Authors Review Books – Page 2

Tag: Authors Review Books (Page 2 of 2)

Story of Cat Island resonates in prose, photographs

On May 24, 2018

By Don Jackson. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 20)

Southern storytelling is a beautiful art form. Through the ages it has been the glue that has bound us across generations. Although facts are always subject to questioning, the truth is always there. It becomes a shared truth that gives us strength and meaning within a framework of profound identity, and as a people with a common heritage.

Such is the wonder and the power of Discovering Cat Island by John Cuevas. It gives us the story of a unique and fascinating place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and of the people who have been part of its history. It brings us light and shadows, and allows the reader to fill in the colors, both in prose and in photography.

This is not a scholarly work created for academics, although it is rich in information and required extensive research. Rather, it is a story that will hold the reader transfixed, with wonderfully-written, almost poetic, prose. A word of warning here… Do not sit down with this book unless you are prepared to sit where you are for at least a couple of hours. You will not be able to put it down. You very likely will read the entire text in one sitting. I certainly did.

Typically I consider books like Discovering Cat Island as coffee-table books that allow one to leisurely pick up the volume and thumb through the photographs… easy to pick up… easy to put down. They provide opportunity for light, transient entertainment. They’re on the table as fillers, just there as something to do, while other things are going on. Interruptions don’t matter. Accordingly, I’m more inclined to spend time with the photographs in such books than I am with their text. Rarely will I even bother with the text.

But with Discovering Cat Island, it was just the opposite. The photography was excellent. But it was the text that kept me spellbound. I’m not sure why, but I broke my rule and started reading the text when I first got a copy of this book.

Once I did that I could not take time to look at the photographs as I desperately turned the pages to get beyond the photographs and to where the story continued.

Only afterward did I go back to look at the gorgeous black and white photography of Jason Taylor. And when I did this, those photographs provided rich seasoning for the story I’d just read. The echoes of the story reverberated deeply within me as I went page by page, slowly catching the spirit of each one of Taylor’s masterpieces.

I strongly suggest that this be the sequence for future readers of this book. Start with the story. But, don’t just read the story. Listen to it! After you’ve heard the story then, as it resonates within you, go back through the book and let the photographs etch this powerful story deeply into your heart.

It is, after all, your story too. Soon thereafter you will realize that this story must be shared with those near and dear to you… with a daughter, son, grandchild, or good friend… together in a porch swing, or out under a live oak, or in front of a fireplace, or wherever your special place may be.

Cat Island is and has for been for generations such a special place for so many people. So, why not just go there with that special someone and share the story there, together. Become part of that story, right there where it all happened and is happening. Pass it along through the tumbling generations for whom, in their hearts, the Deep South and its Gulf Coast is home. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you live here. Cat Island is part of your story. Come discover it.

Donald C. Jackson is the Sharp Distinguished Professor, Emeritus at Mississippi State University. He is Past President of the American Fisheries Society, Past President of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation, and has worked extensively with fisheries resources along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He is the author of three collections of outdoor essays: Tracks, Wilder Ways and Deeper Currents.

Signed copies of Discovering Cat Island are available at Lemuria’s online store.

‘Bluff’ is a sleight-of-hand narrative achievement

By Guest Author

On April 23, 2018

In Mystery

By William Boyle. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

Forgive me, but I’m obligated to begin this way: Bluff (The Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic) by Michael Kardos has some killer tricks up its sleeve.

bluff Set in Kardos’s native New Jersey, the novel starts with close-up magician Natalie Webb, on the verge of being washed up at 27, almost blinding a smarmy lawyer at a corporate holiday show by throwing a playing card at his eye. It’s a compelling and darkly funny opening, one that sets the tone for the rest of what’s to come: a book that expertly walks the line between breeziness and brutality.

As Natalie treads water, she tries to make some extra cash by following up on an offer to write a magazine article about poker cheats. From there, Natalie is set up with a grizzled card hustler named Ace who takes her to a private game held in a bakery. To reveal more than this would be to ruin one of the book’s many surprises.

Suffice to say, the book lulls you into believing you know where the narrative is heading and then it jolts you in a new direction. When Natalie winds up as a central piece of a big game with over a million dollars on the line, Kardos’s choices become particularly innovative and intriguing.

