Download or read book The Sharpshooter Blues written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The identity of the Sharpshooter becomes a central theme in a story that introduces such characters as the owner of the local funeral parlor, an avid comic-book reader, a man who shoots refrigerators, and a boy who never grew up. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

Download or read book The Sharpshooter Blues written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The identity of the Sharpshooter becomes a central theme in a story that introduces such prospective characters as the owner of the local funeral parlor, an avid comic-book reader, a man who shoots refrigerators, and a boy who never grew up

Download or read book Lewis Nordan written by Barbara A. Baker and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope examines and celebrates the work of southern writer Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, whose stories reveal his own pain and humanity and in their honesty force us to recognize ourselves within them. Written by scholars and fiction writers who represent a fascinating range of experience—from a Shakespearean scholar to English professors to a former student of Nordan’s—this is a rich array of essays, poems, and visual arts in tribute to this increasingly important writer. The collection deepens the base of scholarship on Nordan, and contextualizes his work in relation to other important southern writers such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Nordan was born and raised in Mississippi before moving to Alabama to pursue his Ph.D. at Auburn University. He taught for several years at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and retired from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a professor of English. Nordan has written four novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir entitled Boy with Loaded Gun. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, won the Southern Book Award, and his subsequent novel, The Sharpshooter Blues, won the Notable Book Award from the American Library Association and the Fiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Nordan is renowned for his distinctive comic writing style, even while addressing more serious personal and cultural issues such as heartbreak, loss, violence, and racism. He transforms tragic characters and events into moments of artistic transcendence, illuminating what he calls the “history of all human beings.”

Download or read book Southern Excursions written by George Garrett and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-03-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few if any are better endowed than George Garrett to comment on the general and the particular, the long and the short, of southern letters in our time. Garrett— a prolific and internationally renowned author of fiction, poetry, drama, and biography as well as a teacher, editor, critic, and frequent jurist for literary competitions—has been immersed in the writers and literature of his native region for almost a half century. Southern Excursions contains more than fifty of the best essays, reviews, and other short pieces of his career. For the connoisseur of good writing, this book is a depository, a treasure, a veritable time capsule of southern, literary, and American culture. Without sacrificing reverence for modern masters such as Faulkner, O’Connor, and Welty, Garrett has consistently embraced worthy new artists through the years, deftly and judiciously drawing the line between critical acclaim and popular success. Payton Davis, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, William HoVman, Madison Jones, Reynolds Price, Robert Morgan, R. H. W. Dillard, Wendell Berry, Doris Betts, William Goyen, Mary Lee Settle, Randall Kenan, David Huddle, Allan Gurganus, Dorothy Allison—these are a few of the writers Garrett has championed. If some names sound less familiar, Garrett, in these pages, will inspire readers to swift investigation. The author’s charm, wit, and anecdotal style make reading Southern Excursions a delight, and yet there’s no mistaking his erudition. Wise like a prophet, with a talent scout’s enthusiasm, Garrett is not afraid to tell unwelcome truths, covering topics that include southern publishing houses and literary quarterlies, the alliance between writers and academia, the state of criticism and theory, and, most eloquently, the persistence of place, memory, and the Civil War as themes in southern letters. Southern Excursions is a book for the ages, stowing as it does the sage views of one as learned, respected— and modest—in his time as George Garrett. “My strong suggestion [to readers],” he states, “is to plunge in and fare forward. Experience the story before turning to or trusting the opinions and judgments of others, myself included.”

