City of Refuge: A Novel

Tom Piazza

Harper: August 19, 2008

Three years ago, so many lives in Deep Dixie were affected by Katrina. Many nonfiction books of essay, memoir, photo-essay, history and commentary have been published about this life-changing hurricane. Refuge, I believe, is the first piece of serious fiction to come out about this time. Ambitious and successful, I celebrate this novel’s publication by choosing it for our September, 08 First Edition Club Selection.

Refuge deals with two families (one 9^th ward and one uptown) as we see windows into their lives and their souls. We live with these folks, as if they are real, which is a magical quality of very good fiction. Their story is told in this familiar plot as if they are breathing and somehow Tom maintains his vision of truth in fiction. Refuge is writing without too much sentimentality, neurosis and without contriteness that plagues many factual situational novels. His characters live and speak and you feel alive as a reader in knowing them. Their joys, their problems and plainly just their human ways of living and surviving.

I’m excited to be involved with promoting this novel, Tom’s my pal and I thought this book might be too much for him, I was so wrong. He excels.

Refuge is fresh, real and a serious page-turner. Oddly enough, I’m reminded of my first reading of John Grisham’s The Firm, many years ago. Good people make mistakes and you identify with their shortcomings. Troubled folks can learn how to enhance their lives and all the time, you the reader, are part of the feelings of pain, joy and truth. To the last page, Tom is successful and special with the ending, no sentimental sap here. Just the guts of survival.

In reading Refuge, I feel the heart of New Orleans vibrate with humanity and the livable party spirit which those of us who visit value and enjoy.

Anyone touched by the pain of association with this great storm, should enjoy the wisdom of this novel. And be motivated to get off your ass and go to New Orleans and party, and may haps find Chief Bo and his band of Indians chanting joy over the drums and rhythm relishing in the spirit of rebirth.

A friend brought me a copy of Growing Up In Mississippi and I have now read all of the selections included in this volume of essays---poignant memories and thoughts written by some of our most beloved and distinguished Mississippians.
Elizabeth ( Libby ) Aydelott was my friend and mentor years ago when I was a Girl Scout leader. So, reading her selection as she recounts her growing-up years in Poplarville was a rare window into her early life.
Reading the poignant selection written by Sid Salter as he spoke of his beloved sister, Sheila, filled me with such sadness at his loss.
There are many other contributers, from statesman to news anchor, novelist, watercolorist---each entry giving us a glimpse into the lives of these extraordinary individuals. A rare gift, indeed.

Well things are really coming along at Miss Eudora Welty's house. The staff members have moved their offices to the Education and Visitors Center next door to the Welty House. The Visitors Center will be used to show the orientation film (which is currently being showed in the garage) and many interpretive exhibits are being planned also. Miss Welty was always a great friend to Lemuria and we hope that after you tour the house that you will come on up the highway and visit us! We have a great selection of Miss Welty's work along with some very nice signed first editions. Of course, when Miss Welty stopped by one could always find her perusing the Mystery section which I hope that she would still find up to her specifications!

If you are interested in making reservations to tour The Welty House, call 601.353.7762 and follow this link for a virtual tour.

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, 2008, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95

I am excited about our author event tonight (Thursday, March 20th, starting at 5:00 pm), we will be hosting Hillary Jordan. You may have seen one of the many reviews of her new book, Mudbound, in a magazine or online site...everywhere you turn, this book is being reviewed. And the reviews are fantastic! I wholeheartedly agree with the glowing reviews. This novel was very good. I am partial to Southern fiction, and especially stories written with Mississippi as the location. While the story takes place in a dark period in Mississippi's past, Ms. Jordan describes the grand Delta region as if she had lived there all her life. The characters are so real and down to earth, like most people from the Delta are. Her descriptions of the families' struggles with the land and with 1940s racism are so strong that the reader feels like he/she is living in that period of time. I loved how Ms. Jordan wrote each chapter from the point of view of several of the key characters, so you get each person's perspective of the same events. I am looking forward to her reading some excerpts tonight. Please join us, and if you miss it, please don't miss out on a good read!!!

