Fiction Book Reviews

By Vallie Lynn Watson
Luminis Books, 2012
$17.95, Paper
Fiction
Reviewed by Foster Dickson

Referring to Vallie Lynn Watson’s new book, A River So Long, as a “novel” puts the term in its truest context: a work very new and modern in style and content. Relatively slim in total and narrated in imagistic vignette-like chapters, the novel allows the reader to glimpse into the life of Veronica, a barely married traveling businesswoman whose emotional baggage and illicit affairs are scattered all over the continental United States, with pieces of her life languishing in Phoenix, New Orleans, New York, Boston, Wilmington, and Memphis, and in the Birmingham of her past. Read the complete review…

By Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury, 2011
$24, Hardcover
Fiction
Reviewed by Don Noble

Salvage the Bones was released in September 2011, declared a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in October, and awarded the prize in November, before hardly anyone had reviewed it or read it. The five judges of the NBA chose it from a field of 315 novels submitted. And they were probably right. This is a smart, powerful novel and makes, I think, a permanent impression on the reader. Read the complete review…

By Taylor M. Polites
Simon & Schuster, 2012
$25, Hardcover
Fiction
Reviewed by Julia Oliver

This debut novel is a very readable blend of historically detailed narrative and a finely honed, contemporary style of writing. It’s told in first-person/present tense by the main character, Augusta (“Gus”) Branson, who was born into Southern aristocracy before the Civil War did away with the family fortune. Her husband, Eli, who dies horrifically of a blood disease plague in the opening chapter, had been a helpful advocate to newly freed slaves, including those who remained in the household and are like family to Gus. The cast of characters includes both races. Read the complete review…

By Gin Phillips
Riverhead Books, 2012
$26.95, Hardcover
Fiction
Reviewed by Julia Oliver

Gin Phillips, who has roots in Montgomery and lives in Birmingham, received a Barnes and Noble award for her first novel, The Well and the Mine. Her new book of fiction, which also has a lilting, five-word title, is filled with mesmerizing imagery and lovely prose. There is not much evidence of narrative tension or mystery; the artistry is the hook. Read the complete review…

By Philip Cioffari
Livingston Press, 2011
$18.95, Paper
Fiction
Reviewed by Jeremy Dunn

With a host of colorful characters forming its backbone, Philip Cioffari’s Jesusville explores those difficult and dark corners of the human experience: loneliness, self-doubt, and lust. All the book’s characters, similarly locked in desperate searches for some form of redemption, find themselves in a lonely patch of desert darkened by the shadow of the ruins of the Holy Land, a failed Christian theme park, its facades now eerily defaced. This desolate desert setting takes on a character of its own, and it is in this bleak, ghostly place that the characters of Jesusville must confront inner demons and very real external threats. Read the complete review…

By Teddy Porter
Lyons Hart Press, 2011
$12.50, Paper
Fiction
Reviewed by Dee Jordan

Teddy Porter tells an intriguing story about Calvin Huckabee’s becoming a man. Huck, at age seventeen, is still a virgin. He is torn between what he was taught by his dad, a pastor, and what his body screams in hormonal overdrive. Unlike many coming of age stories about boys in which they have no conscience, the protagonist in this one is different. His friend Ringo is a lady’s man who uses girls for sex. This bothers Huck. Read the complete review…

By Michael Martone
The University of Alabama Press, 2011
$16.50, Paper

Fiction

Reviewed by Don Noble

An innocent browser in a bookstore who picks up Michael Martone’s latest might well be a little confused. This volume declares itself to be fiction, and yet many of the individual pieces seem to be simple descriptions of a restaurant or a kind of railroad car or bits of memoir from Martone’s own life, especially his childhood. Furthermore, all the pieces come in sets of four. In fact on the cover there are four strips of photos, four to a strip, of Martone himself in a coin-operated photography booth. Thus the title, Four for a Quarter. Read the complete review…

by Marlin Barton
Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, 2011
$24.95, Hardcover

