Big is well aware that every fifteenth year brings its challenges, but no amount of superstition could have prepared her for the family mystery that begins to unravel as soon as she digs up Liza’s weeping willow in the back yard. Liza, the one person who could answer all of Big’s questions, has been silenced by a stroke at the age of thirty and cannot help Big as she tries to piece together the events of the past fifteen years. Somewhere between trying to keep her family from being ripped apart by what was once a buried down deep secret and keeping a watchful eye on Mosey, Big manages to rekindle an old love that she thought was all but done with.

Through the three voices of Big, Liza and Mosey, Joshilyn Jackson (New York Times Bestselling Author of Gods in Alabama) weaves a southern tale with plenty of plot twists to keep the pages turning. But mostly, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty is a testament to the powerful force of love and the unexpected paths that life and family can lead.

Joshilyn Jackson is coming to visit us at Lemuria TODAY! Signing at 5:00 and reading to follow at 5:30.

Salvage the Bones, released in September, won the National Book Award in November. The signing will take place in the bookstore with a reading to follow in our Dot Com Events Building just across the parking lot from Banner Hall.

In case you missed it last month, enjoy our post with video of Jesmyn accepting the National Book Award.

To see Jesmyn Ward accept The National Book Award fast forward the video to 35:00. Don’t miss the part where she mentions Lemuria!

No doubt we are THRILLED that Jesmyn Ward, who grew up in Delisle, Mississippi, has won The National Book Award.

Jesmyn’s acceptance speech was eloquent.  She explains how the death of her brother in her early twenties inspired her to start writing since “living through my grief for my brother meant that life was a feeble, unpredictable thing.” Jesmyn wanted to make sure she contributed to the world in a meaningful way. As time went on, the scope of her stories grew from stories about an imagined life for her brother to stories with a much broader message. Her hope was that “the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories are as universal, our lives are as fraught, lovely and important as theirs.”

Salvage the Bones is a story about a poor black family, a father, three sons and a daughter, living on the coast of Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina’s arrival is imminent. Told from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Esch, the father attempts to make preparations for the storm with his children. The entire novel takes place in twelve days; the chapters take you day by day as the storm approaches, as Esch also learns she is to have a baby with the heartbreaking knowledge that her own mother died in childbirth. In this family of men, Esch has been reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, wondering if Medea had felt the way she did as she fell in love.

Everything about Jesmyn Ward is sincere and full of heart, from her novel Salvage the Bones to her hopes and dreams as a writer. I like what she wrote on her blog about Salvage the Bones the day it was released in September:

“My second novel, Salvage the Bones, is out today. The cover is beautiful, isn’t it? I always imagined that I’d do an interview for the novel, and a special picture would accompany it: me, hair wild, wearing a tank top and cut off jean shorts, barefoot, Mississippi green wild all around me, holding a leash while a dog, big and red, stands at my feet, mouth open, teeth white. Both of us, grinning. I’m getting generous reviews and given several good interviews, but this hasn’t happened yet. I’m still hoping.”

“This is the story of a girl growing up in a world of men, a tale about her brother and his pit bull, a novel about a family in the maw of Hurricane Katrina. This is about tragedy: this is about hope.” (http://jesmimi.blogspot.com)

Being somewhat near to the story of Jesmyn Ward and Salvage the Bones is one of the honors of being a bookseller. You never know what kind of journey a simple advanced reader copy will take you. As Jesmyn kindly noted in her acceptance speech,  it is the booksellers who are on the front lines, who have the opportunity to create a readership. I am so pleased that this National Book Award will amplify the voices of booksellers and other readers who have experienced the quiet power of Salvage the Bones.

We drew a small, enthusiastic group for Jesmyn’s signing at Lemuria in September. I think we all could have listened to more than the first chapter. Jesmyn is a great reader. Even at that time, I was impressed with Jesmyn’s resolve to stick to the story she felt in her heart, in her determination to tell the story in her own way. We are fortunate to have Jesmyn at Lemuria again on Saturday, December 17th at 3:00 p.m. for a signing and reading.

Other Mississippians who have won The National Book Award include:

William Faulkner for A Fable in 1955

Walker Percy for The Moviegoer in 1962

Alice Walker for the hardback of The Color Purple & Eudora Welty for the paperback of Collected Stories in 1983

Ellen Gilchrist for Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories in 1984

and now Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones in 2011.

Congratulations Jesmyn!

See previous blog with video of Jesmyn talking about being a finalist for The National Book Award.

