Ruby Pearl Saffire is a true patriot, as evidenced by her bejeweled red, white, and blue name. And like any true patriot (as opposed to the impostor who simply waves or wears a flag— symbolism and substance are two very different things according to Ruby), she has penned a manifesto. Ruby’s manifesto is not for the faint-of-heart, for it has less to do with politics and sociological theories and more to do with sex (XXX sex, to be exact).

Few Americans will admit to not having read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a classic tale of childhood by Mark Twain, literary icon. And though decades may have passed since readers discovered Twain’s characters, they still can recall vividly the memorable fence-whitewashing scene, the witnessing of a murder by Tom and his friend Huck, the fear of Tom and Becky Thatcher while lost in the cave where the murderer is hiding. Published in 1876, Twain’s depiction of the adventures of childhood—both fantasy and real-life—has become much more than “a book for boys, pure & simple,” as he had planned. The story has survived as a tribute to the innocence of childhood, as a reflection on the pains of growing up, as a recollection of the rural and small-town life of a now-distant past. The Big Read: Alabama Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer invites all Alabamians, young and old, to rediscover and to revisit this treasure of American literature.

Although priced separately, these books are presented as a pair. The first listing above is a sequel to the second, which is a reissue of a 1986 novel published by Doubleday. Other previous editions of Rommel and the Rebel were published by Bantam in 1987 and Yoknapatawpha Press in 1992. The idea to write a novel about a fabricated journey to America by the German military leader Erwin Rommel, who had distinguished himself in World War I before achieving fame as the wily World War II Field Marshall known as the Desert Fox, came from a press account of a visit to Mississippi by a group of unnamed military men from Germany in the late 1930s. Wells has drawn a convincing parallel between the military tactics of this colorful, well-developed character and those of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.

From the publisher: Epic in its own manner, yet introspective in its intimacy, The Running Horse of Santa Teresa follows cousins Quinn, Rem, and Nelphi as they search for their place in a harsh world.

From the opening pages of Pat Mayer’s novel The Cannibals Said Grace, it’s clear that something is amiss. “It’s in the nature of the place and its people to coat and cover,” he writes. The place is Benedict, Alabama, and what the quirky townspeople have been coating and covering is their appetite for corruption.

Ace Atkins’ success in Wicked City is not in the plot. That could not be altered much. His success as a novelist is in characterization, in the creation of individual scenes, and, most importantly, in his shocking, disgusting portrait of Phenix City, Alabama, itself. All the gambling was rigged, vice was a way of life, and even complaining about the loaded dice could get your throat slit and your body dropped through a trap door in the floor of the bar, into the swirling, muddy Chattahoochee River.

Joyce Scarbrough is the author of three books, True Blue Forever, Different Roads, and now this best of the three, Symmetry. One can see her skill as an author in the manner that she puts the reader into each scene and shows the dynamics of a marriage going sour but with both people truly loving each other.

“Madness made me restless,” N. L. Snowden writes in her courageous debut novel In and Out of Madness. The relentless mind of protagonist Lee Thames storms through Snowden’s engrossing story. The semi-autobiographical work is a raw and painful clinic on mental illness, adultery, and addiction.

Labeled "A Novella" and subtitled Inspiration from Desperation, this attractively packaged book has the look and heft of the Young Adult genre. However, as noted on the marketing insert in the review copy, it’s one of a series geared to "Women 35 plus" from a collaborative duo of Alabama authors.

Any one of Stacia Saint Owens’ female protagonists could be the title character of The Doors song “L.A. Woman.” However, Auto-Erotica is more than motels, money, murder, and madness. The winner of the prestigious Tartt First Fiction Award is also brutal, funny, sexy, and consistently compelling. Spanning thirteen tautly written short stories, Saint Owens recalibrates Hollywood’s soft filter focus into stark high definition and reveals the flaws and scars that can only be seen at pointblank range.

The author lives in Birmingham, the city that provides the locales for this compelling first novel. In crisp, camera’s-eye style, Margaret Fenton has placed her first-person narrator, Claire Conover, at the helm of a horrific enigma: Michael, a little boy she knows well, has been murdered. As the child’s caseworker with the Department of Mental Services, Claire had recommended he be returned from a stint in foster care to his mother, Ashley Hennessy. Aided by Claire’s guidance and encouragement, Ashley had cleaned up her act, and regained custody of her son. Now Claire learns that Michael has died in Ashley’s apartment from drug-poisoned orange juice in a “sippy cup,” and the single mom has been arrested by the police.

Since every year in America hundreds of thousands of books are published, and the number of book reviews is declining, it is sometimes difficult to decide which books to give precious review space. Swimmers in the Sea, a first novel by an absolutely unknown, middle-aged author, published by a small, new press in Winston-Salem, N.C., (even though the author was a Tuscaloosa native, a graduate of Tuscaloosa High School, and attended the University of Alabama) was not a slam dunk. But I was captured by the blurbs.