Joshilyn Jackson's new book, the girl who stopped swimming, is her best yet. I have really enjoyed her two previous novel, gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia and was excited to get my hands on this one. I found this great article in Publishers Weekly and I thought I would share it with you.

Everyday Ghosts

Joshilyn Jackson's suburban gothics are thrilling readers.

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/21/2008

All Southerners believe in ghosts,” says Joshilyn Jackson, whose third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, out this March from Grand Central, opens with a middle-of-the-night visit from the ghost of a teenage girl. The novel's protagonist, Laurel Hamilton, is used to haunting (her dead uncle appears regularly), but this ghost is unfamiliar and leads Laurel to the dead body of Laurel's teenage daughter's friend, Molly, floating in the pool. The ensuing story could be called “Suburban Gothic,” filled with both real and spectral figures coming to haunt her gated community in Pensacola, Fla.

Jackson, 39, began her writing career after years of struggling as an actress in regional theater; both her previous novels, Gods in Alabama (Warner Books, 2005) and Between, Georgia (Warner Books, 2007), were #1 Book Sense picks, making Jackson the first author to have back-to-back top picks. Gods has more than 200,000 copies in print; Between, Georgia, 150,000.

Still, the Georgia author's renown as a novelist remains primarily Southern. Jackson lives in Powder Springs, Ga., with her husband and two children, 10-year-old Sam (named for Samuel Beckett) and five year-old Maisey (named for the Henry James novel What Maisie Knew). But Grand Central Publishing believes The Girl Who Stopped Swimming will be her breakout book, banking on the gated suburban setting resonating with readers across the country. The plan is a 75,000 first printing, with two more novels contracted for.

In person, Jackson exudes the charisma of a stage actress, with a speaking voice that won her a PW Listen Up award for the audiobook version of Between, Georgia. Acting also surfaces in the character of Thalia, Laurel's loose-cannon older sister in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, who runs a black boxtheater in Birmingham, Ala. After Laurel finds the dead girl in her pool, she turns to Thalia for help.

“Laurel and Thalia is that virgin/whore thing that all Southern girls have,” she says, admitting that her “strong sense of decorum” was difficult to overcome early on. “Now I've learned to set a character on fire and see what happens.”

Though there are literal ghosts in Jackson's latest novel, she acknowedges that: “The real ghost in the book is poverty,” adding that it's a very personal topic to her.

Jackson's maternal grandmother grew up in a town very much like the fictional DeLop in Girl. “The book,” says Jackson, “was an effort to empathize with the grandmother with whom I have not spoken in 20 years. My grandmother was a sharecropper. I remember driving through the town with her when I was a child and her saying things like 'that's my corn, those are my trees, that's my house.' But none of it was hers—she just felt the way she did because of the work she put into that land.” Living in such grinding poverty left her grandmother obsessed with social propriety, but emotionally aloof.

In the novel, Laurel's mother—who is obsessed with propriety—is a stand-in for Jackson's grandmother. DeLop represents the shameful past Laurel is trying to outrun—she never lets her husband, Dave, or daughter, Shelby, visit it—but she inadvertently invites the past into her life in the form of Bet, an at-risk teenage girl from DeLop who starts as Shelby's pen pal and ends up as a house guest.

In the same way that her family's history has been injected into her fiction, Jackson has started taking elements from her fiction and turning them into reality. To mark the publication of Between, Georgia, Jackson took a totem that appears in the book—a statue of a little fox—and gave versions of it as gifts to bookstores where she toured. This time, she commissioned a quilt based on a design that Laurel, a fabric artist herself, is working on in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. That quilt, called The Bride, will accompany Jackson when she sets off on her 17-city book tour, which for the first time will extend beyond the South to include cities from San Francisco to Albany, N.Y.

