Southern Fiction – Lemuria Books

Category: Southern Fiction (Page 1 of 24)

By Jim Warren. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 8)

In The Last Taxi Driver, Lou Bishoff drives for Mississippi All Saints Taxis in Gentry, a university town in North Mississippi. His black 1995 Town Car has seen better days–the roof leaks, the brakes are gone, the shocks are shot, the horn doesn’t work, and the tires are bald. Lou’s future is uncertain. Uber is moving into Gentry. His relationship is over, assuming he can convince her to move out. An old nemesis is back in town after cutting off his ankle bracelet and hitchhiking from Kansas.

Albert Camus said, “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Maybe Al was a cabbie? Lou’s taxi has three air fresheners–Bigfoot, Shakespeare, and a flying saucer–besides working well as conversation starters, they help ward off smells so varied and offensive that he must keep Ozium and Febreze at the ready for backup. Lou’s a Buddhist, but a bad one, “the worst Buddhist in the world.” Nevertheless, he reads about Buddhism between fares in hopes that it might quell the urge to raise his middle finger in traffic. Then he gets another dispatch—All Saints dispatches come by text to thwart the competition’s radio spying—and he’s off on a run while his boss Stella watches through an onboard camera.

Lou works days; he’d rather avoid the drunk college students. He takes people to work, to shop, or to the doctor. He makes deliveries. If you got arrested last night and need a ride this morning from the jail to the vehicle impound lot, Lou’s your man. He’s also there if the hospital releases you to go home, but there’s no family to pick you up. He’ll be there when you get out of rehab, too, if it’s the good rehab, the one next to the VD clinic. He’ll drive you to Clarksdale, Memphis, or across town. Two bucks a mile outside city limits, though, and two dollars for any extra stops.

Gentry, of course, resembles Oxford. It’s no coincidence that Durkee drove an Oxford taxi for a couple of years. At one point, he was driving over 70 hours a week. Durkee includes a chapter filled with advice for Mississippi drivers right in the middle of the book, like an intermission. “Safe driving is all about the neck. Pride yourself in how much you employ your neck while changing lanes. Approach driving as a neck exercise.” Ditch the sunglasses (they create blind spots). Never blink your headlights at a UFO. And of course: “Your main job as a driver in Mississippi is to anticipate stupidity.” Indeed.

The Last Taxi Driver is a pleasure to read. We waited a long time for second novel from Durkee. It was worth the wait. Durkee’s language is unadorned and direct. It’s first person Lou, explaining the North Mississippi taxi business and narrating as we ride shotgun on a long, strange shift. The novel is dark, but quite funny. Lou has a knack for overthinking that turns even the normal stuff into a comedy routine. And Lou has stories to tell, stories about albino possums, UFOs, and adolescent trauma. As the day shift turns into a night run home from Memphis, with a yellow-eyed transplant surgery escapee on board and a gun under the seat, things get … well, they get darker.

Durkee was raised in Hattiesburg. He attended Pearl River Junior College, graduated from Arkansas, pursued a creative writing degree at Syracuse–he started the program with George Saunders, was taught by Tobias Wolff–and ultimately obtained his MFA back at Arkansas. He’s lived in Oxford for ten years. His first novel was Rides of the Midway, published twenty years ago. His memoir Stalking Shakespeare is scheduled for publication in 2021.

Jim Warren is a lawyer in Jackson. He collects books, enjoys music, and occasionally writes about both.

Signed first editions of The Last Taxi Driver can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

‘Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves’ explores complexities of slave life during peace, war

By Guest Author

On March 9, 2020

In Civil War, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

By John Mort. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 8)

Bass Reeves—a real, historical figure—was born a slave on an Arkansas plantation in the 1840s. In Sidney Thompson’s new novel, Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves: The Bass Reeves Trilogy, Book One, Reeves grows up to be a big, agreeable man entirely loyal to his master, the redoubtable Master Reeves. Master Reeves is not cruel. When a black scullery maid has her baby, he gives her one day off, and this is regarded as kind by the scullery maid and everyone else.

Slaves have so adapted to this patriarchal economic system that notions of emancipation and equality don’t occur to them. A kind of freedom exists just a few miles to the west, in Oklahoma Territory, but fleeing—running—is a tough concept. If you were beaten or starved, that would be one thing, but Master Reeves would never beat you or withhold food. You may be a slave, but you can live a life on Master Reeves’s plantation. You can marry. You can have kids.

It develops that Bass is an extraordinary marksman, and Master Reeves takes Bass to a number of turkey shoots in Arkansas and the Territory. Bass always wins, and the Master makes good money betting on him. Bass enjoys himself, and sometimes, he can bring those dead turkeys home for the other slaves.

Ignorance may have seemed like bliss, but Bass is a slave and a slave can be moved about like a horse. Old Master Reeves gives Bass to his son, young Master Reeves, who has a plantation down in Texas. Bass has a difficult time understanding this. He doesn’t know where Texas is, and doesn’t want to leave behind his aging parents. How could Master Reeves treat him like this?

