When John Brandon started his first novel, Arkansas, he was boxing up perfume samples for fashion magazines by day since he had found that teaching high school was not conducive to writing. The page lay empty after a day of kids, books and computers. Factory work, often from early morning to early afternoon, left time for a nap and a long evening of writing. All through the writing of Arkansas, and his latest novel, Citrus County, the Florida Gulf Coast native worked cross-country on perfume samples to plastic bowls to diploma frames to potato chips–just to name a few.

In an interview with his publisher, McSweeney’s, John reflects on the moment he got the word that his writing was to be published:

“I remember being at work, at the windshield warehouse, and getting a call from the managing editor of McSweeney’s and having to step outside to talk. You were asking me about the grand themes of Arkansas, and my boss was yelling at me to talk on the phone on my own time. It was a great moment.”

Even though Shelby and Toby, two of the main characters in Citrus County, are at that tender time of junior high school, they both seem to be set on a path for self-destruction. Mr. Hibma, their geography teacher reads this quality very well in his students probably because he also seems to be resigned to his own fate. In a conversation with Shelby, Mr. Hibma tries to comfort her by telling her that you never know what will screw a person up–it may even be something good that leaves a person in ruins. His ponderous thinking leads him to wonder “if anything that happened was really good”.

Kelly writes on the Lemuria Blog about the inertia of Citrus County:

“. . . they continue to stay, aware that their inertia is conscious; their parents or grandparents moved to Florida from somewhere, some years ago, yet no matter how long they live there they will always consider it to be outside themselves, a place that should be mocked and degraded but that they are loath to leave.  What John Brandon has done in Citrus County is to create a culture around this quiet dissatisfaction, where sometimes something really bad has to happen in order to relieve the everyday, mundane misery. Toby thinks he knows just what that is — it’s the only thing he’s ever been meant to do.”

After reading John Brandon’s debut novel, Arkansas, the late Barry Hannah called to tell him how much he loved his book and offered him the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for 2009-10. Praise for Brandon’s writing includes not only Barry Hannah but also other well-known writers chosen for the First Editions Club.

“Pursues relentlessly what each of us might find daily in a Florida town . . .  The purity of thought and of unadorned line are remarkable.” -Barry Hannah

“John Brandon is my favorite new writer. His debut, Arkansas, was hilarious and at the same time disturbing in its detached violence. It set a high bar, and Citrus County nudges the bar even higher. This is a writer to watch, to reread and to envy.” -Tom Franklin

“Citrus County is a real charmer . . .  The book makes you laugh even as it breaks your heart. It may be, among other things, one of the best books about junior high ever written.” -Dan Chaon

John Brandon’s book tour consisted of visits to Square Books in Oxford and Lemuria (July 13, 2010). Citrus County will be on the front page of The New York Times Book Review this coming Sunday. The novel is already in its second printing at McSweeney’s with the initial print run for Citrus County at 6,000 books. The initial print run for Arkansas was 5,000. We also have signed first editions of Arkansas available.

While continuing his teaching at the University of Mississippi, John Brandon is at work on his third novel set in New Mexico.

It’s not every day that Maggie and John like the same book. They were both sending me their postings on Troy Matthew Carnes’ first novel, Rasputin’s Legacy, at the same time so I decided I would post them together.

Maggie’s take:

I take Rasputin’s Legacy home one night. I do my normal routine…read the synopsis, read the reviews and read the author bio and acknowledgments, turn to page one and get started.  The next thing I know it is two hours later and I am about 100 pages in!  What does this mean?  I think…could I actually like a book that John suggested?  Well I finished it yesterday and let me tell you something…I really liked this book.

Giorgi, unbeknownst to him, is a direct descendant of Rasputin and has the power to see into the future.  He is now being sought out by two very powerful men, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, both of whom want to use his power to help them win the bloodiest battles in WWII.  They both send their most able spies and assassins after the boy either to capture him and claim his power or kill him so he cannot be used against them.  Along the way, Giorgi captures the hearts of a highly decorated German war hero, a witch working for the Nazis and a Ukrainian woman who will not rest until she knows that Giorgi is in safe hands.  The question is though, with whom is he safe or does Giorgi know all along?

Well not only did I really like this book, but I was able to go to John and talk to him about a book that he suggested I read and I actually liked it.  I’m not even sure that Giorgi would have been able to predict this one!!

John’s take:

. . . Within this historical perspective Troy Carnes wrote his very fine first thriller. With compassion in the mist of horror, with virtue amongst the dishonorable, this well crafted stage of intrigue is cast underneath the development of the German invasion of Russia.

Carnes’ Rasputin is well paced and a pleasure to read. His first novel skills express character depth, plot complexity without confusing traps, with the steady pace of a well experienced author.

