Author: Leonard Gill

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

And for young readers, Icarus at the Edge of Time.

Heady stuff but written for a wide audience, and all four books are by physicist, best-selling author, and popular speaker Brian Greene of Columbia University.

[jump]

This week, Greene will be speaking at Rhodes College as guest of the “Communities in Conversation” series on Thursday, March 5th, beginning at 6 p.m. The event — free, open to the public, and including a book signing — is inside the MCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center. Greene will be lecturing on “The Cosmos: From the Big Bang to the End of Time.”

The big bang theory: Greene’s not only good at explaining it, he was once on it.

And maybe you’ve seen him on The Colbert Report or talking to David Letterman. Or on the PBS series Greene did for Nova, “The Fabric of the Universe.” Or on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” “Morning Edition,” and “All Things Considered,” in addition to appearing in several commercial films.

On the air at WKNO FM is where Greene was recently when Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes interviewed him. You can listen to their talk here. And for more information on Brian Greene’s appearance in Memphis on Thursday night, go here and on Facebook. Or contact Jonathan Judaken, the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, at judakenj@rhodes.edu. •

It took Memphian Jeffrey Stayton 18 years of background research but only six weeks or so to compose This Side of the River (Nautilus Publishing), a novel that takes place following the end of the Civil War in 1865. That puts publication of This Side of the River 150 years after Appomattox, but it’s unlike any Civil War novel you’ve read, and the author, who teaches modern American literature at the University of Mississippi’s satellite locations in north Mississippi, knows it.

“It used to be a big tangle of baroque language where you couldn’t even find the verb,” Stayton said of the manuscript that led up to this, his debut novel. “Two-thirds of the way through that manuscript, widows started showing up — widows who were irate and on horseback with guns. Every time they showed up, it would kick things up a notch or two. I thought: Okay, here’s where the ‘life’ of the story is. As a writer, you follow the ‘life.’ Now the story is lean, more minimalist, more of a page-turner, and I’m like, thank God.”

[jump]

Lean it is at 240 pages. So was one of the novels that inspired it: As I Lay Dying. Page-turner? This Side of the River is that too once disoriented but alert readers get their bearings.

Doesn’t hurt that Stayton has kept the chapters short and that he’s titled those chapters according to the character narrating. And what a tight-fitting mosaic of characters it is: Southern women (widowed or not, but most of them raging mad); white men (both the gray and the blue and still spoiling for a fight); freedmen and -women (still serving according to their prewar slave status); and at the center of this series of unconventional, interlocking narratives: a Texas Ranger teenager named Catullus McGregor Harvey, “Cat” Harvey for short.

Cat’s plan is to lead a “regiment” of armed widows on horseback out of the South and up to Ohio in order to torch the home of William Tecumseh Sherman. That plan, readers realize soon enough, is as unhinged as the man who devised it. But the outrage of these women-warriors is real.

“The world has done turnt upside down and tipped over,” Cat says near the end of This Side of the River.

He might have added that the world’s been turnt inside out. Cat, for example, dresses in widow’s weeds and paints his face in circus-clown makeup. He’s often coked up on Vin Mariani and at one point adopts another circus element: an elephant named Goliath. He also sexually assaults several of the women in his charge, but he makes men of these women too — traumatized Southern women bent on revenge in the name of their lost husbands and destroyed towns and farms.

“What do I want?” Cat asks when questioned. “I want to light a fire in the North what them that lit the fires in the South have not yet seen.”

What’s a mysterious character named Darkish Llewellyn, a moral focal point in this landscape of ruined lives, to do? Bear witness and listen as even the rocks cry out for mercy, not justice.

Again, this is not your average novel of the Civil War. This is not your average novel, period. The author thinks of it as “literary noir.”

“I’m a sucker for revenge stories, gangster films,” Stayton said in a phone interview. “And yeah, the novel is definitely literary, in that there’s no single narrator. It also deals with some of the darker aspects of human nature.”