The young Master Reeves is an intellectual with all sorts of theories about slavery. He baits Bass with his endless mind-games, trying to cause his new manservant to reveal his true feelings. In many ways, young Master Reeves inadvertently educates Bass and inculcates in him a desire for freedom. Young Reeves is despicable, but he’s also complicated. He fully understands how intelligent Bass is, and potentially how dangerous.

The Civil War has reached the West, and young Master Reeves wants a manservant who can shoot. Most of the Southern officers bring their manservants to the Battle of Wilson’s Creek (near Springfield, Missouri), a Southern victory of sorts that flows into the Southern defeat at Pea Ridge (near Fayetteville, Arkansas). These battles have been written about by historians and novelists alike, but Thompson’s treatment, portraying the war from a slave’s perspective, is unique.

The man-servant’s job is to reload weapons for their masters (for the most part, repeating rifles are not yet in use). But Bass is such an unerring shot that the young Master Reeves loads for his slave. And Bass kills many a Yankee, aiming for the brass buttons of their coats.

Young Master Reeves and Bass return to a changing Texas. The war isn’t over but everyone knows the South will lose. Throughout Bass’s faithful service, young Master Reeves has promised Bass’s manumission, or freedom; secretly, Bass, who has seen some of the world by now, has begun to contemplate running for his freedom into Oklahoma Territory. Just how to maneuver away from the devious young Master Reeves, and how to take leave of his sweetheart, Jennie, occupies the final pages of the first installment of this epic, three-volume portrait of Bass Reeves, the first black deputy west of the Mississippi.

When you’re gifted with the fine sense of characterization Thompson deploys, even the unsubtle subject of slavery grows subtler. His Young Master Reeves is a sort of Nazi, but he’s drawn masterfully. Thompson, once one of Barry Hannah’s students at University of Mississippi, is a highly entertaining writer, and his Bass Reeves emerges as an intelligent, reluctantly violent, sympathetic young man. Readers will find the compelling recreations of two important Civil War battles to be a kind of bonus.

John Mort is the author of Down Along the Piney: Ozarks Stories among others, and the winner of many awards for his fiction including a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

Sidney Thompson will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 10, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves.

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

By Guest Author

On March 8, 2020

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 8)

Oxford’s Michael Farris Smith reinforces his rising prominence as “one of Southern fiction’s leading voices” with his newest Southern noir offering, Blackwood.

Set in “a landscape of fear and ghosts,” this tale of an artist who returns to his (fictional) hometown of tiny Red Bluff, Miss., quickly turns dark as he realizes that the heartbreak of his past is now mingled with an evil that has tortured generations.

The recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award, Smith’s previous novels include The Fighter, Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. His short stories have received two nominations for a Pushcart Prize, and his essays have been published in the New York Times, Catfish Alley, Deep South Magazine and others.

Smith is a graduate of Mississippi State University, and he began writing while at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

As a child in 1956, main character Colburn inadvertently witnessed–and unexpectedly participated in–his father’s suicide. The weight of this, his greatest burden, soon begins to drag him into deeper gloom when he returns to his hometown of Red Bluff, Miss., 20 years later. Why did he really go back, and why did you choose to set this story in this time period?

Michael Farris Smith

I think I chose to set the novel in the ‘70s, with the initial event occurring in the ‘50s, just because this felt like an older story to me. Almost like a tall tale or ghost story you hear told again and again in some small town. I think a lot of people from smaller places can certainly relate to this. As to why Colburn decides to return, I don’t know if it’s something I can answer so directly. He’s been carrying this around for a long time, he’s haunted by it, confused by it, curious about it, and so maybe he feels like he’s ready to face it.

Another formidable, undeniable “character” in Blackwood is the kudzu–the living, invincible vine that could swallow not only the landscape, but any manmade object in its path. Explain its role in this story.

The kudzu is what started this story, much like the idea of endless hurricanes started Rivers. This is the second time I’ve had the landscape be the jumping off point. I’ve always thought the great expanse of kudzu was strange, spooky, dark. We’ve all seen it, how it takes everything, methodically and patiently. I just had the idea of a valley covered in kudzu and the small town surrounding it, and the whispers and maybe even madness that seems to be living on its edge, and then going beneath the vines to find out what is going on. I let my imagination have it and that was that.

“The voice” seems to pervade the community. Tell us about its intrusion into the lives of those who hear it, and its gossip value among those who have merely heard about it.

The gossip value carries some of the weight, no doubt. Back to earlier when I mentioned that Blackwood had the feeling of being a ghost story passed along, year after year, I think the characters in the novel experience the same. One person claims to hear the voice. Another thinks it’s ridiculous. Another falls somewhere in between. It seems like those who are drawn to the notion of a voice below are the ones who want to hear it.

Among the many story lines and characters whose lives are beyond “complicated” in this tale is the presence of characters known as the man, the woman, and the boy–who all live tragic lives. In the end, it is the boy with whom Colburn finds an attachment. Why is this quasi-relationship so important to Colburn?