“I guess I always wished, as a little girl, that I could reach into books and pull things out of them,” says Jackson, “Now, I can.” The thing she couldn't conjure through her writing, though, was a real ghost. “I'm probably too much of a pragmatist to see ghosts,” she says. “But I do believe in quantum physics and the idea that there is not lost energy—just energy that reconfigures itself. Who hasn't walked into a room at one time or another and felt the hairs rise on the back of their neck?”

I must confess that I haven't read much Southern Fiction lately. I have been swimming in a sea of intrigue (I cannot get enough of Tudor England) and blood (I have taken over the mystery section)! That being said, I wasn't really sure that I was going to like Mudbound when Joe brought me an advanced copy and asked me to take a look at it. I took it home to read a few chapters over the weekend and came back to work on Monday having finished the book and let everyone know that I loved it!

The story takes place in the Mississippi Delta in 1946. It centers around two families, The McAllans and The Jacksons. The Jacksons are share tenants on the McAllan's recently purchased farm. Laura McAllan is trying to learn "the ropes" of country living and enlists the help of Florence Jackson to help her around the house. Both families have family members fighting in the war, Laura's bother-in-law, Jamie and Ronsel, the eldest Jackson son. Both men come home around the same time and develop a secret friendship that causes trouble for both families. "The men and women of each family relate their versions of events as they see them, and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale."

Hillary Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. Mudbound is her first novel and has been awarded the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingslover to recognize literature of social responsibility. She will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 5:00. Please come by and congratulate her on this novel whose characters and storyline will stay with you long after you have finished this story of the Jim Crow South.

"This is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm." --Barbara Kingsolver

John Grisham's newest thriller, The Appeal, will be available on January 30, so let us know if you'd like to be on the list to get a signed first edition. We should be able to get them signed before Valentine's Day.

John Grisham's new book, Playing for Pizza, is out! The novels are for sale now but if you want a signed copy call us and let us reserve one (or 10!) for you... They will make great gifts. Check out Grisham on Colbert!

Robert Dalby was in the store last night - we asked him these 5 questions:

Title: Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly

Describe your book in 50 words of less: A sequel to Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly - which is a quirky humorous exploration of a Delta town, Second Creek, Mississippi and its eccentric citizens. Kissing focuses on a mayoral election campaign effort by the former owner of the Piggly Wiggly, Mr. Choppy Dunbar, and the support he receives from the Nitwitts - a widow's club.

What aisle at your Piggly Wiggly was your favorite?: Produce. I love Veggies!

Are the Nitwitts loosely based on real women?: Yes, they are. There is a club in Mobile, Alabama, of women of a certain age which gave me permission to use a variation of their club spelling and some of their anecdotes.

What three things would you want with you on a desert island?: Water, bananas, sunblock.

What are you reading this summer?: My own chapters of the third novel in this series which is in progress.

After teaching English for 13 years at Motlow State College in Tullahoma, Tenn., decorated author Howard Bahr says "it's good to be back home in the South again."

Geography experts, listen up.

"To me, Tennessee is not a Southern state," explains Bahr, a Mississippi native who is living in Jackson and will be teaching writing classes at Belhaven College in the fall. "Tennessee is lovely, but more of a border state in my mind.

"The people of Mississippi are friendlier and kinder to one another, more tolerant of one another. There's a certain grace about the people in the Deep South that is lacking in other areas."

Bahr's definition of the Deep South consists of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. And it is in that region in which the 61-year-old Bahr wants to spend his days writing, living and "contributing to the community."

"There is a sense of energy and creativity in Jackson - lots of artists and writers, and I'd like to have a membership card," says Bahr, whose 1997 Civil War novel The Black Flower earned him the prestigious Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book.

John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books in Jackson, says Bahr's return to Mississippi - particularly to Jackson - "should be a point of pride for all of us."

