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.

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. 

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.