Little by little, Natalie’s backstory is revealed, as well: her complicated family history, her apprenticeship with the magician Jack Clarion, her fall from grace at the World of Magic competition. This is never overwhelming or distracting, and Kardos keeps us firmly grounded in the present while letting us know what we need to know about Natalie to understand her motivations, her craftiness, her cynicism.

Natalie is an endearing protagonist. I can’t remember rooting as hard for someone in anything I’ve read lately. She reminds me of Elmore Leonard’s great heroines, especially Jackie Burke and Karen Sisco. Natalie is hardened by experience, funny, capable of great sympathy, and she’s our moral guide here. The product of deceit at the hands of powerful men, we’re cheering for her world to be set right.

The book is populated with memorable, almost Dickensian characters: there’s Ace, the card cheat Natalie hooks up with for the potential profile; Emily, whose slick play in the bakery game impresses Natalie so much she become fixated on her; Cool Calvin, a neighbor boy who first tries to shake her down and later becomes her apprentice (of sorts); Harley, her kind-hearted upstairs neighbor, who takes in stray dogs; Brock McKnight, the lawyer who offers to help with her case because he desperately wants to understand her Four Queens trick; and Victor Flowers, a New Jersey power player who threads his way from her haunted past all the way to her uncertain present.

The work is also wildly cinematic. I kept thinking this would be a tailor-made adaptation for a director like Steven Soderbergh. It’s got the same sort of lightness on its feet as some of Soderbergh’s crime caper pictures. It also has the raw energy of Robert Altman’s classic California Split and the aesthetic values of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s recent Mississippi Grind.

Bluff, as I’ve said, is full of surprises. None of which I aim to spoil here. It’s at turns tender and tough, a book that’s comfortable roaming into Thin Man territory as it is exploring the violent consequences of getting involved with the wrong people.

Like any great magician, Kardos, who teaches creative writing at Mississippi State, encourages his audience to get totally wrapped up in the world of his act. And this act, ladies and gentlemen, is a pure delight.

William Boye of Oxford is originally from Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the crime novels Gravesend and, this summer, The Lonely Witness.

Michael Kardos will be at Lemuria tomorrow, Tuesday, April 24, at 5:00 to sign and read from Bluff.

Tiffany Quay Tyson’s ‘The Past is Never’ delivers mesmerizing Southern Gothic

By Guest Author

On March 20, 2018

In Southern Fiction

By Susan O’Bryan. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 18)

Is the past ever dead? Can it be put behind you, and if so, how far back in the past can you leave something? Can the present—and future—be affected by a past you didn’t even realize existed?

Those are the questions readers will be asking themselves after the final page is turned in The Past is Never, the latest novel by Tiffany Quay Tyson. The author first left her mark in Southern fiction with Three Rivers, a finalist in the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. With The Past is Never, Tyson uses her native Southern voice to tell a story of family dysfunctions, historic myths, and courage to look behind the past.

Sixteen-year-old Willett and his two younger sisters, Roberta Lynn “Bert” and Pansy, live in fictional White Horse, Mississippi. It’s 1976, and there’s not much for entertainment in the small town. Fun is something they make for themselves. They can’t help but be drawn to an old rock quarry and its cool swimming hole waters.

When their dad is home, which isn’t often, he warns them to stay away from the cursed Devil’s place. He tells them frightening stories about how the quarry was built, the lives it has claimed, and haunted woods that protects it.

Dad’s away, Mama is busy, and it’s hot outside. There’s no keeping the siblings from the quarry. The three walk there together. Only two leave.

The disappearance of six-year-old Pansy changes life as they knew it for the entire family. Pansy, the unexpected “miracle child” born with four teeth, coarse black hair, a blotchy tan and a large purple birthmark on her thigh. Pansy, the feisty, the spoiled, the charmed … the gone.

So begins the unsettling future of Willett and Bert, neither who can let go of what happened that day. There’s more than enough self-blame, accusations, and heartbreak to go around as their dad stays away and their mom dies of a broken heart and a cigarette habit.

In turn, Willett and Bert leave home, not only to find themselves but also search for clues about their family’s past. Reports of their dad’s lonely death in Florida takes the brother and sister to the Everglades where they learn the past becomes the present, which leads to the future. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” To say more might spoil the thrill for readers.

Those three elements–past, present and future–are at the heart of The Past is Never. Readers will learn about Fern, Granny Clem, Earl and a host of others. About the creatures beyond the trees who long to give voice to the past. Tyson ties them together through alternating voices as she explores family lines, tragedies and curses.