Fiction

Reviewed by Kirk Curnutt

Marlin “Bart” Barton’s fourth book in ten years returns us to the west Alabama environs that are his “little postage stamp of native soil,” to borrow Faulkner’s well-known phrase. The Cross Garden is a testament to the beautiful solemnities of place where roots both nourish and restrict growth. In precise prose and lyrical cadences, Barton limns the riverbanks and ironwork bridges, the camphouse lean-tos and cinder-block dives, the turkey-tail-clogged woodland trails and the ornate small-town architecture with such vivid density that Greene County comes alive as a landscape of both unbearable stasis and uncomfortable intensity. Read the complete review…

By Frederick W. Bassett
All Things that Matter Press, 2010
$16.99, Paper

Fiction

Reviewed by Jim Buford

Fred Bassett’s debut novel is the story of young Barsh Roberts, who navigates the rites of passage through adolescence in a small Alabama community during the late 1940s. Bassett writes in the tradition of Ferroll Sams, whose semi-autobiographical Porter Osburne Jr. comes of age in rural Georgia in an earlier time. To me, Barsh is especially evocative of Porter in The Whisper of the River, an enduring classic of Southern literature. Read the complete review…

These fiction titles were recently released by Alabama authors or publishers, or they cover subjects related to our state. View the complete list…

By Clare Datnow
Media Mint Publishing, 2011
$16.50, Paper

Fiction

Reviewed by Perle Champion

Clare Datnow’s novel, The Nine Inheritors, reads very much like a biography of ten generations as told by a keen-eyed on-the-scene observer. I enjoyed her omniscient point-of-view because I could journey with the characters as they each moved through their part of history. Read the complete review…

These books were recently released by Alabama authors or publishers, or they cover subjects related to our state. View the complete list…

By Carolyn Haines
St. Martin’s Publishing Group, Minotaur Books, 2011
$24.99, Hardcover

Fiction

Reviewed by Don Noble

Carolyn Haines of Semmes, Alabama, has now published eighteen novels and is the winner of both the Harper Lee Award and the Richard Wright Award. Things are going well. Bones of a Feather is the tenth in her very popular Bones series. Sarah Booth Delaney’s home place is Dahlia House, Zinnia, Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta. But Haines cannot set all her mysteries there or the population would be, literally, decimated, so Bones of a Feather is set in historic Natchez. Read the complete review…

By http://www.aceatkins.com/>Ace Atkins
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011
$25.95, Hardcover; $12.99, eBook

Fiction

Reviewed by Don Noble

The Ranger is the first of the Quinn Colson books. The protagonist, Colson, has been an Army ranger for ten years, since before 9/11, and served with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stationed now in Fort Benning, Georgia, Colson is called back to the bleak, depressed town of Jericho in Tibbehah County in northeast Mississippi for the funeral of his sheriff uncle. Hampton Beckett, Quinn is told, committed suicide. Well, readers know this will be questioned. Uncle Hamp wasn’t the type. Read the complete review…

By Gretchen McCullough; Translation by Mohamed Metwalli and Gretchen McCullough
Afaq Bookshop and Publishing House, 2011
$12, Paper

Fiction

Reviewed by Don Noble

Gretchen McCullough is a true WT, a world traveler. Not cloistered in a comfortable Midwestern college, McCullough, now fluent in Arabic, is a writer with a lot of life experiences and material for her fiction, much of it exotic, even fantastic. This is the world of 1001 Arabian Nights, where not everything is what it seems. These three stories, all set in Cairo, make use of some of these experiences and exude a sense of the magical. Read the complete review…

By K.T. Archer
iUniverse, 2011
$27.95, Hardcover; $17.95, Paper; $9.99, eBook

Fiction

Reviewed by Marianne Moates Weber

When Alabama author K.T. Archer completed her first novel, The Silver Spoon, she knew she had created a character in Lizzy Wallace that would have many more adventures. The latest for the protagonist is in Kismet, where Lizzy focuses on rebuilding her own life rather than being swamped by the family drama in The Silver Spoon. Read the complete review…

