The bestselling author of School for the Blind and The Music Room returns to his Alabama roots for the setting of his seventh novel.  The writing in this domestic drama is sophisticated, textured, and introspective. With the exception of one amazing, hair-raising epiphany, the storyline is pretty much sedentary.

Anyone having recently survived the holidays will be charmed by Michael Knight’s sleek prose and quirky, stunning selection of details in this look at contemporary life on the Alabama Gulf Coast. Spanning the emotional minefield from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, these two novellas showcase Knight’s mastery using a form in which we could have predicted his expertise.

Exploring Faustian pacts, Daniel Wallace’s Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician rips the fabric of reality, slices the underbelly of American culture, and leaves the reader with few answers and numerous new questions.

An Alabama Christmas is a gift of memories written by people whose Christmases share common Alabama ground. These are not the stories of sleigh rides and ice-skating, except for a few, rare, snow-laced days that have graced Alabama Christmases in the last century.  The folks who contributed these stories write of Christmas wishes granted (or not), of good times in the midst of economic depression and war, of lessons learned, of people remembered. 

Ruth Beaumont Cook’s amazing and entertainingly detailed account of the tiny town of Aliceville, Alabama, during World War II is at once a highly personal narrative, an engrossing true tale of heroism and extreme kindnesses, and a textbook about a time and place that must not be forgotten.

Tony Crunk writes the kind of poems that compel folks who claim to “hate” poetry to admit that well, actually, they like his poems. Crunk’s is a poetry of unlabored images and unadorned language. His new book, Cumberland, is complicated in the best way for contemporary poetry to be complicated.

In this book Philip Beidler emphasizes that one cannot discuss war without also discussing politics, since it is politicians who lead the American citizenry into conflict. He raises a question about “misperceptions and outright falsehoods brought forth to justify large-scale military commitment ….” He cites Congress’ dutiful response to President Lyndon Johnson’s “carefully orchestrated pretext of alleged attacks…in the Gulf of Tonkin” and President George W. Bush’s shaky claims to Iraq’s having weapons of mass destruction as examples of making war under false pretenses.

Willie James King is a masterful poet-physician, environmentalist, and surgeon-priest. He attends to the ills that befall the bonehouse of the body in which we live and recognizes that it is at once the mortal frame, our spiritual being, the work we do, and the earth we inhabit. The House in the Heart is a potent poetic prescription that helps right wrong.

This is an interesting hybrid of a children’s book. While long enough to be a chapter book, it more closely resembles a picture book in format (per physical dimensions, color illustrations, e.g.). As a holiday book, then, it seems designed to appeal to all ages of young readers (or listeners).

“Where were you when the ‘play’ happened?”

The “play” occurred in the 1979 Sugar Bowl game, fourth and inches from the goal-line, Alabama clinging to a seven point lead. The play propelled Alabama to the National Championship, the team’s stalwart defense to the cover of Sports Illustrated...          

The cover art aptly describes this first poetry collection by Irene Latham as an organic, growing, nature-of-life-itself work—the roots, the thorns, the blossoms, the birds.

Mose T was an internationally recognized self-taught or folk artist. At his passing he was the last living artist from the landmark 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980, organized at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The field interested in self-taught artists is consistently asking for scholarly works of definitive analysis, works which extend beyond biography, interesting as it may be. This book is not that endeavor. It is rather a love letter written by a friend.

Gene Roberts and Alabama’s Hank Klibanoff have written a fascinating Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the media’s role in the civil rights movement. The Race Beat is an in-depth, often moving account of the dangers of reporting the plight of black Americans’ fighting for equal rights during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s in the South. Newspaper and television reporters were at times included in the beatings inflicted upon African-Americans by segregationists.

The entrails of a slaughtered sow, the child born with a goat’s face, the cousin laid on a railroad track: such images make up the core of Janice Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. These images weave in and out of her poems but never appear the same as the poet plays with theme and variations.

Near midday on August 30, 1813, hundreds of Indians attacked a small wooden fort that had been hastily erected around the residence of Samuel Mims. The ensuing events here and at other sites near the juncture of the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers began a large scale war that changed the face of the Old Southwest forever.

Sometimes the story of how a book comes into being just has to be told. The poet Beth Ann Fennelly, teaching at Knox College, became friends with her student, Kathleen. The two women kept in touch. In the spring of 2004, Kathleen had married and was headed with her husband to Alaska, where he had a post-doctoral fellowship in marine biology. They would be 1,500 miles away, in a place where they knew no one, where there was not even e-mail. And Kathleen learned she was pregnant.