“Those eyes you feel watching you are the eyes of your family,” Bert tells her niece seven years after Pansy disappears. “They mean you no harm.”

The author’s skillful storytelling reaches a high mark with this novel. Nothing is as it first appears in this dark, complex story that draws upon inner strength, extended family ties and personal determination. As with her first novel, Tyson has an award winner on her hands.

Susan O’Bryan is a former Clarion Ledger and Clinton News editor and writer with more than 30 years of journalistic experience. She now is the web content coordinator at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Tiffany Quay Tyson will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 21, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Past is Never.

‘The Fighter’ is a fascinating new novel from Michael Farris Smith

By Guest Author

On March 14, 2018

In Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

“Do anything but bore me,” the late novelist Harry Crews once said in an interview.

“Tie me up and beat me with a motorcycle chain if you must, but don’t bore me.”

Mississippi writer Michael Farris Smith apparently shares that sentiment. Crews’ statement could be the mantra of The Fighter.

The Fighter opens with a harrowing scene of high-speed DUI and pretty much never lets up from there. It’s the tale of a washed-up, alcohol- and pill-addicted cage fighter prepping for what will be his very last fight—either for good or ill. The stakes are life-or-death—no quarter asked or given. It is a brutal subculture of the South we know, but a fascinating one.

Jack, the titular fighter, should have turned out better. Though orphaned as a toddler, he was raised lovingly in Clarksdale by a devoted foster mother, Maryann (one of the most endearing characters in recent Southern fiction). And yet, as though driven by some kind of genetic predisposition, the teenaged Jack learns and loves the art of bare-knuckle boxing. Soon he is crisscrossing the Southeast for one underworld matchup after another. He climbs to the top of the heap.

But Jack’s champion status comes at a steep cost. He numbs the years of blows and undiagnosed concussions with painkillers and booze. The combined effect is a general amnesia that renders him vulnerable to the cunning. Add in his history of fixing or ‘throwing’ fights for gambling profit, and Jack becomes a walking disaster, a veritable tornado over himself. It is difficult to tell which came first—his pill or gambling addiction. Regardless, each feeds the other.

Enter Big Momma Sweet. In the world of The Fighter, predators are as common as the buzzards that dot the Delta sky, and Big Momma is the queen of them all. From her camp outside Clarksdale, she presides over an empire of fighting, gambling, drugs, and prostitution. Jack is her biggest debtor. His only prospect for settling up with her is one last prize fight—one he is woefully unprepared to fight, perhaps not even to survive.

And then there is a carnival that alights on Clarksdale: a touring regional fair full of convicts, gypsies, and a tattooed lady who just might prove to be Jack’s redemption.
If this synopsis sounds chaotic, frenetic, and over-the-top, then it is accurate. By conventional thinking, there is too much going on in The Fighter’s 256 pages for the short novel to bear. It should not work.

But it does. Smith’s narrative manages to stay just ahead of disintegration, and does so with style, lush prose, and storytelling assurance. Though its protagonist is a disaster, The Fighter is a triumph. It confirms Smith’s status as one of our foremost authors in the Rough South, Grit Lit tradition established by Crews, Larry Brown, Tom Franklin, William Gay, and the towering Cormac McCarthy.

The Fighter is Smith’s third novel in just five years, following 2017’s Desperation Road and 2013’s Rivers. That body of work has established Smith’s aesthetic: a naturalistic South of people living tough lives on the margins, where grace comes hard but the sad stories play out beautifully. All of Smith’s people are on one road or another toward an uncertain future. It will be a harrowing thrill to follow him farther down that road, with his characters just a single step—make that a half-step—ahead of destruction.

Novelist Matthew Guinn is the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe. He is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Forgiveness drives novel ‘Perennials’ about roots, offspring

By Guest Author

On February 27, 2018

In Southern Fiction

By Susan O’Bryan. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 7)

Families are so much like gardens. The bloom, go dormant, and then either bloom again or perish. Whether they thrive depends on conditions beyond their control, but most importantly, they require attention when stressed.

So plays out the message in Julie Cantrell’s latest novel, Perennials (Thomas Nelson), an intimate and intriguing look at families, relationships, and the role each member plays. The New York Times and USA Today award-winning author is known for her inspirational novels that offer hope in the face of emotional issues. Her smooth, lyrical writing style fits well with the laid-back atmosphere of Southern living.