Download or read book Sugar Among the Freaks written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1996-01-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction by Richard Howorth and foreword by the author. The incomparable Lewis Nordan's first two collections of short fiction--WELCOME TO THE ARROW-CATCHER FAIR and THE ALL-GIRL FOOTBALL TEAM--originally published in 1983 and 1986, have long been out of print in all editions. Collectors' items, these two books are now almost impossible for Nordan fans to find anywhere.To rectify that, Algonquin is delighted to announce a selection of fifteen of the best stories from the two books, newly arranged and introduced by fellow Mississippian, bookseller Richard Howorth, and with a foreword by the author. Critics have called Lewis Nordan's fiction "extraordinary" and "marvelous" and "stunning" and "scorching" and "story-telling genius." The selected stories show that genius in the making. "Characters that people the South hobble and dance across the pages of his short stories."--United Press International; "Delightfully eccentric situations and colorful language add up to a work that is even stronger than WOLF WHISTLE."--Library Journal.

Download or read book Wolf Whistle written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2003-10-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In WOLF WHISTLE, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. "An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. WOLF WHISTLE will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters."--Randall Kenan, The Nation.

Download or read book Contemporary Southern Men Fiction Writers written by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully annotated bibliography lists sources of criticism for thirty-nine Southern male authors, each of whom has published at least one significant book of fiction between 1970 and 1994.

Download or read book Book Lust written by Nancy Pearl and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What to read next is every book lover's greatest dilemma. Nancy Pearl comes to the rescue with this wide-ranging and fun guide to the best reading new and old. Pearl, who inspired legions of litterateurs with "What If All (name the city) Read the Same Book," has devised reading lists that cater to every mood, occasion, and personality. These annotated lists cover such topics as mother-daughter relationships, science for nonscientists, mysteries of all stripes, African-American fiction from a female point of view, must-reads for kids, books on bicycling, "chick-lit," and many more. Pearl's enthusiasm and taste shine throughout.

Download or read book Your Blues Ain t Like Mine written by Bebe Moore Campbell and published by One World. This book was released on 1995-06-27 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction

Download or read book A Place Like Mississippi written by W. Ralph Eubanks and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir In A Place Like Mississippi,award-winning author and Mississippi native W. Ralph Eubanks treats us to a literary tour of the evocative landscapes that have inspired writers in every era. From Faulkner to Wright, Welty to Trethewey, Mississippi has been both a backdrop and a central character in some of the most compelling prose and poetry of modern literature. The journey unfolds on a winding path, touching the muddy Delta, the rolling Hill Country, down to the Gulf Coast, and all points between. In every corner of the state lie the settings that informed hundreds of iconic works. Immersing us in these spaces, Eubanks helps us understand that Mississippi is not only a state but a state of mind. Or as Faulkner is said to have observed, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

Download or read book Southern Writers written by Joseph M. Flora and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-06-21 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Download or read book Music of the Swamp written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1992-01-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is not merely a stellar book. It is absolute ballad put to page.” —Southern Living Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world--always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father--a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope. An ALA Notable Book Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award

Download or read book A Literary History of Mississippi written by Lorie Watkins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions by Ted Atkinson, Robert Bray, Patsy J. Daniels, David A. Davis, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Hinrichsen, Suzanne Marrs, Greg O'Brien, Ted Ownby, Ed Piacentino, Claude Pruitt, Thomas J. Richardson, Donald M. Shaffer, Theresa M. Towner, Terrence T. Tucker, Daniel Cross Turner, Lorie Watkins, and Ellen Weinauer Mississippi is a study in contradictions. One of the richest states when the Civil War began, it emerged as possibly the poorest and remains so today. Geographically diverse, the state encompasses ten distinct landform regions. As people traverse these, they discover varying accents and divergent outlooks. They find pockets of inexhaustible wealth within widespread, grinding poverty. Yet the most illiterate, disadvantaged state has produced arguably the nation's richest literary legacy. Why Mississippi? What does it mean to write in a state of such extremes? To write of racial and economic relations so contradictory and fraught as to defy any logic? Willie Morris often quoted William Faulkner as saying, "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." What Faulkner (or more likely Morris) posits is that Mississippi is not separate from the world. The country's fascination with Mississippi persists because the place embodies the very conflicts that plague the nation. This volume examines indigenous literature, Southwest humor, slave narratives, and the literature of the Civil War. Essays on modern and contemporary writers and the state's changing role in southern studies look at more recent literary trends, while essays on key individual authors offer more information on luminaries including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker. Finally, essays on autobiography, poetry, drama, and history span the creative breadth of Mississippi's literature. Written by literary scholars closely connected to the state, the volume offers a history suitable for all readers interested in learning more about Mississippi's great literary tradition.

