Jeffrey Benton, author of Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama, has compiled a list of books about Montgomery in completing the writing of his own book …
Jeff Benton, known for his “Montgomery Portraits” features in the Montgomery Advertiser, has written another; this time, it’s a portrait of how antebellum Montgomerians spent their leisure time. Benton’s new book is Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery, available now. Benton is also the subject himself of a recent feature in the Advertiser …
Author Rod Davis (Corina’s Way) has reviewed Making War at Fort Hood in the Texas Observer. Davis, a veteran of Korea during the Vietnam Era, stays involved in advocacy for those who have left the military; his forthcoming novel, South, America, stars a former Army intelligence officer …
Anniston Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers’s explores “the making of a Southern liberal” in his new memoir, In Love with Defeat. To some, a “Southern liberal” might be an oxymoron, something Ayers discusses in his book and that two new reviews of In Love with Defeat, by D. G. Martin from North Carolina Bookwatch and from Edwin Yoder in the Weekly Standard, have picked up on …
NewSouth Books announces with sadness the passing of Sheldon Hackney, whose life and work inspired a new book — a “festschrift” called Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney, due out in November. One of the volume’s editors, Ray Arsenault, and one of the essay contributors, Charles Joyner, each sent these tributes to their friend and mentor …
Chapter 16 calls writer and professor Gerald Duff’s new short ebook Fugitive Days “a witty insight into the real lives” of some notable poets, and the Southern Literary Review calls Fugitive Days “a wry contribution to the growing literature of writers’ encounters with writers” …
TIME Magazine has included author and civil rights activist Bob Zellner as part of their “One Dream” multimedia project, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The son and grandson of Klansmen, Zellner turned away from his heritage while at Huntington College in Alabama, joining the civil rights movement and later becoming the first white secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Zellner chronicled his growing social awareness and his experiences in the movement, including numerous marches and sit-ins, as well as his encounter with many key figures of the Civil Rights era, in his memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, available in hardcover and ebook …
John Pritchard’s new novel Sailing to Alluvium — hilarious, poignant, and potent — will arrive on shelves this October. Download a free preview, watch the book trailer on YouTube, and follow Pritchard’s irreverent protagonist Junior Ray on Twitter …
Denny Abbott talks to the Montgomery Advertiser about his new memoir, They Had No Voice: My Fight for Alabama’s Forgotten Children, which details his time working as a Montgomery juvenile probation officer and later, filing a federal suit against the state of Alabama over abuses, specifically at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mount Meigs …
Hal Crowther of Oxford American has reviewed two new books about “the Southern mind,” including Anniston Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers’s In Love with Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal, calling it “a book that thoughtful Southerners — and ignorant outlanders — would do well to read and ponder” ….