The best way I can answer is that we are all looking for someone to find things in common with, people who make us feel accepted or part of something. Hopefully it comes from family, but for too many people, like Colburn, that isn’t the case. He’s spent a lifetime with the shadows of his mother and father drifting in his mind, and he has been a loner, isolated, and maybe this is his chance to find that connection he has missed.

The names of the woman and the boy are never revealed, although the man finally tells the local sheriff, “My name is Boucher.” You know what my question is! How does this fit in with the main character of your previous novel, The Fighter?

I’ve never had characters spill from one novel into another until now, and that wasn’t the original plan. I was very late in the process of Blackwood when I realized the man and woman who have broken down in Red Bluff are the man and woman who abandoned young Jack Boucher in Tunica at the beginning of The Fighter. It was such an exciting idea, and the time frame fit, and it gave their story so much more complexity. It raised Blackwood to a higher level, and in some ways, I feel like it has raised the level of The Fighter, as well.

Please tell me about the title of the book, Blackwood, and its significance to the story.

On page 56, I used the description of the “blackwood underneath” in a passage where we first really go under and see what it’s like. As soon as I used the word blackwood, I knew that was the title. It fit the landscape but also fit the kind of story I knew I was going to tell.

Lemuria has chosen Blackwood as its March 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

Author Q & A with Lee Durkee

By Guest Author

On March 4, 2020

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 1)

Twenty years after his first book Rides of the Midway made its debut, Lee Durkee has returned with his new release The Last Taxi Driver, a one-night study of the life of Lou Bishoff as he takes stock of the things that really matter, while transporting his final passengers to their own destinations.

In between his novels, Durkee’s stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Tin House, New England Review, Mississippi Noir, and other publications.

His memoir Stalking Shakespeare, which recounts his 10-year quest to locate lost portraits of William Shakespeare, will be released in 2021.

Born in Hawaii, Durkee grew up in Hattiesburg and lived in Vermont for 18 years (among other places) before moving back to his home state to escape the harsh winters. A former cab driver himself, he now lives in North Mississippi.

I’ll start with the obvious first question: why so long (20 years) between Rides of the Midway, your debut novel, and The Last Taxi Driver, your new release?

Lee Durkee

I have so many answers to this question! Let me explain to you why I failed so spectacularly at publishing for 20 years. My friend Bill at Square Books (in Oxford) used to give me pep talks at the bar at City Grocery in which he emphasized how hard Michael Farris Smith worked, and other well-meaning friends have gently lectured me about drinking or smoking to excess. But I suspect the real reason I never published a second novel was a lack of practicality in what I wrote about.

I don’t have much control over what pours out. My relationship with writing is an opium-like addiction I enjoyed every day for those 20 years of obscurity during which I wrote two unloved books set in Kathmandu as well as a hip-hop version of Hamlet set to Nas’s Stillmatic. I also wrote two books about Elizabethan portraits and a short story collection set in Tokyo told from the point-of-view of nine different Japanese sex dolls. Then there were my Vermont novels, one in which I hideously murdered my real-life jerk of a landlord by having him stuffed, while still screamingly alive, down an ice hole drilled into a frozen lake. None of these books could be described as commercial ventures.

Please tell me about your own experiences as a taxi driver yourself. Did crazy things happen? Were you ever frightened? How did getting that job come about? And, finally, how did that experience influence The Last Taxi Driver?

I drove for two different cab companies in Oxford for a year each and was frequently very frightened. There were times I drove 70-hour weeks–the only way I could eek out a living while saving money for my own car. My first cab company specialized in trailer parks and projects and dirt roads. We also carted the poor people who got kicked out of the local hospital back to their hovels to die. But, as to being afraid, it was mostly the cackles of drunk frat boys who worried me. Like the time I kicked a hoard of them out of my cab for yelling the N-word at this couple. These giant frat boys got out, surrounded my cab, and started kicking the doors etc., while calling me the N word. And I’m white! That’s how racist those punks are. Racists always assume their cab drivers are fellow racists. Same with perverts. The things I heard those kids say about women and Obama would harrow your blood to hear. I drove with a big Kershaw knife under my leg. Other cabbies I worked with had guns.

It was my friend Joyce Freeland, a do-good lawyer, who got me hired by my first cab company after I’d explained to her I couldn’t bartend any more due to back spasms. And the actress Joey Lauren Adams hooked me up with my second cab job. Both Joyce and Joey are members in high standing of the Save Lee from Himself Club, whose president is (Oxford author) Lisa Howorth.

And yes, both taxi jobs influence the novel. Grist was the whole point of me not working in an English department like 98 percent of all writers today do. We live in a world where the bulk of noir fiction is now being written by schoolteachers who have never even had night jobs. They write with their imaginations! Along those lines, the first thing I do whenever I pick up a new book these days is turn it over, trying to deduce if the author has ever stepped outside of an English department.

The Last Taxi Driver is the detailed story of cab driver Lou Bishoff’s last evening on the job, as he shares it in first person, with a penchant for getting off the subject now and again. Despite the state of his personal life (girlfriend problems, his health and his career direction) he always has humor to fall back on, lending a kind of slanted optimism to what many would deem a dire existence. How does Lou, who seems to take things in stride as he reasons through his sometimes-tangled trains of thought, manage to keep it together?