By Bob Whetstone
Lulu Enterprises, 2011
$35, Hardcover

Fiction

Reviewed by Bill Plott

Bob Whetstone, professor emeritus at Birmingham-Southern College, came from an environment far, far away from academia. He grew up in a cotton mill village near Alexander City, a childhood that generated this book. Cotton Mary is the life story of Mary Christine Tarley Stone, a young girl growing up with an abusive father, forced into backbreaking labor in the cotton fields and orphaned and pregnant as a young teenager. Life is a roller-coaster ride of exhilarating highs and stomach-aching lows for Mary. Read the complete review…

By Brewster Milton Robertson
Mangus Hollow Books, 2011
$24, Paper; $4.99, eBook

Fiction

Book Noted

From the publisher: Gone to Graveyards, an epic novel of the Korean War, has an immediate relevance today, over a half-century after the Korean truce was signed. Incredibly the daily headlines portend the ominous threat of North Korea’s nuclear ambition while UN troops still anxiously patrol the Demilitarized Zone at the 38th Parallel. Pundits have variously called the Korean War "a black hole of history" and "The Forgotten War." Most of the meager legacy of written history about the so-called “Forgotten War” would have current and future generations believe the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel into Seoul and ended slightly over one year later on July 10, 1951, the date both sides sat down at negotiating tables at Panmunjom, a village a few miles north of Seoul. This is the farthest thing from the truth. Read the complete review…

By David Morgan
Book Noted

From the publisher: This is a fable* about a small public university in a little southern town—a town tucked away from the world, a little off the beaten path…. For the most part its history has been free of wrangling and controversy, but that ends when a young, articulate president takes the helm determined to enhance the school's image and elevate it to what might be called junior-Ivy-League status. After a while the college community is asking itself if this boy wonder is promoting the school or himself….Read the complete review...

By Barry Hannah
Reviewed by Don Noble

At 464 pages, this volume of new and selected stories is a large, generous gathering of Barry Hannah’s best short fiction. Hannah had, in addition to eight novels, four volumes of stories. There is no announced editor but the Publisher’s Note acknowledges advice from Brad Watson, Jack Pendarvis, Richard Howarth, and others, and they are the best, most knowledgeable people to ask. Until the Library of America or someone else publishes Hannah’s complete stories, this collection will serve admirably.Read the complete review...

By Keith Thomson
Reviewed by Julia Oliver

Hard on the heels of Birmingham author Keith Thomson’s critically acclaimed first novel, Once a Spy, this aptly-named sequel smoothly propels the cast forward as though it’s the second season of a popular thriller-TV series. The main characters are a father-son duo. The elder of this pair, Drummond Clark, has been an undercover agent of the CIA for thirty years, in charge of a unit that sells nuclear weapons concealed inside washing machines to terrorist groups. When a sale is made, the terrorists are arrested, and no harm is done. Charlie Clark, whose main occupation heretofore has been gambling, has only recently learned that his Alzheimer’s-addled father is not an appliance salesman. Some of the one-liner humor is built around Drummond Clark’s memory problems, but in spite of that hurdle, he comes across as heroic and capable enough to save the day.

Read the complete review...

By Mark Childress
Reviewed by Perle Champion

In his latest novel, Georgia Bottoms, Mark Childress introduces readers to a southern belle who makes Scarlet O’Hara seem tame by comparison. Georgia is the sole support of her family, and she tries always to put her best foot forward to maintain the family image of genteel wealth. That’s hard to do with a no-account brother who’s rarely employed in anything legal and an elderly mother who is losing touch with reality and who daily rails against that “evil Rosa Parks” whom she blames for everything wrong with this new South of 2001.

Read the complete review...

By Nadia Kalman

Fiction

Reviewed by Caroline McLean

The Cosmopolitans is Nadia Kalman’s intelligent and entertaining debut novel. Drawing from her own immigrant experience, Kalman explores the dynamics of the fictional Molochniks, a Russian-Jewish family from the former Soviet Union, as they assimilate to life in Stamford, Connecticut. The novel’s eight sections each begin with a chart tracking the changes the family undergoes as each daughter explores love and marriage. If readers resist the urge to skip ahead to glance at the next chart, they will be rewarded with brief, witty insights into the lives of the characters.