After I finished the last chapter of Hell, I realized that I had read one of the best satires of the times. In fact, when a customer comes in Lemuria these days asking for a humorous book, I take him or her to look at Hell. Ranking in my mind just after the funny factor of  Confederacy of Dunces, Hell is a laugh out loud novel, which takes the reader to “Hell” to meet the Clintons, the Bushes, and even the Pope, since, after all, no one on earth has been perfect, so all end up in Hell, but rarely know why.

So, suffice it to say that when I got a copy of Butler’s new novel A Small Hotel, I was rather expecting some satire and humor, but after a couple of chapters, I realized that my expectations were way wrong. Instead, I realized that I had happened upon a very depressing book. In case you, reader, are wondering why I would want to read such a depressingly dark novel, please keep reading because that is precisely what I did, and I am very happy that I did.

As far as subject matter, Butler handles the break up of a long term relationship with clarity and poignancy and empathy, but, and that is a big “but”, his time treatment is what makes the novel remarkable, as well as its ending. We all know that few writers can handle simultaneous time with skill. In other words reporting on what is happening at the exact same time with two characters who are not in the same proximity, requires talent to avoid redundancy and triteness. Robert Olen Butler achieves this without confusing the reader, nor boring him.

Because the novel is primarily set in New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter, in “a small hotel”, the Southern reader feels right at home. Also, since some of the main action of the novel,  occurs during the craziness of Mardi Gras, the reader feels a certain connectedness. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that a lack of communication thwarts the lives of the protagonist and her husband, or vice versa, depending on perspective. In particular, the power of the word “love”, said  out loud, or the lack thereof, becomes more and more powerful.

Toward the end of the novel, the action takes a fast turn forward, which is interesting, since heretofore, a large majority of the action takes place in the past. Once again, Butler’s treatment of time emerges as one of his most valued assets. Without giving away the ending,  I will say that this initially depressing book ends with hope for the future. How Butler gets to this hope remains, once again, as a valued talent, for it is in the telling of the story that the reader finds gratitude.

See Kelly’s post on A Small Hotel.

See Nan’s post on Hell.

We still have signed first editions of A Small Hotel. Click here.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, September 2011)

Watch the National Book Award announcement LIVE at 7pm central TONIGHT: http://www.nationalbook.org/index.html

Mark your calendar: Jesmyn will be signing again at Lemuria on Saturday, December 17 at 3:00. I enjoyed the first event we had with her in September, loved her book and am excited see to see her get this national attention at this point in her writing career. Jesmyn has one previous novel: Where the Line Bleeds. Can’t wait to see Jesmyn again next month.

“Luce’s new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent”

The first line of the shiny new Charles Frazier novel that we’ll have the pleasure of selling on Tuesday. And a great line it is. As a parent of small children I at first thought that these children surely aren’t so different from all small children, but, well, they are. The next line:

“She learned early that it wasn’t smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she’d find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched.”

No, Frazier’s protagonist in his third novel, Nightwoods, is in deep. She believes that “you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you otherwise you’re worthless.”

Nightwoods is very different from Frazier’s earlier work. Set in the early sixties with bootlegging, juke joints, and mountains as a backdrop the reader might think of Thunder Road or the fiction of Ron Rash or even Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. The plot is one that builds in suspense as Luce finds that she loves these new stranger children and that she is at risk of losing them.

Join us on Tuesday, October 11th for a signing and reading with Charles Frazier at 5:00 and 5:30.

His last visit was in 2009 for the novel Hell, a tongue-in-cheek romp through an underworld which is populated, it seems, by everybody who’s anybody, including Anne Boleyn, Humphrey Bogart, Shakespeare, and Dante’s Beatrice. His two books before that, Severance and Intercourse, were comprised of vignettes examining, respectively, the last thoughts of just-lopped heads, and the fevered thoughts of couples while they, well, couple. In these collections, like in Hell, Butler let his imagination play with the details of well-known lives.

His new book, though, is a departure from these entirely. A Small Hotel is a look back at a marriage from the vantage point of its ending, and its characters are nobody we recognize. It’s the day Michael and Kelly Hays, who met in New Orleans twenty-five years ago when he saved her from some drunk ruffians, are finalizing their divorce, though Kelly doesn’t show up at the courthouse to sign the papers. Instead, armed with bottles of scotch and pills, she drives to New Orleans to the Olivier House, to the same room in the hotel where she and Michael spent their first night together, and to where they have returned many joyful times since. It’s been a place of happy nostalgia for the Hays couple, but for Kelly, on this day, it’s a place of despair.