Beautiful gardens in and around Oxford provide the background for Cantrell’s latest tale of growth and forgiveness. In gardening terms, perennials bloom, die back, and then return with new growth from the original root. Cantrell’s characters are perennials, too, as they try to get back to their roots in a once tight, loving family.

Eva Sutherland, nicknamed Lovey, and Bitsy once were adoring sisters who ran and played, capturing fireflies with the neighbor boys. They were the children of a small-town ex-football player who became a small-town lawyer and a debutante mother who grew stunning flower gardens. Lovey’s life was charmed until her mom’s gardening shed burns, injuries a young friend, and Bitsy puts all the blame on her little sister.

Bitsy becomes a cheerleader. The homecoming queen. The perfect Southern belle who can do no wrong. All the while, Lovey gets kicked down and laughed at, always bearing the brunt when Bitsy and her snotty friends throw blame her way.

Tired of living as her sister’s scapegoat, Lovey starts a new life in Arizona, blossoming as a successful advertising executive and a weekend yoga instructor. She hasn’t been home in years and has no plans to return except for her parents’ 50th anniversary. Lovey’s plans change when she gets a plea from her dad, known as Chief, to come home early and help build a surprise memory garden for her mom.

Years of hurt feelings and cold shoulders from sister Bitsy aren’t easily forgotten, though. Simple visits turn into snaps and low blows that even their parents can’t seem to stop. Why is Bitsy so angry when everyone else seems glad to have Lovey home, especially her one-time fiancé Fisher?

Chief’s motto is “family first,” and he’s determined to mend the holes in his family’s lives. When a tragedy hits, family is all that’s left–for better or worse.

Cantrell’s garden settings, surrounded by literary history at its best, emphasize the strength of God’s creations, the power of discovering roots, and what living perennially in spite of disappointments really means.

Susan O’Bryan is a former Clarion-Ledger and Clinton News editor and writer with more than 30 years of journalistic experience. She now is the web content coordinator at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Julie Cantrell will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, February 28, at 5:00 to sign and read from Perennials.

Steve Yarbrough’s ‘The Unmade World’ masters the literary thriller

By Guest Author

On January 23, 2018

In Fiction

By Tom Williams. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 21)

Just about midway through The Unmade World (Unbridled Books), Steve Yarbrough’s seventh novel, the central character, Richard Brennan, reflects upon his writing process as a reporter.

“Something always happened to him when he knew he’d found his story. A moment came when it seemed as if it would write itself as long as he kept putting one foot in front of the other and didn’t complain about lack of sleep, difficulties that threw themselves before him, people who either lied or paid out the truth like fishing line.”

I don’t doubt Yarbrough’s own writing process parallel’s Richard’s. In the now 10 books he’s published, dealing with such thorny subjects as race relations, redemption, and infidelity, rendering settings from the South, the Northeast, the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries, Yabrough makes it look easy to compose lucid prose that gets out of the way of characters as real as your reflection and involved in complex, suspenseful plots. Faithful Yarbrough readers won’t be suprised to see that he has once again “found his story” in The Unmade World.

Concerned principally with Richard and Bogdan Baranowski–two characters yoked together by a set of fateful events on a wintry Polish night–The Unmade World unfolds in three sections, alternating between Poland and Fresno, California, from 2006 to 2016.

And while the political, cultural, economic upheavals of this period are never far from the character’s lives, what’s equally significant are the personal crises faced by Richard and Bogdan. Richard is “trying hard but mostly failing to overcome his loss,” while Bogdan believes he is “missing some essential element. What is was, he didn’t know.”

Yarbrough surrounds these characters with other vividly rendered, wounded souls: Richard’s brother-in-law, Stefan, a novelist who races to finish a novel before cancer finishes him; Marek, a colleague of Bogdan’s, physically scarred by their doomed escapades; Maria, a fellow journalist, driven by the unresolved murder of her own father to uncover and remedy current injustices.

Electing to tell the story in third person omniscient, Yarbrough provides the readers the motives and mindset of this diverse cast of characters (we glimpse the thoughts of at least a dozen: male, female, middle-aged, teenaged, Pole, American), yet his expertly wrought dialogue keeps Richard and Bogdan true to themselves as men who stoically attempt to deal with what life has thrown at them.