There are certain venues—times and places—that are problematical or, alternatively, rich for a novelist. If, for example, a novel is set in Honolulu on Saturday, December 6, 1941, any conversation between characters about what they plan to do tomorrow, go on a picnic, say, is fraught with meaning—to the reader, not to the characters.  Carolyn Haines sets her new novel, Revenant, in August of 2005 on the Mississippi Coast in Biloxi.  Not only can Carolyn Haines write faster than most Americans can read—that is to say, two books a year—she has also, over a career of more than fifty novels, become a smooth professional crafter of murder mysteries.

In his latest investigation of cultural fascination, UFO Religion: Inside UFO Cults and Culture, Gregory L. Reece soars straight into a world that on one end of the spectrum celebrates the possibility of learning, growth, and communication that interaction with other beings on other planets throughout the universe and beyond offers and the dangers that such interaction and communication may present to those who participate, willingly or unwillingly.

The reader searching for a definitive biography of the thirty-ninth president of the United States will not find it in Frye Gaillard’s Prophet From Plains. What he or she will find is the portrait of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and post-presidency, the picture of a rare man who dared to make human rights the cornerstone of his policies as president, and an elder statesman who, after leaving the White House, refused to play it safe.

At a point approximately midway through Fleur Carnivore, Rich Lyons’ Washington Prize-winning third volume of poetry, an augury emerges, voiced in such a way that both bleakness and hope are held within a single couplet: “The future never is, it dies to arrive. I’m not what you said I’d be, / the future whispers. The future is . . . .” The achievement of tone at a moment like this, simultaneously filled with authority and puzzlement, is pure Lyons.

This is Matthew Graham’s third volume of poetry and the sixth book in the River City Poetry Series, edited by Andrew Hudgins. The title refers to one of the book’s two epigraphs, this one from the Book of Isaiah: “ . . . ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”

When the galleys to All Guts and No Glory arrived in the mail in early spring, I shook my head, saying, “I know it sounds interesting, but I’ve been there and done that.” How many more books can I handle set with the civil rights movement as the backdrop? A month later, with the tome gathering dust, I had inched no closer to cracking it open. Finally, knowing the deadline was knocking on my door, I took a shot and honestly couldn’t put the book down.

Jennifer S. Davis, whose first collection of short stories, Her Kind of Want, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, melds a deep understanding of southern culture, an affinity for the human spirit, and a poignant if cynical insight into the universal truths of the human condition in her newest collection, Our Former Lives in Art.

Several poems in Janet McAdams’ Feral “retell or refer to stories about feral children” as the author clarifies in the “Notes to Poems” addendum. Upon finishing the book, McAdams’ second, the reader may recall as the most interesting poems those that are referred to rather than retold.

When I saw the title of #1 New York Times best-selling author Homer Hickam’s latest novel The Far Reaches, I anticipated a story of astronauts onboard sleek spaceships flying through the universe in search of strange life forms in otherworldly environs. Hickam, who penned the bestseller Rocket Boys, the basis for the film October Sky, and the novel Back to the Moon, did indeed take me on an adventure to another world, though it was a journey to lush islands in the South Pacific rather than some strange planet in a distant galaxy.

Much like the canvas of Joan Mitchell, which “leans so all her drips go down,” Mary Kaiser writes with her paper leaning forward, words too heavy for the task slipping to the floor. Bound within a serene yet austere hand-sewn cover, Kaiser’s seventeen poems weave together a seemingly dissimilar community of master artists. From the brilliant and fleshy images of Velázquez to the curiously sterile yet surreal box art of Joseph Cornell, Kaiser imagines them into a combined reality to illuminate the magic of eternity.

On the surface, Desade II: A Brown Recluse Romance may seem a traditional romantic mystery as its title misleads the reader. Within the thin cover of this book lie mysteries as esoteric as the origin of humanity and as practical as the human need for companionship and continuance. 

The Bright Star Restaurant in Bessemer commemorated its one-hundredth anniversary in 2007. In honor of the occasion, long-time Birmingham writer Niki Sepsas has penned A Centennial Celebration of The Bright Star Restaurant with help from the family of the restaurant’s third generation owners, Jimmy and Nicky Koikos, as well as longtime employees and loyal customers. The Bright Star’s perfect combination of unpretentious, friendly service in
a fine-dining atmosphere makes for a memorable night on the town, regardless if one is dining with parents or drinking with friends. And you must sample a couple of entrees: the Greek-Style Snapper (with a delicious Greek tartar sauce made daily from an "old-country" Mediterranean recipe) and the shamefully rich Lobster and Crabmeat Au Gratin.

In a 2002 interview with Southern Scribe, Kelly Cherry commented that as a young child “even before I had words to say it with, I had something to say…. This need to say what was mine to say preceded anything else in my life.” This urgency “to say” has produced a seventh collection of poetry that demonstrates a range of emotional, technical, and lyrical concerns.

