Lemuria Bookstore Blog

I had always intended “to get to” Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, but when I saw that she had a new book coming out, that she was coming to Lemuria, and that she had been featured in Mississippians, there was no time to waste. To begin, I explored some of her poetry and ended up finding a [...]

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How do you make a fabulous book on Mississippi blues? Get the well-known Mississippian photographer Ken Murphy to join forces with blues aficionado Scott Barretta. You may know the work of Ken Murphy through his previous books, My South Coast Home and Mississippi. You may not know that it was sort of an accident that [...]

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The King of the Blues The Father of Country Music The King of Rock & Roll The Most Powerful Woman in Entertainment The Most Beloved Actor of our Time The Founder of MTV The Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century All from Mississippi? The state with the lowest income in the country? The state that [...]

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Meet Lola, a Filipina nanny working in California to send her daughter back in the Philippines to medical school, while her husband waits patiently at home, an executive for Hallmark. Ruth, an immigrant as well, is Lola’s “teacher of America” and runs a placement service for nannies. “Three women one baby. Usually it is the [...]

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I had heard that John’s daughter, Saramel, had become a partner in an art gallery in Charleston. I managed to catch up with her to see how she ended up with this beautiful little gallery. Here’s her story in her own words. Even though my hard-working father warned me about the never-ending days in the [...]

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Even as she wound up a 9-month-long tour for Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger kindly answered the curious questions from an audience of some 35 fans Wednesday evening at our events building. And even as she was about to wrap up a long day of travel and talk, she shared dinner with six of us [...]

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When John Brandon started his first novel, Arkansas, he was boxing up perfume samples for fashion magazines by day since he had found that teaching high school was not conducive to writing. The page lay empty after a day of kids, books and computers. Factory work, often from early morning to early afternoon, left time [...]

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It’s not every day that Maggie and John like the same book. They were both sending me their postings on Troy Matthew Carnes’ first novel, Rasputin’s Legacy, at the same time so I decided I would post them together. Maggie’s take: I take Rasputin’s Legacy home one night. I do my normal routine…read the synopsis, read [...]

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“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” (Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” New York Times, December 12, 1991) This was [...]

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When I think of Her Fearful Symmetry, I think of it in terms of couples. Robert who mourns the death of his wife, Elspeth. Edie who must confront decisions made long ago with her twin, Elspeth. Martin whose mental illness isolates him from his wife, Marijke. And finally, the twenty-one-year-old twins who inherit their Aunt [...]

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