That’s putting it mildly. But was Stayton hesitant to write in the voices of so many women, 19th-century women? His years of visiting battlefields, researching, and reading — diaries and memoirs of the period, county and state archives, biographies such as T.J. Stiles’ Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War — certainly show in Stayton’s handling of customs and dress, attitudes and speech. Stayton described all that research as his “launching pad” to the inner lives of his characters. But the faculty at Ole Miss — where Stayton, a Texas native, received his Ph.D. in English — provided him with something else: confidence. They encouraged their writing students to, in Stayton’s words, “go there” — go ahead, write, and see where it takes you.

According to Stayton, “Barry Hannah, Cynthia Shearer, and Tom Franklin encouraged us to not worry with: How can I, a white male writer, write in the voice of whoever? They gave us permission. They encouraged us to be daring. I had a lot of fun ‘inhabiting’ the characters in This Side of the River and seeing what stories they had to tell.”

For the consequences of the Civil War on soldiers and civilians alike, Stayton looked to contemporary sources, such as the lives of child soldiers in today’s Africa and to accounts of post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition during the Civil War referred to as “nostalgia” or “soldier’s heart.”

“Men were not allowed to express how they felt during the Civil War, and the character of Cat Harvey was a way for me to gain access to that world of wounded warriors,” Stayton said. “I wanted readers to have a visceral reaction to him as a human being, to sense that Cat’s descent into madness is an expression of self-loathing. He’s a very violent, awful person. But he’s also committing all kinds of horrific actions against himself — his widow’s weeds and clown makeup are a provocation to the world … that the world kill him. I wanted to paint a portrait of a man who’s broken.”

And here’s another thing: In addition to being a writer, Stayton is a painter who borrows from the cubists for his oils on canvas. As in Faulkner and other literary modernists, so too the visual artists who presented multiple viewpoints within a single frame. Or as Stayton put it, “You may not have one authorized viewpoint. What you have is a full spectrum.”

Stayton is in the process of giving voice to that spectrum: He’s working with Archer Records in Memphis on an audio version of This Side of the River, due to be released in April or May. He’s drawn from actors at the Hattiloo Theatre and Chatterbox in Memphis, from actors in Oxford, Mississippi, and from nonactors such as local writers Corey Mesler and Richard Alley. Stayton, who tried his hand at stand-up comedy in the 1990s, has cast himself too: as William Tecumseh Sherman and as a character in the novel known as the Ringmaster. He said he still has to perform the eulogy to Goliath the elephant. But his days behind the microphone as a stand-up comedian are long gone:

“I had a lot of fun doing it. I even won a stand-up competition at Texas Tech. But that’s a young man’s game. You have to be fearless.” •

Jeffrey Stayton will be reading from and signing copies of This Side of the River at Burke’s Book Store, 936 S. Cooper, on Thursday, February 26th, 5:30-7 p.m., with the reading beginning at 6 p.m. To reserve a signed copy or for more information, call Burke’s at 278-7484.

If you’ve never read “The Fourth State of Matter,” read it right now or real soon. If it’s been years since you read it (reprinted in the collection The Boys of My Youth, 1999), read it again. It’s must-read, and it’s been impressing writers and readers for nearly 20 years.

“The Fourth State of Matter” is by Jo Ann Beard, and, as Amy Day Wilkinson reminded us last year, it was first published in The New Yorker’s June 24, 1996, issue — the magazine’s fiction issue. But Beard’s piece isn’t fiction. It’s based on real life, Beard’s life, which is why the magazine headed it “Personal History.” The New Yorker ran it because of its high artistry, and you’re welcome to argue over genres all you want.

[jump]

On Wednesday, February 25th, welcome to Memphis Jo Ann Beard, who teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She’ll be guest of the University of Memphis’ River City Writers Series and reading from her work on the third floor of the school’s University Center at 8 p.m. that night. The next morning, at 10:30 a.m., Beard will be interviewed in Room 456 of Patterson Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

But back to that question of categories … Wilkinson wrote that Beard works “between genres.” Wilkinson also reminded us that the novel In Zanesville (2011), Beard’s second book, also skirted categories: It began as a young-adult novel, but it was published as adult fiction. And that’s not all Wilkinson filled us in on. Beard studied painting as an undergraduate, then she switched to writing. But she’s also worked as a secretary, then graduated, according to Beard, to “glorified secretary.” Beard wasn’t done yet. Again according to Beard in an interview, also cited by Wilkinson: “For a while in my early forties I had a job stapling. It was actually fun but then it started bothering my back.”