Fayette native Jimmy Lee Sudduth was one of a significant group of artists whose work falls outside the mainstream of the defined fine-art field. Alabama is remarkably blessed with many of these artists, generally characterized as “self-taught.” These artists, capturing interest often as much by their stories as by their artwork, seem particularly “Southern.”

Poems from the Big Table samples the work of five poets, all members of a Birmingham poetry workshop. The concept of binding several chapbooks together in one volume makes economic sense and potentially widens the audience for each poet.

We are first introduced to Leland Pefley—the crotchety, perpetually dissatisfied protagonist of Tito Perdue’s debut novel Lee in 1991—in his final days on earth.  In many instances, the novel, recently reissued in paperback, reads like a “shame on you” to society—blasting money and materialism as cardinal sins—while Lee himself prefers the simplicities of reading. Yet in many ways, Lee feels like a mere stepping stone to help us arrive at Perdue’s powerful sequel, Fields of Asphodel.

New England writer Jay Atkinson may seem a strange choice for Livingston Press, but his City in Amber could easily be set in Alabama. Social change and cultural conflicts plague a town with a long history and a defunct textile mill. The accent is different, but the issues confronting Lawrence, Massachusetts, affect towns across Alabama.

The author of Memphis Ribs and Coasters returns with fifteen stories that are both geographically and temporally diverse, ranging from Texas to Baltimore and the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Duff is that rare writer that can conjure up Dixie eccentricities without demeaning his characters.

In his first novel, John Sims Jeter succeeds in weaving a narrative that melds together varied art forms—classical music, poetry, architecture, blues, baseball—into a symphony of nature that resonates with the lyrical voices of his characters. Jeter, a recently retired mathematician, professional engineer, and native of Birmingham, combines his love of music with his insights into “humanness” in creating a novel about the maturation of a Southern boy...    

Performer and songwriter Tom Kimmel’s debut book of poems is uneven but nonetheless pleasing. Like a homecooked meal made with much care and some ability, it satisfies.

Brambu Drezi: Words that define liberation, that are beyond boundaries, that testify to the genius of Jake Berry. Brambu Drezi: a Wittgensteinian rendering of: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left and just this is the answer.” Brambu Drezi is an answer.

To read this book of short fiction is to think of Flannery O’Connor, who was known for her ability to write powerful tales of truth and terror that cut to the core of being uniquely human, often flawed, and in need of grace. As O’Connor says, "When the poor hold sacred history in common, they have concrete ties to the universal and the holy which allow the meaning of their every action to be heightened and seen under the aspect of eternity..." Or as Harris puts it: "Church doors are open to saints and sinners alike."

R. Garth’s novella is part stream-of-conscious, part horror tale—and somewhat confusing....  Garth apparently uses his real-life return home to Athens, Alabama, as the frame for the story of Sarah, a four-year-old kidnapped by a sexual predator and eventually "purchased" by a bitter couple for $60.

The novel’s great strength is in the freshness of the material, the subject matter. As a number of us have been saying for some time, there are more stories in Alabama than high school football, losing your virginity, and the relationship between the races. This, like Roy Hoffman’s fine novel of the Jewish-American experience in Mobile...is another piece of the Alabama mosaic. Pitsios captures, accurately I think, both the culture of the Greek-American community in Mobile and the rapidly changing life back in his Greek village....

Instant everything society—busy schedules, borderline craziness, hectic pace, chaotic lifestyles—that’s life today. Our pace of life is frenetic, bordering on insanity, racing at break-neck speed—and for what? Teddy Butler Copeland, author of Playing the Hand You Are Dealt and Holes in the Darkness, examines this new generational phenomenon of stress and frenzy in everyday life and causes us to reflect on our own harried lives in her most recent book, Crock Pot Living in a Pressure Cooker World.

When is a long-form work of prose fiction not a novel? When it’s a Socratic dialogue, and its title is About Euthanasia and the Religious Right. I can’t remember the last time I encountered a fictional book so un-“novelish,” and yet so useful and necessary.

When well done, historical novels are great fun. A Will of Her Own, a young adult historical novel set in London on April 23-24, 1589, is great fun.

Richard Marius was obviously a “Renaissance” man. Few have been more versatile than this Tennessee farm boy, for he was a journalist, minister, historian, novelist, and teacher of writing par excellence. Nancy Anderson and her publisher deserve praise for reviving public interest in this extraordinary man who directed Harvard University’s Expository Writing program for sixteen years, during which he influenced hundreds of Harvard students.

Billy Jones, the central character in Todd Dills’ debut novel Sons of the Rapture, is a son of South Carolina, the progeny of a fractured idealism embodied in his father Johnny, and heir to a staggeringly heavy weight regarding community and responsibility that has dogged him all the way to Chicago.