Actually, I’m not sure Lou does keep it together, and his shift-from-hell can certainly be read as a descent into madness. But dark humor must be a survival mechanism, right? I’ve worked in restaurants all my life, and the jokes you hear there are 1,000 times funnier and dirtier than the meticulously censored ones you’ll hear inside English departments. Both my novels are rife with the black humor of servers who have to smile-smile-smile and then walk back into the kitchen and just let loose that venom. I am nothing if not a child of restaurants. They raised me, they sustained me.

How much of Lou Bishoff is Lee Durkee? (They seem to have a lot in common.) What are the differences?

I suppose Lou could be described as a more tragic version of me who exists in a darker dimension–cue Rod Serling. But that’s also true for other characters in The Last Taxi Driver. There are tricks writers play to make you think a book is more autobiographical than it is. We want you to think that. I’ve always been a huge fan of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which takes the illusion of verisimilitude to a new level–he even named his main character Tim.

But Lou, like all characters in fiction, is mostly a creature of plot. To say Lou is me would be wrong–Lou at least has a girlfriend. And half of Lou’s dialogue was ripped off from customers I’ve eavesdropped on. Like all my characters, Lou is a mutt who is made up of traits culled from a dozen or so different people.

Tell me about your upcoming memoir, set to be released in 2021.

Stalking Shakespeare is a memoir about my decades-long obsession with being the first person to ever find a portrait of Shakespeare painted from life. The memoir is funny, not academic, and concerns my time living in Vermont, Tokyo, London, and my eventual return to Mississippi after 37 years away. I’ve long given up writing anything that isn’t funny.

Signed first editions of The Last Taxi Driver can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

Scholar Phillip Gordon explores all of Faulkner’s walks on the wild side in ‘Gay Faulkner’

By Guest Author

On January 30, 2020

In LGBTQIA+, Southern Fiction

By Jesse Yancy. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 26)

In Gay Faulkner, Phillip Gordon examines Faulkner’s interactions with gay men, his immersion in gay subcultures, especially during the 1920s, and his strong and meaningful relationships with specific gay men, particularly his lifelong friend Ben Wasson. Gordon’s study concentrates on As I Lay Dying and the Snopes trilogy with particular emphasis on Darl Bundren and V.K. Ratliff. Gordon states flatly that “the question at the heart of this study is not ‘Was Faulkner gay?’ . . . what this study really seeks to address: Is there a gay Faulkner?”

Gordon seeks to reveal a gay presence not only in Faulkner’s work, but also in his life as well, establishing Faulkner’s awareness of homosexuality and homosexuals, and his acceptance and participation in gay culture. While Gay Faulkner is a solid academic work the notes are as absorbing as the text, and the bibliography constitutes a summation of Queer Faulkner studies. Gordon offers insight, information, and even entertainment for the general reader.

Gordon’s documentation of Faulkner’s stay in New Orleans explores the bohemian atmosphere as well as the writers’ community of the Vieux Carré. Central to this section of the book is Gordon’s account of Faulkner’s relationship with his longtime friend and roommate, the gay artist William Spratling, including an intriguing account of a trip to Italy with Spratling, a journey that resulted in Faulkner’s most openly gay story, “A Divorce in Naples.”

We also discover Faulkner in New York City after the publication of Sanctuary (1931) interacting with the Algonquin Round Table, and his awkward meeting with Alexander Woollcott with his gay friend and sometime agent Ben Wasson and the New Orleans-born gay writer, Lyle Saxon. Gordon describes Faulkner touring Harlem’s gay clubs and cabarets with Carl Van Vechten, where he attended a show by the famous drag “king” Gladys Bentley. This encounter as recounted by Wasson becomes a focal point for establishing the critical importance of the Blotner Papers at Southeastern Missouri State University, which Gordon calls “fascinating, complex, and, for lack of a better word, beautiful.” And despite his earlier disclaimer concerning Faulkner’s personal proclivities, in somewhat of an aside Gordon also avers that “there is evidence in the Blotner papers that suggest our understanding of Faulkner’s sexuality might not be what we have generally assumed.”

Gordon frames Faulkner within the literary milieu of early 20th century Mississippi, which by any standards constitutes the cutting edge of the Southern Renaissance in American literature and includes several prominent gay writers. The queer planter, poet, and memoirist William Alexander Percy of Greenville nurtured a clutch of writers, including Hodding Carter, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Wasson. Gordon also illuminates Oxford’s fascinating and cosmopolitan Stark Young as well as the undeservedly obscure poet and scholar Hubert Creekmore of Water Valley.

In a text, Gordon and other queer critics focus on the meaning and nuances of the words used, and amplify their implications. Some readers may think Gordon is reaching to make a point, but in the end, the words and their meanings are there for any reader to understand. Gay Faulkner has a great deal to be recommended; it’s interesting, educational and, yes, entertaining. It is also a much-needed blade to cut the hide-bound conventions surrounding Faulkner and his work.

