Anyone who reads Shlemiel Crooks, the award-winning illustrated children’s book by NewSouth author Anna Olswanger, will hear the music in it. In the lilting rhythms of its charming Yiddish-inflected prose, you might even hear the author paying homage to her dad …
Call it a deliciously different catfish dish, or the expression of our enduring friendship with beloved author and storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham. It’s a signed and numbered limited-edition booklet titled Simon Went Fishing on a Sunday, which NewSouth produced on the occasion of its tenth anniversary and the 2010 Alabama Book Festival …
In a message to Bob Zellner, author with Constance Curry of the 2009 Lillian Smith Award-winning The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, Dr. Louis McLoud recalls his relevant personal history: …
New York Times best-selling author Mary Kay Andrews chooses her words — and, it seems, her bedtime reading material — carefully. Fortunately for NewSouth Books, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming by Rheta Grimsley Johnson won a spot on her night table and now on her blog. The author of Savannah Breeze, Blue Christmas, and the soon-to-be-published The FIxer Upper calls Enchanted Evening Barbie a “Valentine to life in the South,” and praises Johnson’s “ability to make both the comic and tragic come alive in this wonderful memoir.” Thanks, Ms. Andrews, for the gift.
“It may still be frosty outside but in the South it’s always Okra Season!” So says the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) in announcing the books named to its 2010 winter/spring Okra Picks list. Lucky for us at NewSouth, Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s new memoir made the cut. Thanks, SIBA. Of Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming, Rick Bragg says, “Rheta Grimsley Johnson writes with nothing short of beauty about childhood, lost loves, sad dogs, and everything else worth knowing about.” Watch for it in April …
NPR’s Debbie Elliott visited with syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson in Henderson, Louisiana recently, to learn about the place Rheta calls her second home. Henderson is the subject of a memoir by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, called Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana, published by NewSouth Books. The All Things Considered program that resulted aired November 30 …
We thought Diane McWhorter had it right in her comments about This Day in Civil Rights History by Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard. She called the volume “a wonderful compendium” and also “a compellingly readable sampling of historic events both well known and obscure, inspiring and appalling.” But in his Arts & Literature blog review for our new book, Art Taylor identifies one of the book’s key features …
NewSouth received a nice note from Harper Lee enthusing about publication of Virginia Van Der Veer Hamilton’s new memoir, Teddy’s Child: Growing Up in the Anxious Southern Gentry Between the Great Wars. Says Ms. Lee to Dr. Hamilton: “It’s beautiful. I loved your book!” …
It doesn’t happen often, according to Molly Thomas-Hicks at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), that a regionally based publishing house is selected to publish a work for its Big Read program. So NewSouth Books was especially honored to learn that it had been named to publish The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the 2010 Alabama Big Read …
NewSouth Books was honored to learn that Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s memoir, Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana, was named by the Baton Rouge One Book Community (OBOC) Program as its summer 2009 reading selection. In his message at the OBOC kick-off event, East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor Kip Holden said, “Let us become tourists in our own state and realize once again that whether it’s in the food or the music, [what we have in Louisiana] adds up to a magic that cannot be found anywhere else in this country†…