Kirk Curnutt’s Dixie Noir is a hard-boiled mystery set in the mean streets of Montgomery, Alabama. References to magnolias, crepe myrtles, and oft rhapsodized Deep-South niceties serve only to draw the reader’s attention to the hot and humid August setting. Narrator Ennis Skinner sweats buckets between decaying old town and creepy McMansion sprawl looking for a young lady named Dixie. His search gets him tangled up in a web of murder, mayhem, and Alabama racial politics with a direct line back to the Montgomery bus boycott.

Ace Atkins has again written a kind of historical, true crime, literary novel. Extensively researched, Devil’s Garden uses all of what is known, evoking with total credibility the city of San Francisco and the fairly depraved Hollywood scene. Everyone in the movie business seems on the make, for money or power or sex, and the wildly erotic amorality is palpable.

Each of the ten titled chapters in this book first appeared as a short story in The Sewanee, Southern, Yale or Kenyon Reviews, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, or Prairie Schooner. That the author has a significant presence in elite literary circles is borne out by dust jacket blurbs from Melanie Rae Thon, Anthony Doerr, Brad Watson, George Core, Richard Ford, Lee K. Abbott, and Alan Cheuse.

Auburn University English professor R. A. Riekki has wowed critics with his novel U.P., drawing speculative praise from one fellow writer who is convinced that Kurt Vonnegut would love the book if only Vonnegut were alive to read it. Vonnegut must have had a stronger stomach than I. According to the book’s cover summary, U.P. is a “complex tale of friendship and brutality.” Complex and brutal? That’s one heck of an understatement. Rather, Riekki slaps the reader in the face with a stark, disturbing portrayal of teen angst in the frozen northern peninsula of Michigan.

Wendy Rawlings, the author of a volume of short fiction, Come Back Irish, teaches fiction writing in the MFA program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Rawlings has set this first novel on the north shore of Long Island in New York State. This is a family novel, not exactly epic in scope, but multi-generational.

It is rude to tell a lot of the plot when talking about thrillers, and I couldn’t if I wanted to. There is simply too much. This novel has executions and assassination attempts; suicide bombers and pre-planted bombs; secret identities; moles and turncoats; gorgeous, dangerous women in tailored suits; a villain’s lair right out of James Bond; high-tech computerized bugging and tracking devices; and twenty-first-century weapons you just won’t believe, although, sadly, I do.

Basil’s Dream is a suspenseful, absorbing tale juggling multiple themes of love, politics, and race relations. The Bermuda of Christine Hale’s first novel is far from the oversimplified island of postcards and popular lore (though vivid imagery of craggy pink beaches, motor scooters, and Rastafarians are all there). Hale’s descriptions of the British overseas territory are particularly interesting and unique, as they draw attention to the post-9/11 social unrest and political strife the region has faced. Also, there’s enough island background to whet any history-lovers’ appetites.

It’s said that many first novels are, at least in part, autobiographical. In this instance, it is true. The core of Coming Together is a true story. Birmingham writer Joyce Norman lived it. With her friend Joy Collins acting as foil and prod, Norman tells us her story of a single woman traversing the hostile bureaucratic maze of the foreign adoption process in 1980s Brazil. She seamlessly weaves every minute detail of that intriguing slice of her life between the pages of an entertaining love story that never was.

From the publisher: John Skipper is thrown into the world of the mountain-dwelling Cherokee after a land and jewel prospector murders his family. During his stay in the care of the Cherokee people, he meets Tsalahi Hinote, the daughter of Red Tree, the Cherokee chief. John discovers that George Prescott, the man who murdered his family, had done so in order to profit from emeralds he found on Cherokee land. John subsequently takes his revenge on Prescott and departs, taking Tsalahi with him—leaving the Cherokee to fend off blame from the white settlers who seek to possess their land.

The ingenuous title of this new bestseller clarifies it on the jacket cover as “a novel,” but these 400-plus pages are as convincing as fine journalism. It’s the summer of 1962, in Jackson, Mississippi, the author’s hometown. In The Help, Stockett, who has a degree in creative writing from the University of Alabama, has reproduced perfectly pitched speech patterns and description of a time and place that belonged to her mother’s generation.

Madison Jones was born in 1925, grew up in Tennessee, graduated from Vanderbilt, took an MA from the University of Florida, and, after decades of teaching creative writing, retired from Auburn University in 1987. Jones is the author of ten previous works of fiction, mainly novels, and it would be understandable if at age eighty-four, he put the dust cover on his typewriter.  But, not only has Jones written another novel, The Adventures of Douglas Bragg, he has astonishingly, written a young man’s novel.

When the Buddha Met Bubba is not fiction in the most conventional sense, although the ancestry of this kind of writing goes way back. Think of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, in which the Pilgrim Christian has to get through The Slough of Despond and resist the temptations of The Vanity Fair in order to get, finally, to The Celestial City. Or, even further back, think of the fables of Aesop created in Greece in the sixth century B.C., in which the speedy hare may set the pace, but slow and steady wins the race.