Jesse Yancy is a writer, editor and gardener living in Jackson.

Phillip Gordon will be at Lemuria on Thursday, March 26, to sign and discuss Gay Faulkner.

Author Q & A with Mark Barr

By Guest Author

On December 29, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 29)

Mark Barr’s debut novel Watershed literally sheds light on the true story of how electric light first came to rural Tennessee in the 1930s–and how its arrival changed those communities in ways they never expected.

Through its pages, Barr chronicles the stories of fictional characters Claire and Nathan, whose complicated fates are drawn together only through the enormity of the construction of the hydroelectric dam that would supply the power to turn the lights on. Barr’s meticulous research adds an attention to detail that draws the reader into the time and place of the story.

A software developer who likes to spend his spare time baking bread, Barr has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. He earned an MFA from Texas State University.

Barr resides in Arkansas with his wife and sons.

What was it about the Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric dam project in 1930s rural Tennessee that caught your interest and inspired this story?

I had been working as an advertising copywriter, and I was assigned to write a brochure for an electric cooperative client. During my preparation for that, I was shocked to learn that, while electricity was available in our large cities in the early years of the 1900s, it wasn’t until 1937 and the Rural Electrification Act that much of the rural countryside finally got electrical service. I was kind of shocked, not that we’d experienced this divide, but that we don’t much collectively remember it.

The prospect of life with electricity was an unknown in 1930s rural Tennessee. Explain how the dam’s construction in Watershed would bring more changes to the community than just electric power–and how the book’s title reveals that.

We don’t stop to think about it much, but we today enjoy a standard of comfort and living that is far beyond 99 percent better than what our preceding ancestors had. Consider the fact of air conditioning when it is hot, lights when it is dark, our global communications network and internet–all of these things are available by and large because of electricity. It’s a foundation for so many other conveniences. It is hard to overstate the reach of its benefit.

Please tell us about the fears and ambitions of central characters Claire and Nathan.

I think a lot of the novel has to do with our past and our inability to ever escape it. Nathan is bound to his. Claire is shaped by hers, even as she grows into a new life. When I set out to write the book, Nathan was, to my mind, the main character. It surprised me when Claire came along and then grew into what I now think of as the primary character. It’s Claire’s struggle and growth that defines the arc of the novel’s story. I feel that it is because of Claire that the book is an optimistic one.

With the scarcity of jobs during the post-Depression years of the ‘30s, explain the tension between the locals and the outsiders who competed for employment on this project in Hardin County, Tennessee.

Here’s a story that reflects the scarcity of jobs during this time period: I visited a couple different dams that had been built in 1937 during my research. At one of them I learned that, during the construction effort, a camp had sprung up just adjacent to the dam site. It was comprised of men seeking work. Each morning, men from the camp would venture over to the dam site to inquire if anyone had died during the previous day, and if so, if a position had opened up as a result! A version of that story made it into the novel.

What can you tell us about future works you may have in progress now? Do you plan to stick with historical fiction as your main interest?

I’ve got a couple different projects that I’m working on next. The one that currently has the upper hand is set in an Illinois coal mining town in the 1990s. I’m drawn to stories about communities as they change, and this one deals with the strains placed on a particular town, generationally, after the mines shut down.

Lemuria has selected Watershed its November 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions of Watershed are available in our online store.

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles about Larry Brown

By Guest Author

On December 8, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 8)

Fans of the late Oxford author Larry Brown need wait no longer to own a collection of his career short works in one volume, with the release of Algonquin’s Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown.

It was fitting that writer Jonathan Miles, (author of the novels Anatomy of a Miracle, Want Not, and Dear American Airlines, and who considered Brown to be both close friend and mentor since they met in Oxford in the early ‘90s) would be the one to contribute the foreword to the book.

“Larry published six novels, a memoir, a book of essays, and all the stories (in this new book), carving his name, indelibly, onto the thick tree trunk of American literature,” Miles states in the foreword. “He strained and he faltered, yes, but he never lost his faith.”

Larry Brown

Without any training in writing or previous publication of a single piece, Brown literally taught himself to write–and he persevered through seven years of rejections until the publication of his first collection of short stories, Facing the Music, in 1988. After his first novel, Dirty Work, was published, he would quit his job as a firefighter in Oxford to devote his efforts full-time to writing.

Among other recognitions, Brown would go on to win the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Southern Book Award for Fiction–twice.

He died of an apparent heart attack at his home near Oxford in 2004.

Miles, a former columnist for the New York Times, served as a contributing editor to several national magazines, and his journalistic work appeared in the annual Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime writing anthologies. A former longtime resident of Oxford, he now lives in rural New Jersey.

Miles shares his thoughts and memories about his friendship with Brown below.

How did the idea come about to publish all of Larry Brown’s work in one volume, and how were you chosen to write the foreword to this book?