By Scott Ely

Fiction

Reviewed by John Wendel

The eleven stories in Scott Ely’s Dream Fishing are on the dreamy and bizarre side. His characters are prosperous folks who know how to spend their leisure time and lead comfortable lives. His men and women make love to one another not out of frustration, but as genuine acts of tenderness. Yet, they are a mystery to each other. In the most straight forward prose—never ponderous or self-consciously philosophical—Ely illuminates our troubles in connecting and relating to people, even in the best of times.

By Fannie Flagg

Fiction

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

The first sentence on the jacket flap describes Fannie Flagg’s latest—actually, her sixth—novel as "a comic mystery romp through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, past, present, and future." I would not put "comic" in the lead place there. Since the landslide success thirteen years ago of her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, luminous, light-hearted humor has been a key factor in Flagg’s style of writing. This time around, the light is more sepia-toned.

By: Ramey Channell
Reviewed by: Perle Champion

In Sweet Music on Moonlight Ridge, Ramey Channell doesn’t narrate as Lily Claire, she is Lily Claire. For those of you who’ve had no children, and/or have forgotten what it’s like to be one, buckle up. This is not a slow walk of a book. Lily Claire’s breathless detailed telling of just about everything that happens in her small world is told as if it was the most important thing in all the world, and you should know it.

By Miles DeMott

Fiction

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

This enterprising first-time novelist has created an intriguing, imaginative saga with characters some readers in Montgomery, Alabama, where the author holds forth, may think they recognize. DeMott says they don’t, though; it’s all fiction.

By: William Cobb
Reviewed by: John H. Hafner

William Cobb’s latest novel, The Last Queen of the Gypsies, is a terrific story about two wanderers: Minnie, a young woman abandoned by her Gypsy family at age eleven because she has one blue eye and one green eye and is therefore unlucky; Lester Ray Holsomback, a young man who runs away from his abusive, alcoholic father at age fourteen, accompanied by an elderly woman (Mrs. Mack); and a fourteen-year-old girl named Virgin Mary Duck. The novel is hilariously funny yet sometimes very sad, raunchy at times yet wholesome in its search for family and community, about love but also about cruelty and murder, full of delicious detail yet fast-paced and impossible to put down.

By: Jim Buford
Reviewed by: Jay Lamar

“Luminous fiction.” “A master magician.” “Impressive.” “Superb.” These are the words of a handful of readers of Auburn-based writer Jim Buford’s latest book, The House Across the Road and Other Stories. They are also testimonials from those who know what they are talking about: writers and scholars, professionals in their fields who are not easily impressed.

By: Sena Jeter Naslund
Reviewed by: Julia Oliver

It should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s read Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance that Alabama native Sena Jeter Naslund has produced another powerful, full-of-grace literary epic. As the title implies, this novel has its roots in the biblical Book of Genesis, which most readers will know is taken literally by conservative religious groups, and is assumed to be apocryphal by others. The opposing credos of evolution and creationism are also a major theme in Adam & Eve.

By: Ruby Pearl Saffire
Reviewed by: Beth Wilder

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).

By: Michael Knight
Reviewed by: A. M. Garner

For readers, this first person account of a military typist from Mobile as he experiences General MacArthur’s post-World War II occupation of Japan is immediate and compelling. “Van” Vancleave expects a routine tour of duty, but life hands him something quite different when his roommate turns out to be a shyster who weaves the unsuspecting Van into his schemes. Then, to complicate matters even further, Van’s wife sends disconcerting news from home, leading Van to examine his life and the circumstances around him. The Typist, set convincingly at the mid-point of the twentieth century, underscores the fact that the problems of war know no century.

By Tom Franklin

Fiction

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

We know that our region of the country has produced more highly gifted, motivated fiction writers over the last hundred years or so than any other, and we concede that, yes, there probably is something in the water. It has become customary, perhaps to the point of being trite, for reviewers in the South to render tribute to an outstanding, living writer by linking him or her to a famous counterpart from a previous era in the same neck of the woods. Tom Franklin, of Oxford, Mississippi, and before that Dickinson, Alabama, does not need such puffery. He has reached the top of the ladder with his previous novels, Smonk and Hell at the Breech, and the story collection Poachers. But a thought that reoccurred to me as I read this latest work is that Franklin appears to have channeled Faulkner’s passion, spirit, and insight, without exhibiting any sign of the latter’s occasional affectation.