Carter Martin’s debut novel Kelbrn is the story of a modern day Odysseus, Miles Kelley, whose wanderings take him not only through the first fifty years of twentieth century America but also across the country itself from Wisconsin to New York to North Carolina and finally to California. Miles’ journey parallels the movement of modern America from rural to industrial from dairy farms to textile mills from East to West from idealism to disillusionment.

The poems in Alan May’s Notes Toward an Apocryphal Text appear as tight little blocks on the page, like columns of newspaper print, or as if larger poems had been trash compacted. I admit I had trouble getting past the seemingly arbitrary form. Then early in the collection I came upon this...

Probably not at all surprisingly to those who know him, North Carolina writer Mark Ethridge has made the crossover from award-winning, third-generation newspaperman to first-time novelist with grace and aplomb. Credited as having directed the Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations of the textile industry and the PTL/Jim Bakker scandal, Ethridge studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and has written for many publications.

“Who am I?” The quest for self-knowledge has provided authors and readers the opportunity to ponder this question through literature.  This deceptively simple question propels M. Wilhoit’s novel Hadleyville Nights, which is comprised of a collection of Internet postings written by the protagonist, Heathcliff Vanlandingham, to understand how his life has become what it is and to explore the meaning of life through the Internet, specifically in chat rooms and blogs.  

Phillip Cioffari, author of A History of Things Lost or Broken, manages to cut his own his little sliver of New York City, and in a refreshing twist he goes not to Wall Street, Greenwich Village, or Central Park but instead to the swamps of the 1950s and 1960s Bronx, filled with debris, both human and not. It reminds me of Phillip Roth’s Newark: working class, ethnic, and it reminds me not of New York City but of the American “every city.”

Please don’t take it as a sign of disapproval when I say that this is a very weird book. Set in a mythical South American capital that bears a parallel-universe resemblance to Mexico City, Lost City Radio is part science fiction, part death-comedy political satire, and, overall, a sweeping indictment of betrayal as the central element of the human psyche all rolled into one.

Yeats asks, in a question that is really a lyric lament, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In the case of the uniquely-gifted poet Rette Maddox, it is impossible to separate the two. His dance was the dance of death in the embrace of the Scotch, malnutrition, and tobacco that ultimately killed him (he was 44) in the form of esophageal cancer, but it was out of this embrace—organically and inevitably—that his poetry bloomed.

The novel The White Squirrel, written by D.W. Hunt, is the first piece of narrative fiction I have ever read that is reminiscent of a Roger Corman film. The book feels low-budget, salacious, campy, and eventually macabre.

Having had the good fortune a few years back to be selected for an anthology of emerging writers (Full disclosure: it, too, was published by Livingston Press), I can heartily testify to both the fun and fear that comes with belonging to the sort of virtual community that a collection like this one creates. In essence, anthologies provide writers a peer group against whose themes, styles, and motifs they can measure their individual interests and begin firming up their own literary outlook and values. The downside is that seeing your name among better-known folks can be intimidating; even worse is happening on a story you doubt you yourself could have written.

In poll after poll, Alabamians list education as the single most important issue facing the state. Yet ask citizens about Alabama’s public schools and attitudes change. Differences appear between parents with school-age children and those without. People will speak highly of their local schools, yet say Alabama schools overall are either poorly run, poorly funded, or both.

Edge by Edge is a collection of four chapbooks with poems by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter.  In How To Recognize a Lady , Emma Bolden’s chapbook ,  the reader will find sharp and unabashedly direct poems pushed and pulled by the lilt of language, and then bitten back to the driving point by words skillfully crafted that show what women are subjected to in society’s written and unwritten rules. 

Personal struggles have a way of pushing us to action—research, conversations, and lots of reading online or in the bookstore aisles. Anniston native Sherry Kughn approached one set of personal issues similarly, by talking with friends, listening to others’ stories, reading, and meditating.

"Hey, Mister, I want a MoonPie!" David Magee’s book MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack demonstrates the significance of this phrase: it has propelled a family-owned business for three generations and a product that has relied upon word-of-mouth support rather than formal advertising.  Magee, who has previously explored American product advertising, marketing, and branding with books on Ford and John Deere, turns to the lone product of Chattanooga Bakery for his most recent foray into Americana.

Before leaving Kentucky to return to his birth state, Alabama, Wade Hall composed a work of honesty and devotion for what he left behind. In this case, however, what he left behind was not a lover, but an intimate relationship with the craft of writing in Kentucky, and Hall’s Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State is not simply a love letter. The anthology, which includes a wonderfully articulate and sometimes pleasantly surprising selection of historical, literary, and creative works spanning the entire history of the commonwealth, is a prime example of Hall’s inspired and meticulous work.