The idea had been bouncing around, among Larry’s family and friends, for the last decade or more. The links between his two story collections – Facing the Music in 1988 and Big Bad Love in 1990–are so strong that combining them felt like a natural and graceful merger. The greater desire, however, was to finally corral all the stray stories that Larry published in magazines and anthologies, so as to gather the entirety of his short fiction into one definitive volume. Those includes his wild masterpiece, “A Roadside Resurrection,” which appeared in the Paris Review, as well as “Tiny Love,” the prickly, lovelorn title story, which Larry published in a charity anthology, as well as the early stories he published in biker and horror magazines. I’d been shepherding the idea along, over the years, and was honored when Algonquin, Larry’s longtime publisher, asked me to write the foreword.

Tell me about your friendship with Brown. How did you meet him, and what did you learn from him as a writer?

Jonathan Miles

I met Larry in 1992, a very memorable meeting that I wrote about in the foreword. It involves dancing on a table! Despite a 21-year age difference, we were instant pals. The Brown family adopted me, in just about every way, and neither Larry’s passing nor my move up north ever changed that–when I’m with them, I’m home.

As for writing, I’ve often said that my writing classroom was Larry’s pickup, and my classes were the hours Larry and I spent riding Lafayette County backroads. He often traced the origins of stories and scenes on those drives, pointing out the location of some real-life event and then explaining how he’d worked it into fiction, how he’d transformed it into art. Sharing the recipe with me, in a sense.

But the greatest lesson Larry gave me, and gave every artist, was the example of his persistence. Despite years of rejection, he never stopped writing. The only failure in art, he taught me, is not making art. You must always keep working.

Please describe Brown’s work in your own words. What do you admire about his work, and what drew you to it?

Larry Brown wrote about human frailties, about people in dire straits–emotional, romantic, financial, existential. The setting was almost always the rougher corners of north Mississippi, but the frailties were universal. Good people doing bad things, bad people doing good things. With limitless compassion, Larry sought to reconcile such human mysteries. From the first page he liked to load his characters with trouble–he called this “sandbagging”–and then chronicle their struggles to cast off this load, like the Old Testament’s God lobbing ordeals at Job. Yet by gauging what they could endure Larry showed what all of us can endure. There was a lot of darkness in Larry’s work but tremendous light, too.

Why was it important to finally publish all of Brown’s short work into one volume?

The hope is that this big new volume will draw a new generation to Larry Brown’s work and will reboot appreciation for one of the most singular voices in American literature. The people Larry wrote about don’t often appear in literary fiction, or, when they do, are rarely afforded the breadth of humanity that Larry gave them, the full bandwidth of their existence.

A young novelist from Alabama recently wrote me to say that he’d never met folks like himself and his family in books until reading his first Larry Brown book. Tim McGraw, a huge Larry fan, once told me that, unlike with most books he reads, he “recognized” the people in Larry’s work.

I hope this volume kindles more moments like that. I hope it leads more readers into Larry Brown’s north Mississippi, down those windy backroads. And I hope it helps to further cement his legacy as one of this state’s–and for that matter this nation’s–greatest writers.

What are some of your favorites among Larry’s work, and why?

In putting this collection together, I was struck, anew, by his story “Samaritans,” which appeared in Facing the Music. The setup for the story sounds like a joke setup: a little kid walks into a bar. But the story veers into dark, unsettling directions, and ultimately just claws at your heart. I’ve probably read it dozens of times but each time I do it feels slightly different–tonally, morally, the works. Certain paintings are like that; there’s always something new to see. Likewise, certain songs. That’s a hallmark of great art: it feels inexhaustibly alive.

Copies of Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown and Lemuria’s specially designed Larry Brown t-shirts (designed by Barry Gifford) are available in our online store and at our location in Banner Hall.

‘The Cofield Collection,’ now back in print, is a striking Faulkner portrait

By Guest Author

On December 3, 2019

In Art/Photography, Southern Fiction

By Allen Boyer. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 1)

“It wasn’t easy to get a smiling photograph of William Faulkner!” That was the fond, exasperated comment of J.R. “Colonel” Cofield, the Oxford photographer in whose studio Faulkner sat for the portraits that graced the dust jackets of his novels.

Dealing with William Faulkner was daunting. Yet Cofield endured and ultimately, he prevailed. He seldom saw Faulkner smile, but he captured striking images of the man. Those portraits, with other photos taken or collected by the Cofield family, supply the heart of William Faulkner: The Cofield Collection–published in 1978, now brought back to print.

Cofield first photographed Faulkner when he published Sanctuary, in 1931. Faulkner was thirty-three, a handsome young author with a tweed jacket and a cigarette. Late in life, when pressed by friends in Virginia, he posed in a fox-hunting outfit, with top hat and riding boots and blazing red huntsman’s coat. Other times he was indifferent; he would sit for Cofield wearing a three-piece suit or a simple blue work shirt.

As well as Faulkner, this book covers the postage-stamp of native soil about which he wrote. Field hands work mules, and farmers sell produce from trucks parked on the Oxford Square. Cotton wagons crowd the lot outside the gin. Barnstormers pose beside grass airstrips. Schoolchildren line up, some outside the Oxford Graded School, others on muddy lawns out in the county. A string band warms up the crowd for a speech by youthful Senate candidate John Stennis.