Over the years I’ve burned out on reading this enjoyable type of novel. However, I’m very pleased to read this new author and enjoyed the tale he spun–it’s a good one.

If you are a fan of Greg Iles’ first two novels and are looking for a historical thriller, you’ve found it. Be one of the first to get on Carnes’ bandwagon. Once on board, I believe you will enjoy the ride.

A copy of Men and Dogs has been buried in a stack by my bed for a couple of months now while I read the long and wonderful The Invisible Bridge. So, last weekend, I opened Men and Dogs and was immediately pulled in. This is a good summer read. I would not say it is a “light” summer read, but I would say it kept my attention and that I enjoyed reading it.  The character development ranks high, the plot shows natural unforced movement, and the setting of Charleston, South Carolina, is depicted accurately. (I was there a few summers ago and loved the way the author Katie Crouch used the factual street names and places, such as names of churches.)

The main character, Hannah, suffers  from the inability to move on from her father’s disappearance in the Charleston sound, most likely due to drowning, when she was a pre-teen. His dog was with him and the dog was found, but not the body of her father.  Now a young married adult, Hannah is obsessed with the fact that she thinks her father is still alive. This obsession leads to marital disharmony in her San Francisco home and depression which shows itself in various ways. Hannah’s husband decides a month’s “vacation” at her childhood home, complete with her crazy stepfather, and truly Southern tennis playing mother, is just what Hannah needs to recover.  Hannah reconnects with her teenage boyfriend, now an Episcopal priest, and that move, of course, causes sparks. All of the Southern mores and customs are examined and put on the page in this new novel.

Katie Crouch already cultivated a following around here for her first novel Girls in Trucks in 2008. I liked that title as much as I like the title: Men and Dogs. This new novel worked for me, and I thank Pat for recommending it!  -Nan

Moving Forward With My Head Turned Back: Why I’m So Pumped to Read at Lemuria

Here’s the deal.

I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but spent most of my life nearly positive that the two kindest people in the world lived in Jackson, Mississippi.  Well, they lived in Jackson first and then Brandon, although they never moved.  It seemed instead that Lakeland Drive simply turned from some dusty stretch of potholes into a thick and black electrical cord, plugging downtown Jackson into the folks out near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, many of whom, once juiced, said, “Wait a second, we moved out here for a reason!”  I think they (the royal “they” and not my grandparents in particular) even kicked up enough dust to have the address officially changed in order to clear up any confusion that they might live in a place that had crime, litter, and interstates.  I’m no Jacksonian scholar, though, so this could be wrong.  All I know is that my clumsily printed birthday cards to “Maw Maw Rebie” and “Paw Paw Milton” started coming back returned if I wrote Jackson, MS, and not Brandon.  And so it strikes me now that the Mississippi P.O. may have been my first editor.

Anyway, a few things about these saints:  my grandfather, Milton Walsh, was a retired oil and gas man and my grandmother, Rebie Walsh, was an artist.  Both were insane golfers.  My grandfather, I believe, could have gone pro if he had any interest in competing.  He seemed more interested in telling knock-knock jokes in the rough areas around the green, though, and talking sincerely with strangers in the clubhouse.  Still, he was the only man I ever knew who could shoot his age on the golf course. This is no small deal. My grandmother was skilled, too, but also disinterested in the competition.  She’s instead spent the second half of her life throwing herself whole hog into any artist endeavor she could find; oil painting, drawing, paper-making and, once she got past seventy, memoir writing.   To be honest, she was pretty damn good at most of this stuff; and a few of her works now hang out in storage areas of Mississippi museums, some future call to relevance not impossible.

But whenever I would visit them as a child during hot summers they’d lay aside every personal pursuit to entertain me.  For years it was the zoo.  Then the water park by the Reservoir. That old toy store right off I-55. As I grew up, though, all three of us felt the shine of these places wear off and we searched for new avenues of connection.  I began duffing around the links with my grandfather. We ate at every new restaurant they could find (nearly always Mexican, though I had no idea why).  Then, my grandmother noticed how much I was reading; often slinking off to my bedroom to flip through comic books as a kid, Stephen King novels as a teenager, and then starting to scribble some of my own ideas down as a young man, and she told about this place called “Lemuria”.  I was immediately interested. For those in the know; this word glowed to me like Araby.

So, we went, and the next ten years of my life were some of the best. Every visit to Jackson was punctuated by a trip to Lemuria and lunch at the sandwich shop below.  I’d gone through college and a graduate degree in literature at this point and eventually moved to Oxford, MS, for an MFA at Ole Miss.  Every few months I’d stop in Jackson on my drive back down to Baton Rouge to go to Lemuria with my grandparents. And as my personal reading tastes were now coming into their own, my appreciation for this amazing bookstore multiplied.  I got past the stacks and asked permission into the locked room of collectibles with my grandmother in tow.  I carefully handled books that cost more than I would make that entire semester on my graduate stipend.  Still, with her help, I began my modest collection, buying things like first edition Barry Hannah’s and a first edition of Rock Springs, by Richard Ford.  I knew at those moments, more than ever before, what I wanted to do with my life.