In one of the novel’s many stunning moments–and there are many–Bogdan refuses to share with the police the complicity of Marek and others in a scheme to get older tenants to vacate an apartment building. When asked his motive, he replies, “I’m a shell of a person, and I’m drawn to old buildings that remind me of myself.”

One certainty throughout is Yarbrough’s absolute mastery. Too often, a thriller skips by breezily, and a more literary novel gets bogged down by intellectual concerns. In The Unmade World, Yarbrough neatly negotiates between Richard and Bogdan’s narratives, building suspense so effortlessly, you’re often tempted to skip a chapter, only to get wrapped up in the tantalizing clues.

And through the third section of the book at first moved at too swift a pace for me, the finale is tautly rendered it left me breathless. And hopeful–a destination you might not imagine upon finishing the relentless first section.

After reading Yarbrough’s first novel, The Oxygen Man, nearly 20 years ago, I became a convert, and with every book I kept expecting this would be theone that elevated his fiction to a much-deserved place in the highest ranks.

What’s obvious, though, is that Yarbrough is at the top of his game. The Unmade World is a marvel. It’s the kind of book that would equally impress readers of John Grisham and of Jesmyn Ward. Throughtful, entertaining, rich with detail, each page entrances.

Tom Williams lives in Kentucky. His publications include the novel Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and the entrance on Steve Yarbrough in The Mississippi Encyclopedia.

Steve Yarbrough will be at Lemuria Books on Monday, January 29, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Unmade World.

‘Rocky Boyer’s War’ is among great eye-level accounts about WWII

By Guest Author

On July 26, 2017

In History, War

By Howard Bahr. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 23).

Among the finer memoirs of World War II are those by enlisted soldiers, sailors and Marines at the sharp end of combat. They dispel the romantic aura that too often surrounds our collective memory of that conflict. They offer no “greatest generation” nonsense: only loss, violence, and the anguish of young souls tried almost beyond endurance. rocky boyers war These qualities lie at the heart of an outstanding new work, Rocky Boyer’s War: An Unvarnished History of the Air Blitz that Won the War in the Southwest Pacific(Naval Institute Press, 2017), by Allen Boyer. Roscoe Boyer, Allen Boyer’s father, was not an enlisted man, and the book is but partially a memoir. Nevertheless, this work will find its place among the great eye-level accounts of World War II.

In his long and productive life (1919-2008), Roscoe Boyer would become an inventor, an early student of computers, a senior professor in the University of Mississippi School of Education, and an advocate for public schools in Mississippi. Of course, this was all in the future when he was caught in the draft after Pearl Harbor.

Rocky Boyer was commissioned a lieutenant in the Fifth Air Force and served in the Southwest Pacific from November 1943 to November 1945–not so long in civilian life, but an eternity at the sharp end. While in the service, he kept a diary, which was, and continues to be, against regulations. Lucky for us, Boyer was not much troubled by regulations–one of his many virtues–nor did he allow them to interfere with his duty. In addition, his junior rank recommends him. The recollections of those above the rank of captain should be eyed with suspicion.

Those who have served will recognize the hardship, the annoyances, the petty squabbles and unearned privileges of colonels and generals, tension between officers and enlisted men, homesickness, sweethearts sorely missed, and the loss of friends in combat. Those who have not served will be usefully entertained. All readers will shake their heads at the folly and come to understand why, later in life, Boyer’s favorite novel was Catch-22.

While Rocky Boyer’s War has universal appeal, the book is important for its historical specificity. In a unique synthesis of personal remembrance and history, Allen Boyer locates excerpts from his father’s diary within the broader context of the campaigns in the Southwest Pacific. The result is a concise, yet comprehensive, narrative of operations crucial to victory over Japan, but largely forgotten today.

Howard Bahr of Jackson is a veteran of the Navy’s amphibious war in Vietnam.

Allen Boyer signs Rocky Boyer’s War on Thursday, July 25 at Lemuria at 5:00 p.m.

Matthew Guinn reviews ‘Signals’ by Tim Gautreaux

By Guest Author

On January 24, 2017

In Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger.

signals Tim Gautreaux’s career has been long and prolific, spanning three novels and two collections of short stories that have established him as one of the South’s finest writers. In his latest, Signals: New and Selected Stories, he marshals 21 new and selected stories into a sprawling collection that proves him to be a master of the form.