Through his and hers flashbacks, seamlessly slipped into and out of as the characters go through a single day, Butler reveals the fissures in the couple’s relationship. If this basic plot description sounds quite gloomy, I actually found the novel to be too full of insight into relationships to be depressing. Michael and Kelly for twenty-four years have participated in that most vulnerable of relationships, a marriage, each trusting that their spouse understands implicitly their intentions, feelings, and thoughts, and each has ended up realizing that they’ve been completely misunderstood.

So I take it back that we don’t recognize the characters in A Small Hotel. They remind us of ourselves, of course.

Mr. Butler will sign and read at Lemuria on Tuesday, the 13th of September, beginning at 5 pm. To order a signed copy of A Small Hotel, click here. 

That being said, my appreciation for art is not limited to only things that hang on a wall. I also love beautiful art books, which is why I am so excited to talk about a lovely new book on Eudora Welty’s gardens that is soon to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book features writings (and some photos) by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown with photographs by Langdon Clay, who just happens to be my dad!

Accompanying my dad’s photos is a wonderful and engaging look at the history of the garden of the Welty house or as Eudora called it, “my mother’s garden.” Haltom and Brown do an excellent job of telling the story of Chestina Welty, Eudora’s mother, and her love for gardening, which strongly influenced Eudora and her writings.

Before I perused this book, I was not aware that as Eudora was establishing her writing career in her late twenties, she was also becoming an adept gardener thanks to her mother Chestina’s guidance. Sadly the gardens of Chestina’s generation did not last, but towards the end of Welty’s life, the restoration of her “mother’s garden” was underway and the results continue to impress at the Welty house today.

The book will be launched on October 6th with a signing party in the garden at the Welty House from 12-3 p.m., hosted by the Eudora Welty Foundation. For more info, check out the Welty Foundation’s website.

Also, Lemuria will host a signing on Saturday, October 8th at 11:00 AM.

And so begins the story of the Family Fang. Mr. and Mrs. Fang are award-winning performance artists, meaning they stage “events,” by which I mean upsetting, but humorous, public displays, and their best props are their two children Child A and Child B, otherwise known as Annie and Buster. After this particular “event” in which the children help their parents stage a candy store robbery, you find Annie and Buster, waiting for their parents to extricate themselves from trouble, tossing pennies into the mall’s fountain “each making wishes that they hoped were simple enough to come true.”

The Family Fang is a novel about, well, a family, and while I don’t think Wilson generalizes with his characters (the Fangs are a very unique family and I don’t think many of us can compare our childhoods to those of the Fang children), Annie and Buster do make us realize the extent to which our parents can affect us—even as adults. Sure, the Fang events are ridiculous and it might be good fun to watch one happen in a shopping mall near you, but at what cost to the young Fangs? I don’t want to give away too much, but let’s just say that this black comedy does not have a fluffy ending tied up with a bow. Wilson’s humorous tale does have real substance and questions the consequences of raising children in a household where art is placed above all else. I particularly like the way Janet Maslin, in the NY Times review, phrased it: “All children eventually question lies their parents have told them, but the Fangs take that chicanery to a whole new level.”

Wilson has been a Lemuria favorite since the 2009 release of his short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (a collection that I personally feel like I could re-read an infinite number of times without tiring of it), and we cannot wait to welcome him back to the store on August 18 at 5pm.

I also have to add that the cover art for The Family Fang was done by one of my favorite illustrators Julie Morstad (who I wrote about a few months ago), which only adds to my love of this book.

See Emily’s blog on her love for The Family Fang and Kevin Wilson here.

When Kevin was here for the release of his first book, I garnered a coveted Lemurian attendance to his reading. He surprised us all by reading a piece he had just written, and while I can’t remember what it was actually about, I do remember the feeling of sitting out on the Dot Com deck and realizing how fortunate I was because even then I just knew: Kevin was going places. His writing style is unique and refreshing and familiar all at the same time. In 2010, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth won the Shirley Jackson award and an Alex award, and every time I read of Kevin’s accolades I wanted to clap for him and say, ‘I knew it!’

During that same visit, Kevin also told us that he had been signed to write a short story collection and a novel. So when I first heard last fall that he had finished his novel, I was ecstatic. It was finally here. I snagged an advanced copy from Joe’s desk and then promptly came down with the flu. Now, the flu part of that week, as you can guess, was horrible. But Kevin’s novel, The Family Fang, made my week. I couldn’t read it fast enough and I couldn’t bear to finish it; it was just that good.