Some pictures have the glossy look of publicity shots. Years after he had won the Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner posed at a Memphis preview of Land of the Pharaohs. He had a screenwriter’s credit on the picture, and it was a film by Howard Hawks, the director who took Faulkner dove-hunting with Clark Gable. Faulkner’s own favorite photo looks like something from Hollywood, a studio close-up straight out of film noir.

Faulkner summoned Colonel Cofield to Rowan Oak to record his celebrated costume-party hunt breakfast, that Sunday morning in May 1938. He called him back for two weddings, his daughter’s and his niece’s, and at those receptions Cofield caught him smiling.

Some of Faulkner’s past is dead–very clearly past. There are images here from Life Magazine and the Memphis Press-Scimitar. As a teenager, Faulkner often rode the train to Taylor and hiked back along Old Taylor Road, then a red-dirt track, now choked with the cars of Ole Miss student traffic. Black men and women appear on the edges of their white employers’ family portraits. (John Cofield, grandson of Colonel Cofield, whose internet collections preserve his hometown’s history, energetically documents the past of both black and white communities. Forty years ago, this was harder.)

In Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the Sartoris family seems modeled on Faulkner’s own relations. But, ironically, there is much of the novelist in a different character, strong-willed black tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp. Beauchamp is a match for Faulkner in independence and a subdued haughty knightliness, a taciturnity shaped by battles with misfortune. Beauchamp’s face, Faulkner wrote, “was not sober and not grave but wore no expression at all.” Can the same distant unreadable expression be seen in these pages? For in nearly every photograph, studio portrait or snapshot alike, Faulkner’s gaze is similar–serious, reserved, never quite directly into the camera. Cofield knew that expression well. Quoting Kipling, he wrote: “‘No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’ Bill Faulkner lived up to this principle to a T.”

Some of these images will be familiar. It was this book that made them well-known. Eudora Welty praised the original edition of “The Cofield Collection.” “These photographs,” she wrote, “eloquently tell us what no voice now can tell, what no words are likely to express so clearly and intimately about William Faulkner’s life.” Miss Welty was no mean photographer herself, and her judgment still holds true.

Allen Boyer lives and writes on Staten Island. He grew up in Oxford, where Colonel Cofield took the Boyer family’s portraits every year.

Lawrence Wells, the editor of The Cofield Collection, will be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 7, from 1:00 to 2:00 to sign copies.

Minrose Gwin delivers soon-to-be classic novel ‘The Accidentals’

By Guest Author

On September 13, 2019

In Southern Fiction

By Scott Naugle. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 8)

The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin is the best type of novel, striking so many intellectual and emotional chords. The deep and rich story is masterfully built through the subtlest of detail, nuance, shading, and intuition. Beautifully styled, every word gently and intentionally placed, The Accidentals is destined to become a classic of 21st century American literature.

Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo. Her previous novels include Promise and The Queen of Palmyra. Gwin’s nonfiction work includes Wishing for Snow, a memoir, and Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement.

The Accidentals begins in 1957. Olivia McAlister is an anxious mother of two daughters, June and Grace, married to the dependable Holly, a bookkeeper for the local paper mill company. Holly drives a Nash Rambler and is meticulous in trimming the hedges of their neat, comfortable house. Impacted by and wistful for the energy and vibe of her youth in New Orleans, Olivia cannot find her footing among the routines and housewives of a rural Mississippi community. She’s standoffish, a loner, pining for the intellectual and artistic stimulation of a larger city and the invigorating broader cause she served while working at the Higgins boat factory during World War II.

Through bird-watching and opera, Olivia attempts to find purpose and connection. She is an accidental, “a bird found outside its normal geographic range, migration route, or season: vagrant” explains the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

With a richly developed interior life, artistic, self-aware, walking through days under a deep and exhausting disquietude, Olivia McAlister joins Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. Intelligent, internally reflective, and articulate female characters in literature are a rarity, particularly through which an author sets the tone of a novel or barometer through which other characters or society are judged.

In the opening paragraphs of “Mrs. Dalloway”, “… feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful as about to happen; looking at the flowers…” And from the opening of “Mrs. Bridge”, “…Now and then while growing up the idea came to her that she could get along very nicely without a husband.” Both are strong independent women challenging the status quo and searching for intellectual fulfillment outside a society dominated by men and commerce.

We are introduced to Olivia McAlister in the opening paragraphs of The Accidentals as she projects her concerns and desires, “Listen hard now and you can tell what they are saying. This morning the cardinal. Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet. Then, two houses down, a mockingbird. Redemption, redemption, redemption…Cheer, cheer, cheer. I’m all ears little wren.” Birds represent flight, an escape, while chirping coded messages to the restless Olivia McAlister, plotting her next action that will, through a series of mishaps, lead to her death. Her escape flight will be aborted.

After Olivia’s death, her daughters and Holly are boomeranged through a series of emotions and actions that further reverberate into the lives of others with tragic consequences–abortions, wrongful incarceration, cancer, mental illness, physical deformity. I must admit that the plot twists in The Accidentals were so unexpected, and shocking, that I stopped short in my reading and gasped more than once.

