You will instantly want this book the minute you see it with its impeccable selections from an all-star list of our state’s very best writers. But you will also immediately think of all the ways you will want to use this book after you greedily read it. Teachers will plot ways to use it in their classrooms. Book groups will include this in their line up, knowing it will re-introduce beloved writers to newer members, writers whose works they will want to further explore.

Master novelist Howard Bahr...has moved on in time from his triumvirate of Civil War fiction (The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field) to almost the midpoint of the twentieth century. The elegiac tone of those novels has carried over into this brilliant, often visceral narrative about men who worked on or around trains in the great era of American railroads.

“Let me guess: you knew a guy named Bill” is the sentiment that begins Dan Kaplan’s investigative poetry collection, Bill’s Formal Complaint—a group of thirty-two poems, ranging from sonnets to prose poems, that seek to answer one question: who exactly is Bill? Or better yet, what is Bill?

Michael Martone of the University of Alabama Creative Writing Program is vying for hardest-working writer/editor in Alabama as well as cleverest.  He now has gathered his own nonfiction of the last few years into Racing in Place. Martone calls these assembled pieces “collages, fragments, postcards, ruins.” This describes their brief, snapshot nature but not their dense playfulness.

The claim is made often that people are the same wherever you go. This statement seems trite in the shadow cast by Xujun Eberlein’s first short fiction collection, Apologies Forthcoming. Set in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, This book proves that our human similarities are strengthened or negated by personal experiences.

Originally published in 1936, this is the classic first novel of one of the twelve Fugitive Poets who were founders of the Southern Agrarian literary movement at Vanderbilt University. The group also included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Frank Owsley, who later became chairman of the University of Alabama History Department. Lytle begins his narrative with a letter of acknowledgment to Owsley, who had told him the true story on which the book is based. The reprint edition’s Introduction by the professor’s son, Frank L. Owsley Jr., also adds interesting credibility to the aspect that this impassioned, colorful tale is not entirely fictional.

In her collection of short stories aptly titled Church Booty, Carol Manley leads her readers on an excursion through the most exotic American landscape. The route she chooses meanders through the Bible Belt, a praying place that punctuates error with lashing tongues and caustic looks. And the natives she introduces may be as white as a Sunday dinner apron or as black as the dirt of our own Black Belt soil.

Hang in There, Mom! is a collection of lighthearted and humorous vignettes based on a column Phyllis Barrett wrote for the Birmingham News between 1979 and 1987. She writes of the problems and rewards of marriage, rearing children, and aging, and the adjustments in life that each of these demand.

The genre of creative nonfiction, which autobiography is, usually employs the same elements of fiction, such as setting, characterization, plot, theme, and time, in order to give the reader a balanced view of what is important in the daily lives of the story’s characters. These elements also move the reader along the path of a major change of characterization, usually with plot leading the way. The “almost-all” true story, a reference to what Edmonds says about his book on the back page...chronicles in an almost diary writing style a description of frequent visits he made to the home of his best friend, Nancy Pacey, as she struggles with a death sentence brought on by cancer. The point of the story seems to be that a mature man and woman can have a meaningful, nonsexual relationship.

Frank Turner Hollon’s latest novel, The Wait, is a heartbreaking journey through the life of a single man that explores the shortcomings of humanity as it exposes the inner workings of James Early Winwood’s mind. This cerebral setting is uncomfortable even for Early, yet from the very beginning the entire tale is grounded there. Angsty, angry, confused, and fractured, Early’s mind ticks first like a clock in relatively orderly succession as he processes the questions whose answers define the individual and then like a time bomb as he progresses toward his own destruction, choosing paths, solutions, and alternatives that lead him further into the darkest recesses of human thought.

While Hickam’s last work was an historical adventure novel set in World War II in the Pacific, in Red Helmet Hickam depends more on humor as he paints an Appalachian setting that is simple yet rife with backstabbing, crime, murder, and outside corporate meddling.

The opening paragraph of Gin Phillip’s debut novel, The Well and the Mine, is only two sentences long, but those two sentences hook readers immediately and pull them into an unforgettable tale of small-town southern lif

Just who is the girl who stops swimming? The first few pages of Joshilyn Jackson’s new novel reveal that Molly, a neighbor’s child, is the girl found floating face down in the Hawthornes’ backyard pool, but as the story unfolds, it seems that everyone is drowning in their own sea of secrets.

Sue Brannan Walker, a state literary treasure, is associated as closely with Mobile as with Alabama. She has further cemented that legacy with a charming new book for children (and their affiliated adults), Reuben’s Mobile. The book’s conceit is simple but engaging: through a series of page-long poems and accompanying illustrations, the title dog, a (real-life) Harlequin Great Dane, visits a number of key Mobile landmarks. In the process, readers receive thumb-nail introductions to distinguishing features of the city’s history, natural landscape, and cultural traditions.

Do you or a friend need a boost, a little inspiration to get you to that goal or accomplish that dream? If you answered “yes,” then look no further. Charles Ghigna, a resident of Homewood, Alabama, and author or more than thirty books of poetry, has written a collection of fifty poems that inspire everyone-children, parents, athletes, coaches, teachers, and graduates from middle, high school, or college.

Richard Matturro has produced an interesting novel in his latest, Leslie. Interesting in that it combines Greek and Roman allusions surrounding the life of a forty-three-year-old librarian heading out for her own “Odyssey” from “Troy” with her dog “Argos.” Homer might not be amused, but his beautiful marriage quote (Odyssey VI, 180-185) is cryptically (written in Greek) paid respect to in the novel’s opening. Leslie is Matturro’s third novel and the second of a trilogy; it stands, however, well on its own.

Bill Goodson takes a tired plot and adds a fresh twist to it in his book Scherib. The novel, though set mainly in the state of Tennessee, takes the reader around the world, even to the Vatican.

Investigating the violent death of her father, a determined young woman risks her life for answers, finding faith and romance amidst the dangerous truth in a small North Alabama town. A sawmill rife with fatal accidents is the site of trouble in the fictional town of Stoney Creek, a place full of misgivings for protagonist and reader alike, but for different reasons.

“Like a mosquito gone mad,” the steel needle of the sewing machine in the Haggar factory pounds into Erma Lee Jacobs’ index finger. Oozing out with the blood is thirty years of fearing her husband’s angry fist. She has already lost her daughter, Suzette, to drugs, prison, and a low-life husband, and when there’s no sympathy from even her mother, long a battered wife herself, Erma Lee knows it’s up to her to save her thirteen-year-old granddaughter from repeating history.