Book Reviews
Filthy Animals
by Brandon Taylor Riverhead Books, 2021 $18.59 hardcover, $15.26 paperback, $13.99 Kindle Genre: Short Fiction Review by Jace Rose Malmquist The characters in Brandon Taylor’s short stories are all in pursuit of something: a touch, a truth, something that is real or could work in the place of something real, that could tide them from this thing to that, like a series of rope swings; big chances, easy ones, crazy ones, and no regret in any of them. As the reader [...]
field recordings of mind in morning
Poems by Hank Lazer; Music by Holland Hopson BlazeVOX, 2021 Paperback: $20.00 Genre: Poetry Review by Edward Journey The last time we checked in with poet Hank Lazer, author of thirty-two books of poetry and 2015 recipient of the Harper Lee Award, he was pondering themes of plague and survival, anger and calm, and life under a wannabe American autocrat in COVID19 SUTRAS. Lazer’s newest book, field recordings of mind in morning, includes writing in a less turbulent vein from pre-pandemic 2018 and 2019. [...]
Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South
by Ed Southern Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2021 Hardcover: $25.95 Genre: Nonfiction; Sports History; Sociology Review by Edward Journey About midway through Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South, Ed Southern states that he’s “working on making [Wake Forest] every Alabama fan’s second-favorite team.” I might be an easy convert; a Baptist-affiliated university whose athletic teams are called the “Demon Deacons” will always garner my attention. Southern, a Wake Forest graduate with strong ongoing ties to his alma [...]
Children of Dust
Children of Dust by Marlin Barton Regal House Publishing, 2021 Paperback: $19.95; Special Edition Hardcover: $28.95 Genre: Fiction; Novel Review by Frye Gaillard With his latest book, Children of Dust, Alabama novelist Marlin Barton has taken his place with the finest Southern writers of our times – with the likes of Ron Rash or William Gay – and if anything, that is understating the case. When it comes to understanding the human condition, and its intricate intertwining with the history of [...]
Fugitives of the Heart by William Gay Livingston Press, The University of West Alabama, 2021 E-Book: $19.95; Hardcover: $26.95 Genre: Contemporary Fiction Review by Edward Journey According to William Gay lore, when he first encountered a dictionary, he read it from cover to cover. A reader might reasonably speculate that he spent his writing career trying to use up all of those words. Here’s a horrible example: the protagonist “… screamed a cry of outrage and bereavement and utter revulsion as [...]
This Ditch-Walking Love
This Ditch-Walking Love by James Braziel Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Hardcover: $29.95; Paperback: $19.95 Genre: Contemporary Fiction Review by Edward Journey James Braziel’s This Ditch-Walking Love is an impressionistic collection of short stories and sketches exploring themes of strife and defeat in rural Alabama, near the Locust Fork. The location is described as “not a county of rivers – just rills and rivulets that widen into creeks.” Some stories in the collection are hypnotic collages of time, [...]
Searching for Jimmy Page
Searching for Jimmy Page by Christy Alexander Hallberg Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Paperback: $18.95 Genre: Fiction Review by Frye Gaillard With her new novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, Christy Alexander Hallberg takes her place as one of the bright new stars in Southern fiction. She has given us a coming-of-age story based on a premise that could have fallen anywhere between sad cliché and literary page turner. In Hallberg’s deft and confident hands, it is most assuredly [...]
Poet Warrior
Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo W.W. Norton, 2021 Hardcover: $25.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Pam Kingsbury Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior is a graduate course in what it means to find healing through poetry, as well as to live as a compassionate human. Describing herself as “being equally left and right-brained," Joy Harjo has made her life’s work as a writer and a teacher, as well as a daughter, mother, grandmother, and now matriarch, taking up the ideals of poetic justice, [...]
The Speckled Beauty
The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found by Rick Bragg Knopf, 2021 Hardcover: $26.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Tucker Coombe The opening of Rick Bragg’s new memoir depicts a gorgeous, luxuriant landscape—“tangled pines and mountain pasture, fractured by dappled sunlight…blue jays, yellowhammers, and an emerald blur of hummingbirds”—that provides a stunning, if unlikely, backdrop for the author’s own desolation. The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found opens in the autumn of 2017. [...]
Nobody Knows How It Got This Good
Nobody Knows How It Got This Good Nobody Knows How It Got This Good By Amos Jasper Wright IV Livingston Press, 2018 Paperback $8.95 or Hardcover $13.95 Genre: Short Fiction Reviewed by Andrew Mollenkof In his debut collection of short stories, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good, Amos Jasper Wright explores the complications of existence in his home state, Alabama. No matter where you travel, every place has a cadence, a rhythm and melody interwoven with the sights, sounds, and people. Alabama, [...]
Driving the King
By Ravi Howar HarperCollins, 2015 $25.99, hardcover Fiction Reviewed by Don Noble A slow and meticulous fiction writer, Howard took years to complete his first novel, Like Trees Walking (2007), the fictional retelling of the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile. But Trees brought Howard the Ernest J. Gaines award, was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award and brought him support from the NEA, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Hurston-Wright Foundation and the New Jersey Council on the [...]
Halley
Halley By Faye Gibbons NewSouth Books, 2014 $21.95, Hardcover Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Don Noble Faye Gibbons is an old pro at children’s and Young Adult writing. An Auburn graduate and author of more than a dozen books, she won the Georgia Author of the Year award in 1983 for Some Glad Morning and the Alabama Author Award, given by the Alabama Library Association, for Night in the Barn in 1998. Although she lives in Alabama now, Gibbons was raised [...]
Grace and Grit
Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond By Lilly Ledbetter and Lanier Scott Isom Crown, 2013 Paperback: $21.00 Genre: Nonfiction Reviewed by Pam Kingsbury Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to change the workplace; she just wanted to help contribute to her family’s finances, help provide more for her children, and achieve financial stability. Like many Alabamians of her generation, she was born in a small town (Possum Trot, Alabama) and lived in a house without [...]
A Powerful Blessing
A Powerful Blessing: The Life of Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter, Sr. 1899-1969, Sixth Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, 1938-1968 By Douglas M. Carpenter TransAmerica Printing, 2012 $24.99, Paper Nonfiction Reviewed by Julia Oliver In A Powerful Blessing, an absorbing, affectionate, and scholarly biographical narrative about his father, the Reverend Douglas Carpenter notes that his sources were "letters, diaries, notes, and clippings saved at the time of the events, scrapbooks, conversations with people on site, and [his] own memory, which extends back to [...]