And, during this time, I also got lucky.  I had a few stories published in anthologies like Blue Moon Café and French Quarter Fiction that allowed me, as a doofus in his late twenties, to read and sign books at Lemuria. I was, of course, humbled and felt a fraud. Still, my grandparents attended these casual events in nice clothes and I remember Rebie taking about thirty pictures of me as I just sat at a table with some other writers, signing stock.  I was not embarrassed by this, though it was embarrassing. I loved them and understood that they loved me.  But when her pictures came back, all blurry, every one of them, almost unrecognizable, I knew that I wouldn’t have much longer to spend with them.  And I was right.

Gone five years from us now (Rebie passing of a broken heart a year after losing Milton), I was already at work on the stories that now appear in my book The Prospect of Magic when they died. One of the stories in the collection, The Freddies, I began writing in that very same bedroom in Brandon, Mississsippi, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.  In the months that followed that event, while editing the story, I found myself trying to talk my grandmother into reasons to keep going.  Her health was failing, her house was empty, and I knew I was waging a losing battle. Still, I’d say things to her like, “You can’t go anywhere.  I want you to be there for my wedding, for when I have a kid, for when I get a book out and read at Lemuria.”

And it likely seems improbable to most that a bookstore event would be listed alongside things like birth and marriage; but it wasn’t for us.  We’d discovered something cool about one another (as people and not just kin) among the stacks at Lemuria and we both knew it.  And even as I type this I can remember the smell of their station wagon as we drove the long stretch up Lakeland Drive, from Castlewoods to Banner Hall, to the bookstore, and I remember the rosary lying in the small change cup by the automatic stick shift.

All this to say that I was lucky to have them then like I am lucky to have them now.  And, although neither Milton or Rebie will be in attendance when I do get the chance to read and sign from my own book at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 9th, I’ll imagine her snapping photos of me the whole time, him fumbling with a golf tee in his pocket, both happy to be back in Jackson and smiling, like I am.

M. O. Walsh’s website

Lemuria is excited to welcome visiting writer Glenn Taylor! Today he will be in the store at 5:00 p.m. signing copies of his new book The Marrowbone Marble Company.

The novel is set in Taylor’s home state of West Virginia and focuses on the life of the lead character, Loyal Ledford. The storyline traces the progress of Mr. Ledford through three decades of change in American history, from World War II to the civil rights movement. Upon his return from military service in WW II, Ledford affiliates with the upstart Marrowbone Marble Company, and from there the novel catapults the reader into the world of civil rights and a war on poverty in rural West Virginia during the late 1940s and 1950s. I am really looking forward to hearing Mr. Taylor read from the book tonight.

I am always interested in authors who chose to write about their home states. Legends and stories from hometowns that are passed down through generations of town gossip always evolve beautifully into stories, and from the looks of Taylor’s debut novel The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), he has a way of turning folklore into fiction. Taggart is the story of Trenchmouth Taggart, also set  in the author’s native state of West Virginia. The novel tells the story of a mysterious backwoods fellow with a troubled past. Although Taggart is also a work of fiction, Taylor acknowledges his local inspiration in the author’s note at the beginning of the book, writing, “This novel is a work of fiction. The places are real, and some of the events and individuals depicted herein were in fact real, as can be further studied in any of the excellent historical sources listed in the acknowledgments.”

Mr. Taylor dropped in a moment ago to get acquainted with the store before his signing tonight. We have already set his books up in our big signing booth, and Mr. Taylor browsed through the main store and fiction section checking out our books and cool t-shirts. We are excited to see his handsome smile return this evening!

Nell

I come from a wintry, flinty, and hilly place called the Ozarks, where limestone runs in deep, moon-gray seams and ridges. Moving to Mississippi in 1998 was thrilling—pine trees, bamboo, gardenias, anoles, flying cockroaches, soil that shifted, skies roiling with Gulf moisture. You could throw a thought on the ground, and it would grow, in November!

For a would-be writer, though, Mississippi was both warmly welcoming and culturally intimidating. I came from a writing program at the University of Arkansas, but something left over of hill country reticence made Mississippi a challenge. Everyone in Mississippi made a living as a writer it seemed! And no one hesitated for a second to make introductions such as “Hi, I’m Jane, and I write the culinary murder mystery series.” “This is Rocky, and he writes about southern cryptozoology.” “Name’s Chuck. Got this novel about a preaching, healing banana from Bovina. Cohen Bros. are after it for a movie.”