By: Stacia Saint Owens
Reviewed by: Colin Crews

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.

By: Mark Twain; Foreword by Alan Gribben
Reviewed by: Elaine Hughes

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.

By: Joyce Scarbrough
Reviewed by: Delores Jordan

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.

By Lisa Patton

Fiction

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Catfish Karkowsky
Reviewed by: Edward Reynolds

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.

By: Sonny Brewer
Reviewed by; Kevin Wilder

By Edie Hand with Jeffery Addison

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

By Kirk Curnutt

Reviewed by John Wendel

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.

Ennis encounters a variety of rich characters and wild situations. High C, a meth cook turned book publisher, is one of the more engaging scoundrels you are likely to run across since Shakespeare gave us Falstaff. Reese Justice, known in town as the “Kudzu Ann Coulter,” manages her incumbent father’s mayoral race. Her down and dirty deeds give the likes of Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff a run for their money. Thugs and would-be great men intermingle in the state capital, highlighting what a strange and contrary, but fascinating place Alabama can be.

Ennis Skinner is a disgraced former Crimson Tide football hero who spent one decade in a methamphetamine haze, and another in Kilby Prison. He is a man looking to make amends, and hopefully find a little redemption. His journey involves dealing with some dark corners of his life, and Curnutt doesn’t shy away from graphic scenes, specifically in flashbacks to Ennis’ drugged out days with his ex-lover Faye (Dixie’s dead mother). Fortunately, he neither romanticizes their degradation, nor does he simply rub the reader’s nose in a lot of nastiness. He sets the record straight, which means recording nasty events in clear and stark language. Ennis knows all too well our capacity to sentimentalize, if not mythologize, unhealthy people and episodes in our lives. Only when he replays those memories without the fog of drugs or sentiment does he stand a chance at that redemption he so desperately craves.

The memory of the civil rights movement also looms large. It haunts and burdens characters close to Ennis and those he’s forced to deal with. Ennis’ daddy, Quentin, and black mayoral candidate, Walk Compson, remind us of how all-too-human former movement heroes can be. And sometimes memories from that past are just cold factors in the cynical machinations of dirty southern politics.

Dixie Noir twists and turns with plenty of action. You’ll race toward each plot point, but ultimately the characters own this story. The last few pages reveal a little too much, and too suddenly, of who did what to whom, but wit and intelligence abound in this dark entertainment. Dec 2009

John Wendel teaches English as a foreign language for Dongguk University in Kyeongju City, South Korea.

By: T.K. Thorne
Reviewed by: Perle Champion

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.

By: James Braziel
Reviewed by: Andrew McNamara

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

At once the recognizable inscription marking the entrance gate of hell in the Inferno, Dante’s warning is equally appropriate for the apocalyptic vision of America depicted in James Braziel’s haunting new novel Snakeskin Road. Set in 2044, Braziel’s dystopian world is plagued by government corruption, and the southern United States—or more appropriately, what’s left of it—is ravaged by harsh, inhospitable deserts created by gaping holes in the earth’s ozone layer.

By: Christine Hale
Reviewed by: Kevin Wilder

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.

By: Ruby Pearl Saffire
Reviewed by: Beth Wilder

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).

By: N.L. Snowden (Delores Jordan)
Reviewed by: Colin Crews

“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.

By: Joyce Norman and Joy Collins
Reviewed by: Perle Champion

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.

By Edie Hand with Jeffery Addison

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Pat Mayer
Reviewed by: Jill Deaver

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.

By Margaret Fenton

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By Mitch Wieland

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: R.A. Riekki
Reviewed by: Edward Reynold

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.

By Kathryn Stockett

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Chris Tusa
Reviewed by: Beth Wilder

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.

By: Sue McDougald Watson
Reviewed by: Liz Reed

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.

