Category: books

The South (and the nation, too, though he was a true Southerner in the best senses of the term) was diminished today with the sudden death by heart attack of the Nashville-based writer John Egerton. We at NewSouth were privileged to know John and work with him for several decades, first through the Southern Regional Council, and later as the publisher of an insightful collections of essays, Where We Stand (2004), to which he contributed, and his wickedly satiric comic novel takedown of George W. Bush, Ali Dubya and the Forty Thieves (2006) …

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 …

A detailed interview and a glowing review are just the latest to spotlight Eddie Pattillo’s unique book of history, Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier. Here, Pattillo, an Alabama historian, reproduces his ancestors’ letters from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, painstakingly collected alongside Pattillo’s own copious research, to give an unprecedented glimpse of early American life. The Mobile Press-Register‘s John Sledge, in his “Southern Bound” review, calls the book “magnificent”; Walter Edgar also interviews Pattillo about the book on the Walter Edgar’s Journal show, available online …

Dr. Henry Wall signed his family story From Healing to Hell at the 3 Diamonds bookstore in Blakely, Georgia, during the March 24 Peanut Proud Festival. “We were happy to have Dr. Wall signing his book with us during Peanut Proud,” said Debra Anderson, owner of 3 Diamonds. “His book tells about an important event in his life and in Blakely history, and people seem to be really responding to his book” …

I cannot claim to have known William Gay well. But I admired him very, very much, and my life was touched by him in more than just an abstract way. Indeed, he blurbed my second book, The Yazoo Blues. My relationship with William was brief and almost entirely telephonic. We enjoyed a couple of exceedingly long chats over the telephone, and as a result of those talks, I knew I really liked him and understood how unusual and perhaps how massively significant he was in terms of what, where, and when he was. I always meant to get in the car and go over to Hohenwald, Tennessee, to see William, but I never did. I should have …