Zora Neale Hurston’s is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  (more…)

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It was with great interest—and, perhaps, skepticism, for I myself taught English in Japan—that I read Faulkner Studies in Japan, an assemblage of critical essays written and translated by Japanese academics and edited by American Thomas L. McHaney, professor of literature at Georgia State University.  Whisking eagerly through the pages of this significant, insightful book, I learned, to my surprise, that Faulkner’s reputation in Japan has been, for six decades, mostly favorable, despite that his “works are difficult to read, even in his own country” (xiii).

Though my brief stint as sensei didn’t lend itself to instruction in unconventional, stream-of-consciousness fiction—just getting my pre-teen students to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha” would’ve been inconceivable—other sensei have taught Faulkner with relative, if not outright, success.  (more…)

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Reading John Pritchard’s Junior Ray is like sitting in a rocking chair, on the front porch, a beer in your hand, listening to some trash-talking, sheep-screwing redneck—Mr. Junior Ray Loveblood—ramble on about, well, whatever comes to mind.  Junior Ray is the racist, rascally protagonist of this explosive little novel, which, with its roots in oral tradition, recalls Joel Chandler Harris’s The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or, more recently, Gayle Jones’s Eva’s Man.  But caveat emptor:  it’s far more profane than any of these books. (more…)

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Through the Pale Door is a coming of age story set in Columbia, South Carolina. Sarah West, the female protagonist is a recent high school graduate from Marietta, Georgia who packs up and leaves her psychotic mom to live with her dad. He gives her a summer job at the steel mill he manages so she can earn some money before going to Emory in the fall. It doesn’t take long for her to meet and fall in love with Edgewood, a fellow mill worker and artist who secretly paints murals around town and lives in an abandoned jail. (more…)

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Joshilyn Jackson’s “Between, Georgia” reminds us that we are not lonely people. No matter where our lives take us, our families will follow.  When we meet our narrator, Nonny Jane, she is recounting the story of her birth and simultaneously introducing us to a small town family feud that will grow up with her. Born a distinctly red-headed Crabtree, Nonny comes to belong to the Frett family whose members include three dark-haired, thick-skinned sisters: Bernese, the town matriarch, and her twin siblings Genny and Stacia. It is Stacia, born def and destined to lose her eye sight by middle age, who decides that the Frett family will raise Nonny. (more…)

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If you were asked to imagine an ongoing chronicle of life in the American South from the late 1600’s through the 1970’s, you might picture snapshots of agriculture, slavery, the Civil War and segregation. Nicholas and Dallas Reed’s “Deep Family” offers a different take on Southern life as it was experienced by three, progressive, wealthy families (the Baldwins, Craiks and Reads) living in Montgomery, Alabama.

Elaborating far beyond typical family lore, Nicholas and his wife, Dallas, weave family myths with information gathered from 500 plus letters they discover in Nicholas’ mother’s attic and in other heirloom boxes. (more…)

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Women hear voices. Some are the voices of those that they love and care for, some are voices that come from the mouths of men they’ve met only once in their lives and some are voices that can only be described as divine. Reading Darnell Arnoult’s “Sufficient Grace” reminded me that most of the women in my life are taking care to listen to the world around them in tandem with the world inside of themselves. In the space that exists between listening and reacting, these women find their inspiration.

Gracie Hollaman is a woman who begins paying more attention to her own voices at the opening of the book, when the messages and omens in her life are only just beginning to make sense to her. When her husband, Ed, comes home to a well-cooked meal with Gracie’s shredded credit cards in the center of his dining room table and a missing Buick, he only begins to understand that the woman he has been married to for thirty years has been “called” away. (more…)

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In the 1950s in Drexel, Mississippi, the color barrier remains rigidly in place with each race understanding their sphere. Jade Dupree is raised by her black adopted parents, Jonah and Ruth, although her biological mother is the very socially powerful white Lucille. Jade’s half sister Marlena is married to the wealthiest and most powerful figures in town, Lucas Bramlet. Marlena treats Jade like a servant paying her for services rendered including watching her daughter Suzanna.

Marlena accompanied by Suzanna meets her lover, a traveling salesman, by the river. However, men wearing masks attack them. Marlena is rushed to the hospital while Suzanna has vanished. Jade is there watching over Marlena but her husband is at home waiting for a ransom.  (more…)