Faulkner comparisons abound in Sailing to Alluvium reviews
Author John Pritchard’s newest “southern redneck tour-de-force,” Sailing to Alluvium, continues to entertain and maybe offend (just a little) with a bevy of great local and national reviews. Chapter 16, the online publication of Humanities Tenneseee, writes that Sailing to Alluvium “is, in the end, a biting study of class differences, every bit as profane as the plays of Aristophanes” and “every gotdamn bit as funny,” as Pritchard’s inimitable narrator Junior Ray would say …
Remembering John Egerton
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) …
Southern Living spotlights Tasia Malakasis’s Thanksgiving table
A new Southern Living feature spotlights the Thanksgiving table of Tasia Malakasis, owner of the Belle Chevre fromagerie in Alabama and author of Tasia’s Table: Cooking with the Artisan Cheesemaker at Belle Chevre …
Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises Emigration to Liberia book as African American genealogical resource
In a feature in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, genealogist Kenneth Thomas calls Matthew McDaniel’s book, Emigration to Liberia, From the Chattahoochee Valley of Georgia and Alabama, 1853-1903, a “fascinating story … well worth reading.” Thomas also praises the book’s appendix, which lists the names of almost all the African American emigrants to Liberia. “This list could help clarify what happened to someone’s lost relatives,” Thomas notes, making Emigration to Liberia a key title both for historians and those interested in African American genealogy …
Fred Gray talks Rosa Parks, new memoir, with John Seigenthaler, CSPAN2
A new video and a podcast interview with attorney Fred Gray complement the release of the newly revised edition of Gray’s memoir, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System. During the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement, Gray served as the lawyer for Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks; he also argued in cases involving school desegregations, and helped bring about a presidential apology for victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study …
Jeff Benton compiles Montgomery reading list, recommended books
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 …
Historian Jeff Benton’s new book Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery
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 reviews Making War at Fort Hood in Texas Observer
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 …
Weekly Standard, NC Bookwatch look at making of a Southern liberal in Ayers’s In Love with Defeat
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 …
Remembering Sheldon Hackney, 1933-2013
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 …