Oh Don’t You Cry for Me is Philip Shirley’s first book of fiction, and some readers will inevitably look for hints of his prestigious career in this nine-story collection. Those hints won’t be found in the content, which tends toward the dark, sad, and twisted. Rather, the influence is in the craft. These are precise, sharply structured tales with plenty of what admen say it takes to break through the clutter and arrest a reader’s attention. Put simply, Mr. Shirley’s got hook.

Joyce Sterling Scarbrough creates an atypical Southern character in her book Different Roads. The novel, set in Tampa, exposes the power of money in making or breaking a person’s life. Scarbrough takes us on a disturbing journey as the conflict of the book pits the rich against the poor.

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.

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.

Sonny Brewer’s third novel departs from his previous forays into fiction. The events that unfold are not merely musings on a scenario, but based on real-life experiences surrounding the disappearance of Cormac, the Brewers’ much beloved family dog, and the ensuing search that becomes a quest. With a surprising mix of complicated situations, intrigue, loss, hope, and immediacy, the text engages the reader beyond mere interest. 

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.

This latest book by Alabama writer and college professor Kirk Curnutt is a brilliant example of how a novel can be an artistic medium which connects the reader to the creative process that went into it. The mystically evocative title comes from the epic poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. Although most chapters (all of which have titles) are in third person limited perspective, some are in first person. At times, the narrative takes on a baroquely omniscient quality which seems fitting, as a universal lamentation runs through this prose like a river of grief...

A joint venture by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and River City Publishing, this well-designed, hardcover book documents a collection of quilts obtained from Kempf Hogan of Birmingham, Michigan. Museum Director Mark M. Johnson states in the Foreword: “The Hogan collection encompasses the work of a diverse group of African American quilters working in Alabama and its environs during the last half century.” The collector was aided in the selection, a seventeen year process, by gallery owner Robert Cargo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this book of literary criticism, the editors present a rich compilation of writers who attempt to give insight into the minds and hearts of the people surrounding the murder of and trial for Emmett Till. Citing literary figures such as William Bradford Huie, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lewis Nordan, this book is an important work to any student of the civil rights movement in the South. This book is a study of the “interracial consciousness” of the times.

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.

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.

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.

Frye Gaillard, now writer-in residence at the University of South Alabama, has earned a place on the top shelf of interpreters of the recent South. This is the shelf occupied by popular writers such as Hal Crowther and Roy Blount Jr. and academic scholars such as Wayne Flynt.  Gaillard is an established, seasoned professional, and With Music and Justice for All is his eighteenth book on southern life. These essays, chosen from the work of the past thirty-five years, have been revised, updated, and in some cases consolidated and rewritten from several different pieces on the same subject.

With this title, The Prince of Frogtown, one expects a story akin to the tall tales of Uncle Remus, and Rick Bragg does not disappoint. He is a consummate storyteller in the southern tradition of “pull up a chair, and let me tell you about the time….” Here he closes the circle of family stories in which his “father occupied only a few pages, but lived between every line.”

“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.  

Bob Whetstone’s first novel is a page-turner. From the first sentence, “My life took a turn toward Hell that spring day Dock Turley returned my runaway sister to the house on a mule’s back,” to the final quote years later, Grave Dancin’ captures the reader and carries him through Hell and upward.

You want to lose weight. Eat God-given foods. This is the cornerstone prescription in Focus on Fitness: 5 Steps to a Healthier Lifestyle. “Eating a plan based upon God-given foods is not a diet. It is a way of living,” states author Dr. Jerry Williams, MD.

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.