This provocative novel takes the reader on a wild ride inside the mind of a Mississippi Delta good-old-boy ex-deputy sheriff who is as vicious and racist as the worst 1950s-’60s stereotypes. Junior Ray Loveblood narrates the story in his own profane, colloquial voice, telling why he hates just about everybody and why he wants to shoot Leland Shaw, a shell-shocked World War II hero and poet who is hiding in a silo from what he believes are German ...
Junior Ray Loveblood, one of the most outrageous and original personalities to appear in American literature in many years, returns in The Yazoo Blues, the sequel to John Pritchard’s Junior Ray. Now semi-retired, Loveblood works as a security guard in one of the floating casinos that have replaced cotton as the cash crop in the Mississippi Delta. In his spare time, Junior Ray has become obsessed with the ill-fated Yazoo Pass expedition by a Unio ...
Publisher’s Weekly hailed the “wit and subtlety” in Gerald Duff’s fiction as “simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon,” and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetter said “Gerald Duff’s dialogue is among the best being written, and his sense of the absurd is Portis-like.” This new collection of short stories by the author of Coasters (2001) features the Ploughshares Cohen Prize-winning story “Fire Ants.” ...
On the Hills of God describes the year-long journey of a boy becoming a man, while all that he has known crumbles to ashes. The novel has been translated into German and Arabic and won the PEN Oakland Award for literary excellence. Critic Ishmael Reed calls it “a monumental book.” This revised edition includes a new introduction. When we first encounter Palestinian Yousif Safi in June 1947, he is filled with hopes for his education abroad to stu ...
For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom, a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do ...
In the eighteen stories in this retrospective of his best short fiction, Dale Short shows why he is one of the best prose stylists of his generation and why he deserves a break-out success. Short's writing has been hailed by Wally Lamb as “simultaneously mythical and modern; a wild ride,” and Dennis Covington has called him “wise and compassionate, a major Southern writer.” He writes here from many perspectives—male, female, first person, t ...
Raised in the Primitive Baptist Church, Beulah Buchanan at age 16 marries the much older deacon Ralph Rainey to escape from her oppressive parents, thus jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Over the next six years, Beulah works in her domineering husband’s cafe all day and cooks him dinner at home every night, dutifully attends church, and falls into an affair with the preacher. When she embarasses her husband by not cooking enough food fo ...
Janson Sanders, part Cherokee, part poor-but-proud white, is intent on avenging his father’s death and taking back the land stolen from him by a wealthy planter. Parentless and alone, Janson sets out, hopping a train with only a few biscuits and some cold pieces of chicken to his name. Thus begins a journey across the Souh to earn enough money to return home and reclaim his birthright. He eventually settles on rich landowner William Whitley’s la ...
Charlotte Miller’s debut novel, Behold, This Dreamer, was a regional success story in 2000-2001. She continues now with the second installment of her trilogy exploring romance, culture, and place in the Depression-era Deep South. In the new book, Janson Sanders and his new bride, Elise, have been exiled by her wealthy father and have returned, penniless and landless, to his poor-but-proud relatives in Alabama. There, they struggle to build a lif ...