Something bothered Beard too about the writing life at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs. As the essay by Beard titled “The Boys of My Youth” tells it (and as Beard told a friend at the time): “I hate it here; why did I come here? All there is to do is write.”

Wilkinson was right to point out that passage as a good example of Beard’s dry wit. Just as Wilkinson was right to call The Boys of My Youth a “genre-defining collection.” Or should that read “genre-defying”? Better to take the simpler path, as writer and critic Francine Prose did when she summed up In Zanesville in two words: “must-read.”

For more information on Jo Ann Beard this week at the University of Memphis and for writer Liz Robbins’ upcoming visit in April, go here or contact the director of the River City Writers Series, Sonja Livingston, at slvngst2@memphis.edu.

. . .

Talk about genres … On the same night Jo Ann Beard is reading at the U of M, Sarah Ruden is at Rhodes to deliver the school’s annual Batey Lecture, named after Rhodes’ longtime New Testament scholar Richard Batey.

Ruden, currently a visiting scholar at Brown University, will be delivering a talk titled “Divine Comedy, Earlier Than You Think: Vergil, Augustine, the Bible” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Hardie Auditorium of Palmer Hall. But Ruden isn’t only a respected translator of Greek and Roman classics. She’s an author, essayist, and award-winning poet in her own right, which helps explain the high praise Ruden received for her version of Vergil’s Aeneid (2008). Historian, journalist, and writer on religion Garry Wills put that praise in more than two words: “the first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself.”

For more information about Sarah Ruden at Rhodes on Wednesday night, go here or contact Patrick Gray of the school’s Department of Religious Studies at grayp@rhodes.edu.

. . .

One religion, Judaism, is at the root of Greenhorn … and not only Judaism but dark remnants of the Holocaust. The story, set mostly in a postwar New York City yeshiva, is an important lesson in friendship as well, and it was told in a book for young readers called Greenhorn in 2012 by native Memphian Anna Olswanger. Olswanger based Greenhorn on the true tale told by Rafael Grossman, rabbi emeritus of Baron Hirsch Congregation in Memphis. And now Greenhorn is a short film, co-produced by Olswanger and written for the screen and directed by Tom Whitus.

The film premiered in New York last October at the Museum of Tolerance, thanks to another Memphian, Jane Fraser of the Stuttering Foundation. Greenhorn is having its local premiere when it screens this week during the second annual Morris and Mollye Fogelman International Jewish Film Festival.

Greenhorn will be shown, along with five other movies, as part of the short-film competition on Thursday, February 26th, beginning at 7:30 p.m. inside the Belz Theater at the Memphis Jewish Community Center (6560 Poplar). Tickets are $7; $5 for MJCC members.

For more information on the entire film festival, which is running now and continues through March 1st, go here. Tickets can purchased online at jccmemphis.org/film; by calling the MJCC at 901-761-0810; or by visiting the center. For any other questions, contact Amy Israel, the MJCC’s director of Cultural Arts and Judaic Enrichment, at 901-761-0810 or aisrael@jccmemphis.org. •

The weather may not be the best this week, but Wednesday and Thursday are just fine in Memphis for writers and signings.

Native Memphian Alan Lightman (right), whose new memoir, Screening Room (subject of the Flyer’s book column that appears on Wednesday), will be at story booth (438 N. Cleveland) to read from, discuss, and sign his book on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

And the same night, Tim Johnston, of the creative writing program at the University of Memphis, will be doing the same: reading from, discussing, and signing his critically acclaimed debut novel, Descent.