Where I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, you would never introduce yourself as a writer to anyone unless you had the product there in hand to sell that instant. Announcing you were a writer out of context, or without the reputation of Janet Dailey, the only writer we all knew, marked you as wicked and weird, and certainly unemployable. “Hi, I’m Steve. I catch and roast bluebirds for a living. Like yours with mustard?”

You see, though we are risen from hillbillies, we are also the nation’s master homogenizers and native country to the world’s best sales force. Don’t believe me? Where did Sam Walton, of the Arkansas Ozarks, launch his first Sam’s Club and engender his Wal-Mart empire? Springfield, Missouri. Where does Bass Pro Shops come from? Well it started in a liquor store in, you guessed it, Springfield, Missouri. Where does the smoothest sales barker of all time originate from? Bob Barker of The Price is Right hails from Springfield, Missouri, even graduated from my wife’s alma mater, now Drury University.

Writing is not an homogenizing act. It defies and betrays empires. It prefers love to lucre. So, unless you have the product to prove it, keep smiling, keep listening, and keep that Ace close to the vest. At least that was the wise thing to do where I came from.

How was I to fit in Mississippi, home or native ground to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Gilchrist, Barry Hannah, James Whitehead, Larry Brown, Steve Yarbrough, Brad Watson, Donna Tartt and more? Possibly only Ireland revered and honored its writers with the intensity and warmth I saw in Mississippi. It was a reverence both heartwarming and stifling.

One of the first books I had the privilege to promote at University Press of Mississippi was Willie Morris’s North Toward Home. And, in the slough of despond as a writer with an unpublished novel manuscript awash in a sea of comfortable writers, I was sinking as I read Willie’s majestic autobiography. In Mississippi, even the nonfiction sang like a sword was in the attic! All was hopeless, nothing unusual, nothing with spark came from Springfield, Missouri.

And then I read that great, kind-hearted, ever-welcoming man’s invitation to live, breathe, and write in this amazing place. Right there in North Toward Home, the opening of chapter five in the Mississippi section, Willie writes: “A few weeks later, as a kind of consolation prize against death, I got the most unusual dog I ever owned, shipped from a kennel all the way from Springfield, Missouri.”

I read it out loud ten times. Skip came from Springfield, my native place, my hometown!

It was like Willie put his arm around Bob Barker’s shoulder, mussed the slick salesman’s silver hair, and they both shouted, “Come on down!” I still might not tell anyone I’m a writer unless I have a book in hand, which thanks to the intercession of St. John Evangelist and Moon City Press back in my Ozarks, I do! But listen, thanks to Willie, thanks to Skip, and a lot of other kind, welcoming hearts, I’m going to be all right here in Mississippi.

* * *

Portions of Steve Yates’s novel Morkan’s Quarry appeared in Missouri Review, Ontario Review, and South Carolina Review. A novella-length excerpt was a finalist in the Faulkner Society’s Faulkner/Wisdom Novella Prize. His short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, Turnstile, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, and many other places. He is twice the recipient of individual artist’s fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He is assistant director / marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson when he is not leading a secret life … as a writer.

Not only did we celebrate Cinco de Mayo at Lemuria yesterday, we were also honored to have Holly LeCraw come and read to us from her debut novel, The Swimming Pool. Despite having just driven straight from Atlanta with hardly a minute to catch breath before we put her to work signing books, Holly was a captivating reader and a truly pleasant person. A murder mystery/love story set in Cape Cod, The Swimming Pool is the perfect summer read (Amy Tan describes it as “riveting and psychologically complex as Hithcockian film noir” – !), so for those of you looking for something to get lost in this summer, come on over…we’ve got signed copies!

Read some of the general public’s reviews of The Swimming Pool here.

Susie

I walk past her house all the time; her books take up an entire bookcase in the fiction room; a writer coming to Lemuria is inspired by her . . . I feel like things are finally coming together for Eudora and me.

The article Karl Marlantes wrote about what writing and readings means to him has had quite a presence on our blog and website. Well, I don’t mean to bring up Karl again, but it tickles my curiosity that Eudora Welty made an impression on him. I read Delta Wedding for a course in Southern Literature. As I recall, I did not have any strong reaction to the novel. But now I want to read Eudora Welty again not only to quell my curiosity but to also revisit her since I happened to move to her hometown three years ago. I also get to visit her house next week.

I started reading some of her short stories last night and I loved them! I think next I am going to read The Optimist’s Daughter. Surely this will round out my personal Eudora Welty appreciation month and in the end I can say something more thoughtful about her writing and her life.

The photo of Eudora Welty with Richard Ford was taken at Lemuria Books in 1985 .