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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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...    

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.