Gwin can plot a story like few other writers. She exposes the randomness and elegiac incongruity of Southern life at the twilight of the twentieth century. Like an unrestrained and irrepressible Faulkner spinning through generations of malevolence and wickedness in Absalom, Absalom!, Gwin’s characters cannot escape their past, the poor judgments of their relations, and pure bad luck.

Unlike her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, Gwin writes with a balance and steadiness, spinning a completely believable story, more grounded in day to day life than we may care to acknowledge.

“What I know is that there are always stories behind the stories people tell,” muses June, “They are stacked like crackers in a box behind the ones they do tell.”

Gwin does not attempt to unearth plausible causes, scrapping through circumstances or family attics for reasons to present the reader as to why something happened. Rather, she understands that art, particularly literature, is where one word or one inferring principle is enough. Gwin gives us a story to contemplate, softly imprisoning the reader in her beautiful and subtle language, as we read late into the early morning hours.

Scott Naugle is the co-owner of Pass Christian Books/Cat Island Coffeehouse in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Signed first editions of the paperback original The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin are available at Lemuria and in its online store.

Small towns, big issues get help from touring author in Susan Cushman’s ‘Friends of the Library’

By Guest Author

On August 26, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Tracy Carr. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 25)

When Adele Covington hits the road for a book tour in some small Mississippi communities, it turns out she’s part author, part fairy godmother. The ten short stories in Susan Cushman’s Friends of the Library deal with big issues in small towns with heart and compassion.

Hosted by each site’s Friends of the Library, a non-profit advocacy group aimed at supporting public libraries through fundraising and promotion, Adele adapts her program to the group and, depending on their interests, discusses either her novel, which deals with a sexually abused graffiti artist, or her memoir, which details her experiences with her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.

If the descriptions of Adele’s books sound a bit familiar, there’s a reason for that: Cushman herself embarked on a book tour of Mississippi libraries, hosted by the Friends, where she discussed her novel, Cherry Bomb, which features a sexually abused graffiti artist, and her memoir, Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s. Friends of the Library is loosely based on Cushman’s real-life series of library programs, but with—presumably—a little more magic.

(By the way, there are 135 Friends of the Library groups in Mississippi. If you’re a library supporter and want to make a difference, join your local chapter!)

At each library, Adele meets someone who catches her eye. She strikes up a conversation, suggests a cup of coffee or lunch, and listens as the person unburdens their problems to her. Adele, who would be a busybody if she didn’t get great results, offers advice, connects people, and fixes their lives. Imagine if Touched by an Angel were set in Mississippi libraries.

Adele’s not fixing minor problems, either. The problems these folks have are serious: homelessness, alcoholism, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, eating disorders, and kidnapping, to name a few. Adele’s quick thinking, easygoing manner, and trustworthiness mean she’s able to offer big solutions to the big issues.

In Oxford, she meets Avery, a part-time library employee and full-time aspiring writer. He’s written a fantasy novel about a dystopian society where newborn babies are taken away from their parents and prominent families get to take their pick. The rest of the children grow up in warehouse orphanages, and later stage an uprising to find their birth parents.

Over coffee at Square Books, Adele listens to how closely Avery’s background and novel intersect and encourages him to enroll in a creative writing workshop, where he forms an immediate connection with a creative writing professor 20 years his senior. I won’t spoil things, but this book is all about happy endings.

The same goes for the homeless man in Eupora, the kidnapped girl in West Point, and the abused wife in Aberdeen: they all, with Adele’s help, find solid solutions to their life-threatening problems.

And that’s a good thing. Cushman doesn’t shy away from real-life issues, and while the way those issues are dealt with might be swift, it also gives us a little hope.

Do some of the problems wrap themselves up a little too neatly? Perhaps, but just as we don’t complain that a TV show’s conflict is resolved tidily at the end of each episode, we shouldn’t be bothered that Adele is always in the right place at the right time with the right words.

We could all use a little more sweetness and magic in our lives, and that’s what Friends of the Library delivers.

Tracy Carr is the Library Services Director at the Mississippi Library Commission in Jackson. She also serves as director of the Mississippi Center for the Book, and is a Mississippi Book Festival advisory board member.

Susan Cushman will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, August 27, at 5:00 to sign and discuss her novel, Friends of the Library.

Category: Southern Fiction (Page 1 of 24)

Lee Durkee’s ‘The Last Taxi Driver’ provides wild, dark, hilarious ride

‘Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves’ explores complexities of slave life during peace, war

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

Author Q & A with Lee Durkee

Scholar Phillip Gordon explores all of Faulkner’s walks on the wild side in ‘Gay Faulkner’

Author Q & A with Mark Barr

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles about Larry Brown

‘The Cofield Collection,’ now back in print, is a striking Faulkner portrait

Minrose Gwin delivers soon-to-be classic novel ‘The Accidentals’

Small towns, big issues get help from touring author in Susan Cushman’s ‘Friends of the Library’

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