Signals is an apt title: In it, Gautreaux ranges far beyond his home turf of Louisiana’s bayous and backwoods and across the American landscape. The people of his fiction, however, remain familiar—the type of folk that one tends to see but not hear, from lonely spinsters to exterminators to house framers. Yet their sagas of wistfulness and small-time heartbreak bristle with the veracity of real life. Even when their stories are mean and brutal (“Sorry Blood” and “Gone to Water”), Gautreaux’s characters are fully fleshed enough to allow us to understand them even as we dislike them, recalling novelist Harry Crews’s maxim that “nobody is a villain in his own heart.” More often, however, the people of Signals are workaday folk trying to do their best in a world where the dogs usually bite, the beer is seldom cold enough, and the picnics tend to get rained out.

Witness the reluctant Samaritan narrator of “Deputy Sid’s Gift.” At confession for the first time in years to unburden himself of his treatment of a homeless man, he tells us that “everybody’s got something they got to talk about sometime in their life.”

And talk he does, spinning a tale of strained charity in which the spirit of compassion alternately flickers and dies. He recalls watching the homeless man “staring up into the black cloud bank, waiting for lightning. That’s how people like him live, I guess, waiting to get knocked down and wondering why it happens to them.” The passage rings out like the thematic center of Signals—stories of people watching and waiting, getting knocked down and wondering.

In “Idols”—arguably the book’s standout story—Gautreaux literally and figuratively dismantles the neoconfederate myth of vanquished glory and nobility. In it, Julian, the washed-up descendant of a Mississippi cotton baron, inherits the family’s dilapidated antebellum mansion. Returning to refurbish a legacy that never was truly his, Julian employs an African-American carpenter named Obadiah, pays him near-starvation wages, and reestablishes the old exploitative order.

By the story’s end, however, Julian’s dreams are indeed gone with the wind, but not in any way the reader will foresee. He is taught a searing lesson by a “long-suffering and moralizing carpenter” who resembles another carpenter of old. “Idols” is a finely wrought parable that deserves a place alongside the short fiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

Tim Gautreaux

Yet for all the tragedy and misfortune in the stories, there is a vein of rich humor running throughout Signals. Perhaps no other contemporary writer save Chris Offutt bears the mantle of Mark Twain as deftly. The wry, dry, ironic tone that Twain introduced to American letters is alive in Gautreaux’s fiction. His characters muddle their way through life with an air of good-natured befuddlement, from “The Bug Man” who maintains that “(h)e was a religious man, so everything had a purpose, even though he had no idea what” to the city waterworks supervisor who has “a great desire to be famous, if only in a small way” (“Radio Magic”).

Often the violence in the stories carries a bawdy frontier justice reminiscent of Old Southwestern humor, such as when the bug man hoses down an entire abusive family with bug spray or when an old man hits a young lout from behind with “a roundhouse, open-palm swat on the ear that knocked him out of the chair and sent the beer bottle pinwheeling suds across the floor.”

Yet the strongest impression that Gautreaux’s latest leaves on the reader is a love of language, a reverence for good prose, for the craft of the word. At the conclusion of one fine story Gautreaux writes: “He closed his eyes and called on the old farm in his head to stay where it was, remembered its cypress house, its flat and misty lake of sugarcane keeping the impressions of a morning wind.” Few contemporary writers can match such prose, and it runs through Signals like filigree, reminding us that into mundane lives, big drama—and beauty—can often intrude.

Novelist Matthew Guinn is the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe. He teaches creative writing at Belhaven University.

Tim Gautreaux will serve as a panelist on the “Historical Fiction” discussion at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 19 at 10:45 a.m. at the State Capitol in Room 201H, and also on the “National Literary Panel” at 2:45 p.m. in the Galloway Sanctuary

Tag: Authors Review Books (Page 2 of 2)

Story of Cat Island resonates in prose, photographs

‘Bluff’ is a sleight-of-hand narrative achievement

Tiffany Quay Tyson’s ‘The Past is Never’ delivers mesmerizing Southern Gothic

‘The Fighter’ is a fascinating new novel from Michael Farris Smith

Forgiveness drives novel ‘Perennials’ about roots, offspring

Steve Yarbrough’s ‘The Unmade World’ masters the literary thriller

‘Rocky Boyer’s War’ is among great eye-level accounts about WWII

Matthew Guinn reviews ‘Signals’ by Tim Gautreaux

Authors

Categories

Tags