"We've lost a lot of our great writers here in Jackson," says Evans, referring to the deaths of Willie Morris, Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker Alexander in recent years. "Howard Bahr is a serious literary writer. In a state known for serious writers, I think it's extremely important to have a great writer living in our community.

"Plus," Evans adds with a chuckle, "he's a really fun guy to be around."

Bahr, a veteran of the Vietnam War, followed The Black Flower with two more Civil War novels - The Year of Jubilo and The Judas Field, which has just been released in paperback.

"They formed a trilogy, which I never meant to happen," says Bahr, a former professor at the University of Mississippi and the curator at William Faulkner's Oxford home, Rowan Oak, for nine years. "But I think I've written about all I can on the Civil War. I don't anticipate any more of those."

His next book, Pelican Road, has been purchased by MacAdam Cage of San Francisco and is in the editing stages. It is due out next spring.

"It's a book about working on the railroad," says Bahr, who spent five years as a railroad yard clerk and brakeman from 1968 through 1973. "There have been lots of kids books done on railroads and trains, but never a serious book about what it used to be like working on the railroad when they had cabooses and used hand signals and all that."

And even though Bahr doesn't have a concrete idea for another book, he still goes to his computer every night to see what his subconscience might offer.

"Writing is a compulsion," he says. "I think most artists will tell you that ... the painter has to go to his studio, the potter has to go to his wheel.

"If I don't sit down and at least write a few sentences or paragraphs and see what comes out, I feel like I haven't done my duty for the day."

Check out this NYT review of our friend Pia Z. Erhardt's Famous Fathers - our June First Editions Club selection - and it looks like the publisher is out of First Editions.

The new issue of the Oxford American just got here. Lots of our friends in there - Jack Pendarvis is the guest editor. He must be a busy guy - moving to Oxford and with a new book out. Some other buddies in this issue are Ron Rash, Bret Anthony Johnston, Michael Parker, Brock Clarke (he's got a new book coming out in the fall - really good stuff), Roy Blount, John T. Edge, Beth Ann Fennelly, and George Singleton. Let me know if I can send you a copy. joe@lemuriabooks.com

Check out this video of author Tito Perdue. He'll be signing and reading at the store on July 25. His Publisher compares him to Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, but I think he reads more like a Southern Kafka. Here's what a few other folks say:

"(Lee) contains some of the most heartfelt, lively, funny, and wicked rants I've ever read... Tito Perdue is, without question, one of the most important contemporary Southern writers we have--and should certainly be considered among the most important American writers of the early 21st Century." - The New York Press

"A spellbinding work... Perdue has touched at a very American nerve--a very Southern nerve which sends our lives and his imagination on a collision course to revelations." - New England Review of Books

"Written with uncompromising venom, Perdue's stunning novel tells us more than we might want to know. The author's obvious talent and uncanny wit are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett." - Booklist

As you can see this is about the best copy of Willie Morris' Good Old Boy that you can find. I just got it in. It's signed, but also has a personal inscription. Perfect Dad's day gift.

It's hard to say what Larry Brown means to Mississippians and Southern Literature. I'll never forget that day - the day before Thanksgiving 2004 when Richard Howarth told me that Larry was gone. I haven't read the new book yet. I felt like I needed to go back and re-read some vintage Larry and remember why he stands so large in Southern Lit.

Frank Turner Hollon is one of those authors that has become a friend to our bookstore. He is a lawyer in Fairhope, Alabama and is one of the authors that has been featured in Sonny Brewer's Blue Moon Cafe series. We have picked one of his books for our first editions club, and another is being made into a movie starring Luke Wilson. LIFE IS A STRANGE PLACE is probably the funniest book I have ever read, and I don't typically like funny books. Frank is coming back to the store on Friday for his new book - BLOOD AND CIRCUMSTANCE - a suspense novel told entirely through the pre-trial interviews of a man who has killed his brother. As you can see, Frank's books are diverse in subject manner. Anyway, come and meet Frank for yourself, or check out his books.