Download or read book The Best Novels of the Nineties written by Linda Parent Lesher and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reader’s guide provides uniquely organized and up-to-date information on the most important and enjoyable contemporary English-language novels. Offering critically substantiated reading recommendations, careful cross-referencing, and extensive indexing, this book is appropriate for both the weekend reader looking for the best new mystery and the full-time graduate student hoping to survey the latest in magical realism. More than 1,000 titles are included, each entry citing major reviews and giving a brief description for each book.

Download or read book Would You Shut Up Please written by Lewis Nordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you call yourself a serious reader but still haven’t discovered Lewis Nordan, shame on you.” —The Seattle Times Lewis Nordan’s cult following began in 1991 when Algonquin published his first novel, Music of the Swamp. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, was inspired by one of the nation’s most volatile and notorious racial incidents. Nordan was fifteen years old at the time, and living in Mississippi, just down the road from where young Emmet Till was murdered for daring to whistle at a white woman. Wolf Whistle was hailed by Randall Kenan in The Nation as “an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” It was Nordan’s most acclaimed work and winner of the Southern Book Award. He published four more books with Algonquin, including Lightning Song, The Sharpshooter Blues, Sugar Among the Freaks, and a memoir, Boy with Loaded Gun. His fictional works, all set in the American South, have the ability to break your heart and keep you laughing at the same time. The Los Angeles Times review got it exactly right: “Lordy, Lordy, can Lewis Nordan write!Horrible things happen, and horribly funny things, too, in the Delta town of Arrow Catcher, Miss.” When Lewis Nordan died in 2012, he was working on a collection of stories. This story, Would You Shut Up, Please, is the tale of a man who investigates a disturbance at his elderly neighbors’ home and discovers more about their lives than he cares to know. Algonquin is committed to keeping all of Lewis Nordan’s remarkable work available in print and as e-books, to ensure that new generations of readers will continue to discover his wild imagination, his boundless talent, and his singular voice. We hope you’ll enjoy Would You Shut Up, Please and will want to read more from this legendary storyteller.

Download or read book The Publishers Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Black Klansman written by Ron Stallworth and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times Bestseller! The extraordinary true story and basis for the Academy Award winning film BlacKkKlansman, written and directed by Spike Lee, produced by Jordan Peele, and starring John David Washington and Adam Driver. When detective Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department, comes across a classified ad in the local paper asking for all those interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan to contact a P.O. box, Detective Stallworth does his job and responds with interest, using his real name while posing as a white man. He figures he’ll receive a few brochures in the mail, maybe even a magazine, and learn more about a growing terrorist threat in his community. A few weeks later the office phone rings, and the caller asks Ron a question he thought he’d never have to answer, “Would you like to join our cause?” This is 1978, and the KKK is on the rise in the United States. Its Grand Wizard, David Duke, has made a name for himself, appearing on talk shows, and major magazine interviews preaching a “kinder” Klan that wants nothing more than to preserve a heritage, and to restore a nation to its former glory. Ron answers the caller’s question that night with a yes, launching what is surely one of the most audacious, and incredible undercover investigations in history. Ron recruits his partner Chuck to play the "white" Ron Stallworth, while Stallworth himself conducts all subsequent phone conversations. During the months-long investigation, Stallworth sabotages cross burnings, exposes white supremacists in the military, and even befriends David Duke himself. Black Klansman is an amazing true story that reads like a crime thriller, and a searing portrait of a divided America and the extraordinary heroes who dare to fight back.