By: Erin McGraw
Reviewed by: Jody Kamins Harper

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.

By: Nanci Kinkaid
Reviewed by: Beth Thames

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.

By: Don Noble, ed.
Reviewed by: Norman McMillan

The twenty-one stories in the collection, all by post-World War II Alabama authors, run from the traditional to the experimental. Arranged according to birth order of the writers, the collection leads off with “The Byzantine Riddle,” the comic masterpiece of Eugene Walter, whom some have called the funniest man in Alabama. The greatest appeal of the story to me is Walter’s ability to reproduce with unfailing accuracy the speech of a group of Mobile women who well understand that language is not simply a utilitarian instrument, but, equally important, a means of entertaining one’s listeners.

By: William Borden
Reviewed by: David Wyman

William Borden’s novel, Dancing With Bears, is a very odd book about the extremely odd business of living. The publisher’s Web site informs us that Livingston Press is hot on the trail of the quirky and odd, always on the hunt for "offbeat literature." Well, Livingston bagged a stuffed and mounted trophy loony-toon with this one, and you just might like it.

By: William H. Drinkard
Reviewed by: Kirk Hardesty

Who is the Creator? What is the Creator’s plan? In William H. Drinkard’s first novel, he explores these universal questions. Writing in the science-fiction genre, which is ideally suited for the examination of society and civilization, the author takes his readers on an epic journey where the principal characters are challenged with the possible extinction of their race. In facing this challenge, the characters get an unprecedented backstage look at the forces affecting the evolution of their people and the social structure that drives their cultural progression on Elom, a planet near the center of the
galaxy.

By: John Pritchard
Reviewed by: H. F. Lippincott

John Pritchard has followed his first novel Junior Ray (2005) with the further adventures of his eponymous hero in The Yazoo Blues. The place is the Mississippi Delta, south of Memphis, along Route 61—a place of levees, oxbows, and now casinos built over water. The charming but foul-mouthed hillbilly hero, retired as sheriff’s deputy—he insists he’s a “law-enforcement professional”—now works parking security at a casino. Gone is the unsuccessful search for a shell-shocked veteran of World War II of the first book, along with the somewhat tedious excerpts from the soldier’s diary. Now the picaresque adventures are more wide-ranging, exploring the sexual peccadilloes of modern Mississippi and Memphis residents.

By Val L. McGee

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

From the opening sentences, you know you’re in the hands of a good storyteller. Dale County retired district judge Val McGee, who has served as president of both the Alabama Historical Association and the Friends of the Alabama Archives, is the author of several books of history. His ambitious, impressively researched first novel is set in and around the town of Selma just before, during, and after the Civil War.

By: Jimmy Buffett; Illustrated by Helen Bransford
Reviewed by: Don Alexander

Imagine, if you will, a mom that’s a former Opryland Hotel cook but now a pastry chef in a four star New York hotel, twelve-year-old twins—a soccer whiz son and an aspiring fashion designer daughter—a screenplay writing absentee dad who’s in Iceland, a cat that is typically draped on a twin’s shoulders, and a potbellied pig named Rumpy that can read (but can’t Google) and disguises herself in a dog costume.

No, this is not a Rod Serling introduction to an episode of The Twilight Zone. This is Jimmy Buffett’s most recent novel, Swine Not? A Novel Pig Tale.

By: J. Patrick Travis
Reviewed by: Chris Bouier

In Pitching In the Dark, J. Patrick Travis has crafted an insightful glimpse of the effects of mental illness on a typical American family and the consequences of both the denial of these effects and the journey that accompanies the affected individuals’ decisions to face the reality of their situation. It is a tale of compassion and a tale of apathy illustrating how each of these emotions is itself as much of a burden on the sane as the disease is a burden upon its victim.

By: Lafie Crum
Reviewed by: John Wendel

Bill is a young daddy from the hills of East Kentucky who has just been laid off from a construction job. He and his wife Martha are whisked away to a party, out next to an old abandoned mine, by smarmy cousin Andy who has shown up from Ohio flush with cash, booze, and pills. The buzz they catch offers a bit of relief on a bad news day. Things get fuzzy in the course of just a couple of paragraphs, setting the tone for a world of hurt poignantly explored in Only Son, Lafie Crum’s debut novel.

