Lemuria Bookstore Blog

This year’s Looking Around Mississippi has been replaced by Looking Back Mississippi by Forrest Lamar Cooper. Cooper’s name did not ring a bell for me but you may have been reading his columns in Mississippi Magazine on history and culture for the past thirty years. Looking Back Mississippi is a sampling of some of Cooper’s [...]

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Hiking and Mississippi are not the first two words I would put together. However, after spending a good deal of time hiking in the North Carolina mountains, I began to long for the benefits of hiking closer to home. While Mississippi doesn’t have near the inclines, I have been learning in Helen McGinnis’s book, Hiking [...]

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This evening come to Lemuria for an unusual diversion. The Book: Panther Tract is about efforts to control the population of the wild hog in Mississippi. Published by University Press of Mississippi, the photography is beautiful and the stories have been collected from boar hunters across Mississippi and beyond. Chef John Folse has also contributed [...]

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With A Classical Journey Ken Tate gives us his first book since 2005. Filled with photographs of homes across Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, Journey sets an easy pace into Tate’s world of “intuitive classicism” with beautiful foldout reflections, poetry, quotations and mini-interviews. Half of the homes featured in Journey are in Mississippi and one [...]

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Growing Up in Mississippi is a collection of essays written by a wide range of notable Mississippians–from news anchor Maggie Wade, writers Ellen Douglas and Richard Ford, our former Governor William Winter, and many more distinguished educators, entrepreneurs, and artists. Accompanied with a photograph from their Mississippi childhood, these essays attempt to capture the parents, [...]

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A teacher in Austria, I had finally given myself permission to indulge in English language reading when I ran across a paperback of The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart by Alice Walker in a Swiss bookstore.  It was the title that convinced me to the purchase the book as I had never read [...]

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This is an event, a book, a group of people that every independent bookstore in Mississippi is talking about. Everybody’s talking about Lucas McCarty and the Trinity House of Prayer in Moorehead, Mississippi. The word is spreading because Mockingbird Publishing has teamed up with writer T. R. Pearson and photographer Langdon Clay. The event has [...]

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As a young bookseller at Lemuria in the late 70s I became intrigued with the writer Ellen Douglas. She visited the store a few times and introduced herself as Josephine Haxton. I couldn’t believe my lucky stars that I had met another Mississippi writer and one who had a PEN NAME at that, and who [...]

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1. Who was the most reluctant famous Mississippian to be profiled (hint: this Mississippian owns all of his or her own photos — and didn’t want to give us permission to publish his or her likeness)? 2. What was the most expensive photograph to acquire for publication? 3. Who is the relatively unknown Mississippian who [...]

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Flipping through the galley of Mississippians, I gratefully acknowledged the bios and pictures of Mississippi greats so familiar from literature, racial reconciliation history, music, education and art in this comprehensive Hall of Fame. Then I saw the dogs, dogs standing at attention next to a handsome, outdoorsy looking fellow named Mike Stewart, owner and trainer [...]

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