In his debut novel Dirty Little Angels, Louisiana writer Chris Tusa explores the dirty little world of the New Orleans slums and the downtrodden people who stumble through the bad side of town among crack houses, drug dealers, and rampant poverty. This raw and gritty story sucks the reader in to the dangerous, hopeless lives of two urban teenagers, Hailey Trosclair and her brother Cyrus, as she desperately tries to save her dysfunctional family from ruin.

Nursery Rhyme Noir is not quite flash fiction, but it is only one notch up—the short-short. Kopaska-Merkel has created a P.I., Hasp Deadbolt, often mistakenly called Deadbeat, to tell these stories. Read aloud, or even silently, Deadbolt sounds like Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir, who is himself of course a parody of the Mike Hammer of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

From the publisher: Set in the southern Appalachians, R.T. Smith’s third collection of stories also inhabits that allegorical realm where the patterns of human travail are dramatized and played out endlessly. Whether incarcerated in penal institutions or imprisoned by their own obsessions and transgressions, the bear hunters, cockfighters, con artists, ginseng diggers, and school teachers of these inventive narratives demonstrate that tragedy, comedy, and travesty are seldom as distinct as we want to believe.

From the author: The publication of Goober Joe occurs as Barack Obama assumes this nation’s highest office, following an unprecedented mass crossing of gender and ethnic barriers.

Courtney and Truely Noonan, brother and sister, sit across the kitchen table from each other in their Mississippi childhood home, a southern table loaded with their mother’s fried chicken and skillets of cornbread. Nice kids, they are growing up as expected. But expected comes to a halt when Courtney announces she is moving to California to pursue her dreams, whatever they might be. She imagines it to be "a place generously littered with dreams and dreamers," but her parents wonder what’s gotten into her, and what’s wrong with chasing your dreams in Hinds County, Mississippi? When little brother Truely follows a few years later, the parents puzzle over what they did wrong. The answer, of course, is nothing at all.

Inman Majors has published his third novel The Millionaires, set in Glenville (read Knoxville), Tennessee, in the 1970s, and it is a marvel. The Millionaires, with its wry, sophisticated narrative voice, a voice in full control, is the best, most fully accomplished new novel I have read in perhaps three years. Let me begin by saying what it is not, for some early reviewers seem to have gotten it wrong. The Millionaires is not a satire of Southern society, high or low. It is not a partially successful comedy. It is not a comedy at all, although Majors’ formidable sense of humor is unleashed from time to time. The Millionaires is an intimately knowledgeable study of the Southern class system, the old money, the newly rich, the small town come to the big city, those used to political power and those newly amassing power. It is serious business and it is very good.

When Nell Platt first meets the domineering woman who will employ her to sew costumes for Hollywood actors, she sells herself with these words: “I know that details are important. Details create illusions. I never forget that people are trying to escape their own lives.” This revelatory statement is also a metaphor for a novelist’s ambitions, creating detail within the seam of a story that gives readers a well-wrought tale to escape into. Erin McGraw’s novel, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, has a precise stitching of language and a sturdy plotting pressing on like a needle through daunting fabric.

It’s not surprising that someone named “Catfish” serves up fiction marinated in a curious, surreal concoction loaded with chunks of oddball characters, with occasional naive misfits sprinkled in for good measure. Catfish Karkowsky’s new book Literture is a collection of brief vignettes offering twisted tales of stalkers, teenage soda jerks, a kid with no arms and legs named Seal, a father abusing his robot infant, and the occasional schizophrenic.

In Noah’s Wife, consummate storyteller T.K. (Teresa) Thorne takes us back to 5500 BCE. Here we meet Noah’s future wife. Born to a mother who dies giving her life, Na’amah is a beautiful girl with peculiarities. She sees the colors and patterns of words overlaid with the color of their truth.

There’s an inherent problem in starting a new book at bedtime: If it’s a good read, 3:00 a.m. comes quickly regardless the hour set for the next day’s beginning. Such was the case with Jane Ellen’s Path. From the first chapter, author Sue McDougald Watson “mourned the lack of control that seemed the birthright of all females.” McDougald’s first novel follows Jane Ellen from pre-school through retirement and presents a picture of Alabama women of the 1950s woven with the familiar threads of racism, classism, misogyny, and fear.

This debut novel combines deep-South, heart-warming, chick-lit style with a chill-out setting way north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Leelee Satterfield is happily and generationally entrenched in Memphis, Tennessee; she and her husband Baker, whom she’s adored since they were in the tenth grade, have two small daughters. Life is idyllic, until that husband talks her into leaving their comfort zone to become inn-keepers in Vermont. Leelee’s three best-friends-forever think she’s lost her mind.