By: Scott Ely
Reviewed by: Katherine Henderson

When Pender Hartwell returns to Egypt Ridge, Mississippi, after a tour of Vietnam, he receives no warm hero’s welcome. Instead, he is greeted with thinly veiled hostility which quickly turns into death threats. Scott Ely’s The Dream of the Red Road finds Pender largely unconcerned about these displays of the town’s animosity, however, preferring to spend his time remembering a girl, or as he phrases it, “studying love in my dreams.”

By: Carolyn Haines
Reviewed by: Jody Kamins Harper

Any southern girl worth her salt knows a double first name is iconic in this region, so why not dual vocations as well? Sarah Booth Delaney, as narrator and protagonist, lives out concurrent roles as private investigator and actress in Wishbones, the latest in the series of light-hearted mysteries by Carolyn Haines. Leaving her happily haunted house in Zinnia, Mississippi, and unsure if she can withstand homesickness and lovesickness, the protagonist plunges into the sexy leading role in a remake of Body Heat.

By: Ellen Gilchrist
Reviewed by: Anita Garner

A Dangerous Age is Ellen Gilchrist’s twenty-second book of prose, so we who have followed her career for the last thirty years recognize her distinctive voice and finely crafted sentences. The time of the novel spans from the bombing of the World Trade Center to the eve of Hurricane Katrina, indeed a dangerous age. Yet this book is a brave step: a novel that explores a political hot-button issue, released in the heat of an election year.

By: Jim Herod
Reviewed by: Katherine Henderson

Thanks to his grandfather’s secret DNA experiments, Wesley Stone has fathered a new and improved version of the human race—a strain of humanity mysterious government forces are determined to destroy. Driven into hiding, members of this new race, most of whom have never met Wesley, desire to learn about their founding father, “the new Adam,” and bond together to ensure the survival of the species. In Jim Herod’s Gathering Moss, Thomas Stone, Wesley’s son, though not by blood, has collected scattered pieces of Wesley’s life story in order to help his family understand their father and the responsibility they share as his descendents.

By: William Cobb; With a Preface and Afterword by Don Noble
Reviewed by: Kirk Curnutt

First published in 1984, William Cobb’s Coming of Age at the Y is a reminder of a type of bawdy, rollicking novel that only Christopher Buckley seems to write anymore. From the late 1960s through the mid-80s, writers who came of age in the Eisenhower era tended to parody America’s kitschy commercialism and newfound sexual freedoms, almost always satirically but not always with the metaphysical preoccupations of Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, or Philip Roth. Instead, several comic authors aimed only to capture the lunacy of contemporary life in all its gaudy, gauche silliness. To read Livingston Press’s reprint of Cobb’s Southern delight is thus a bittersweet experience....

By: Michelle Richmond
Reviewed by: Anita Garner

Mobile native Michelle Richmond has already shown in her first three books that she can artfully cast a spell on readers, drawing them into her stories with subtleties of voice, style, nuance, and plot. From her prize-winning collection of short fiction through her first two novels, she has gained growth and maturity as a writer. Now with the latest novel No One You Know coming right on the heels of last year’s successful The Year of Fog, one might wonder if she has been able to sustain the pace. What Richmond has written is a perfectly paced novel that will appeal to many levels of readers.

By: Carol Manley
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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.

By Andrew Lytle

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Xunjun Eberlein
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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.

By Howard Bahr

Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Michael Morris
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Via Brown

“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.

By: R. Garth
Reviewed by: Veronica Kennedy

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.

By: Jennifer Youngblood and Sandra Poole
Reviewed by: Jody Kamins Harper

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.

By: Bill Goodson
Reviewed by: Dee Jordan

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.

By: Richard Matturro
Reviewed by: R. Garth

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.

By: Joshilyn Jackson
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Via Brown

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.

By: Gin Phillips
Reviewed by: Beth H. Wilder

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

By: Homer Hickam
Reviewed by: Edward Reynolds

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.

