Can’t Shake the Dust
Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing 2024) by C.H. Hooks employs three points of view to paint a full picture of a dysfunctional family in South Georgia. The alcoholic father and son are obsessed with racing—even though the father lost a leg in a racetrack accident. The recovering addict mother works in a pet store specializing in copulation, and the grandfather owns a bar that displays monkeys inside glass cages. Against that weird background, no wonder fourteen-year-old “Little” is not finding success in school. Or in life. He is bullied by classmates and sexually abused by the mother of the biggest bully. You can’t help but root for Little to find a way forward despite all the ways the world he is born into conspires against him.
Faulkner, Welty, Wright
Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence (UMiss Press 2024) contains fourteen essays. This volume turns from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.
Before We Left the Land
Before We Left the Land (Moonshine Cove Publishing 2024) by Dreama Frisk depicts the changes occurring in a small West Virginia town as the United States enters WWII. Telephones, electricity, jobs in the city, enlistment in the military—all these affect the lives of the Bancroft family and their neighbors. No lessons from the past have prepared them for what lies ahead. After Pearl Harbor, Carl enlists, and his departure affects his family in myriad ways. This is a family where each person works to make a living from the land. Daily life in the small community of Jane Lew is painted in loving detail from the canning of the harvest to prayers before meals. The absence and then the death of Carl begins the break-up of this family as they leave the land that has played such an important role for each of its members. This touching story of a changing America examines how farm families can disintegrate when their touchstones are longer holding them fast.
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