The Fangs are quite different than your average family. Think Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums or the dysfunctional family in Margot at the Wedding. The parents, Caleb and Camille Fang, are performance artist who believe that chaos is the highest form of art. They wish to disrupt the world, to pull it from its malaise and elevate it with their art. They use their own children as props in their public art events, which often occur in shopping malls full of the Fang’s unsuspecting audience.

Child A and Child B, also known by their true names Annie and Buster, participate in their parents’ mad schemes for a time. But as all children do, Annie and Buster grow up and begin to realize the absurdity of their parents’ art, and it’s that same realization that makes reading this novel both entertaining and sobering. Without their child props, Caleb and Camille try to continue their art performances, but as shopping malls become outdated and social media devices more prevalent, their ‘events’ fall flat. They begin searching for the ultimate ‘Fang event,’ something that will solidify their place in history. I can’t tell you much more without giving away a large portion of the plot, but I must say that the ending was just as surprising and well written as I had hoped it would be.

I cannot wait to hear Kevin’s thoughts on his newest novel and to hear him read on Thursday, August 18th at 5:00. Much like Kevin’s last visit did, his signing this Thursday is sure to add an invaluable element to my reading and remembrance of The Family Fang. I honestly believe that you will regret not coming to Lemuria for Kevin’s visit. His contribution to Southern literature is brilliant.

See Kaycie’s blog on her love for The Family Fang and Kevin Wilson here.

For those readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading any of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, you must read a couple before starting this novel. We have several  good collections here at Lemuria. I would recommend your reading A Good Man is Hard to Find and Good Country People  to start. Once you have read these, you are now ready to begin this newly released novel, A Good Hard Look, this title, cleverly being a “take-off” on the title of the first short story title above. (Of course, if you just want to jump right in on this novel, and then read O’Connor’s short stories afterwards, then that will work as well!)

The point that I’m making here is that Ann Napolitano refers to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories throughout this novel, and, for that matter, the plot and the characters themselves often reflect O’Connor’s plots and characters in a very clever way. Suffice it to say: the characters are flawed by life, by turmoil, by desire, by boredom, etc., etc., and their actions are often reactions to their current life status; therefore, all sorts of “escape” occur as an  answer for them to run, run, run!

As A Good Hard Look begins, the reader is propelled into a Southern setting filled with glorious tailfeathers of numerous peacocks screaming their heads off on the eve of  the wedding of two of the main characters, the to-be bride having grown up with, but not been on good terms with Flannery. The irony does not escape the reader for long as he or she learns that these squawking preening peacocks belong to Flannery and her mother who live down a country road from town.

The much awaited beautiful perfect Southern wedding is now blemished before it even begins because “Cookie”, the bride to be, falls from her bed and hits her face causing a black eye to emerge, due to the very startling terrific screams of the peacocks—-essentially the fault of Flannery not being able to control her birds. So, the animosity that Cookie has always felt toward Flannery is fueled again.

Jump forward a few chapters and the reader learns that Cookie’s new husband from New York, essentially a “trust-fund” boy who really doesn’t have to work, becomes fascinated with the town’s favorite eccentric author and not only begins to read her short stories, but also develops a close relationship with Flannery even going so far as to drive out to her house fairly often, but “in secret,” not daring to let on to  his new wife who certainly would not like the idea at all.

Various sub-plots, such as a early middle-aged woman having an affair with a teenaged boy, plus various other controversial relationships, wind themselves throughout the plot. Tragedy strikes the novel, not once, but twice, both in a big horrific way. One does involve Flannery, her peacocks, her country house, and Cookie’s husband and his and Cookie’s new little baby girl.

The other involves a horrifying murder. “Shocking” should not be the operative word here, if one is in-tune with Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, the author Ann Napolitano, infuses this novel with hints of O’Connor’s stories. In other words, I would say that Napolitano has crafted a novel here which is “true” to the fine Southern author herself and her subject matter.

One last thing which struck me as noteworthy about this novel, and again, being familiar with O’Connor’s stories, enables me to make this observation: grace and redemption, maybe not in their full forms, but certainly in small doses, do ring true in A Good Hard Look, for some of the characters do find a way through their chaos to befriend and help their human, as well as animal friends.

Finally, I would also surmise that Napolitano also handles Flannery, the person, with respect, especially her debilitating bouts with the disease of lupus, which finally took her life in1962. This is a novel which Mississippians and other Southerners should read, for it does take “a good hard look” at one of our very most remarkable and talented Southern writers.

A Good Hard Look is our July First Editions Club Pick.