By: Frank Turner Hollon
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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.

By: Joe Taylor, Debbie Davis, Tina Jones, Tricia Taylor, eds.
Reviewed by: Tony Crunk

Tartt’s Three is an anthology culled from the manuscripts submitted to the third annual First Fiction Contest, which awarded publication to two short story collections by writers who had not previously published such a work. Given the competition’s lack of editorial agenda, these twenty-three stories amply suggest the broad range of subjects, styles, and voices that contemporary American fiction so vitally encompasses.

By: Tony Crunk; art by Peter Wilm
Reviewed by: Linda A. McQueen

Interesting, thought provoking, and eye-opening—all of these adjectives add up to Stories from Real Life, a collection of short fiction by poet and children’s writer Tony Crunk with artwork by Peter Wilm.

By: M. Wilhoit
Reviewed by: Catherine Alexander

“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.  

By: Philip Cioffari
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

By: Rex Burwell
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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. 

By: Joyce Sterling Scarbrough
Reviewed by: Delores Jordan

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.

By: Tito Perdue
Reviewed by: B.J. Hollars

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.

By: Jennifer S. Davis
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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.

By: Dennis McFarland
Reviewed by: Julia Oliver

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.

By: Philip Shirley
Reviewed by: Kirk Curnutt

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.

By: Bob Whetstone
Reviewed by: Wayne Greenhaw

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.

By: Carter Martin
Reviewed by: Penne J. Laubenthal

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.

By: David T. Morgan
Reviewed by: David Wyman

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.

By: Jay Atkinson
Reviewed by: Karen Pirnie

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.

By: Kirk Curnutt
Reviewed by: Julia Oliver

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...

By: Michael Knight
Reviewed by: Anita Miller Garner

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.

By: D.W. Hunt
Reviewed by: Van Newell

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.

By: Brad Vice
Reviewed by: Joey Kennedy

By: Sonny Brewer
Reviewed by: Catherine Alexander

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. 

By: Daniel Wallace
Reviewed by: Treasure Ingels-Thompson

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.

By: Shelley Fraser Mickle
Reviewed by: Liz Reed

By: Phillip Cioffari
Reviewed by: Van Newell

Phillip Cioffari, author of A History of Things Lost or Broken, manages to cut his own 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.”

By: Carolyn Haines
Reviewed by: Linda Busby Parker

By: Irene Steele
Reviewed by: Foster Dickson

By: Joe Taylor with Debbie Davis, Gerald Jones, and Tina Jones, eds.
Reviewed by: Kirk Curnutt

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.

By: Daniel Alarcón
Reviewed by: David Wyman

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.

By: Gerald Duff
Reviewed by: Kirk Curnutt

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.

By: Homer Hickam
Reviewed by: Edward Reynolds

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.

By: Robert Ely
Reviewed by: Edward Reynolds

With his wickedly funny, satirical tale of notorious political dramas portrayed by Alabama rascals, Robert Ely pens to life unforgettable characters that include governors, bureaucrats, legislators, hero attorneys, and the little people—the salt of the earth, common folk of the state. Ely tells the story of an attorney determined to break the shackles of demagoguery that threaten the state’s social and safety welfare.   

By: Michelle Richmond
Reviewed by: Anita Garner

By: Ravi Howard
Reviewed by: Todd Dills

By: Cassandra King
Reviewed by: Norman McMillan

In Queen of Broken Hearts, novelist Cassandra King has written a very perceptive modern-day novel of manners.  Set in Fairhope, Alabama, the book paints an excellent picture of the town’s upper crust—people who sip Dom Perignon, eat candied ginger, inhabit beautiful interiors, and dance the tango.  But King, building her narrative around the central theme of marriage and divorce, delves far beneath this surface sophistication to expose the faults and failures of a number of Fairhope’s finest.    

By Mark Ethridge
Reviewed by Julia Oliver

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.

By: Todd Dills
Reviewed by: Jim Murphy

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.

By: Jimmy Carl Harris
Reviewed by: Sue Walker

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."

By: John Sims Jeter
Reviewed by: Elaine Hughes

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...