[jump]

Johnston will be at the U of M’s University Center Bluff Room, with a reception at 5:30 p.m. and the reading at 6 p.m. For more information and any questions about Johnston’s signing, presented by the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities, contact Robert Marczynski at marczyns@memphis.edu. And for more on Descent, go to the writeup that accompanied Johnston’s own recent reading at story booth.

Descent is a suspense story set in motion when a high school track star goes missing in the Colorado Rockies, and it follows what becomes of not only her but of the anguished family left behind. Fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson is another high school runner, but she doesn’t go missing in the pages of another debut novel: M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away (Putnam). Lindy does meet with her own trauma, however, when she is raped one night on her quiet, upscale street in Baton Rouge. Among the suspects, back in 1989 when the incident occurred, is a 14-year-old boy who lived across from Lindy, and he suffered from more than a serious schoolboy crush. He unwittingly helped to ruin the next several years of Lindy Simpson’s life.

Like Descent, this is a suspense novel, and it may be aimed at adult readers. But it can easily be read by young adults too — should be read by young-adult male readers. What does it mean to be a man? What’s it take to grow into one? Those are core questions in My Sunshine Away, and it takes the narrator, now in his 30s, half a lifetime to puzzle over the tough questions and arrive at some not-so-easy answers in what amounts to a 300-page case study on the damage men — and some boys — do. A beautifully written and unsparing coming-of-age story, the novel can also descend, as Johnston’s harrowing novel does, to downright creepy.

M.O. Walsh grew up in Baton Rouge, graduated from the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, and now directs the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans and the Yokshop Writers Conference in Oxford. He’ll be discussing and signing My Sunshine Away at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., and it’s the latest event in the store’s “Literary Tastemakers” series.

Another series continues Wednesday night when “Communities in Conversation” at Rhodes College welcomes Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton, to discuss “The History of White People,” based on her book of that title published in 2010. The lecture, free and open to the public, will take place inside the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center at 6 p.m., with a book signing to follow.

What does Painter mean by a history of white people? What does “white” even mean, what has it meant across history and cultures? Jonathan Judaken of Rhodes asked those same questions in a recent 30-minute interview with Painter that aired on his radio show on WKNO FM, “Counterpoint.” The interview is well worth your attention if you can’t make it to Painter’s lecture. If you do make it, you’ll already know what an impressive communicator she is. To Judaken’s question about that phrase “post-racial era” when Obama was elected president, you can turn today’s headlines for an update. Or you can take Painter’s word for it — actually, two words: “Total poppycock.”

For more information on Nell Irvin Painter’s lecture and book signing and on the “Communities in Conversation” series, go to Facebook.com/Communities.in.Conversation or Twitter @Rhodes_CiC, or contact Jonathan Judaken, Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, at judakenj@rhodes.edu. •

Memphis poet Tara Mae Mulroy, author of the chapbook Philomela (Dancing Girl Press), teaches middle school Latin at St. George’s Independent School, so it’s no surprise that she’s often inspired by the gods and goddesses of classical mythology: Persephone and Hades, for example, in Mulroy’s poem “A Letter” or Hera and Zeus in “On Our Anniversary.”

Those two poems are from Mulroy’s nearly four dozen poems in her unpublished collection called Swallow Tongue, and she’ll be reading from her work on Friday night at story booth on North Cleveland.

[jump]

The event, organized by another Memphis poet, Heather Dobbins, is part of the “Impossible Language” poetry reading series, which this Friday night will also welcome two other writers: Memphis poet Bobby C. Rogers, professor of English and writer-in-residence at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and Massachusetts poet Elizabeth Witte, author of the chapbook Dry Eye (Dancing Girl Press) and an editor at the literary website The Common.

Swallow Tongue is Mulroy’s first full-length manuscript, and if it often references ancient myth, it also puts the reader between a rock and a hard place: “Scylla” opens the collection; “Charybdis” closes it. At least for now. As Mulroy explained in a recent phone interview, “I love that phrase — “between Scylla and Charybdis” — but I don’t know if readers will know about it or know what it means. I just wanted to play with it. It may not work even for me in a couple months.”

Which is okay, since Mulroy is still shopping the manuscript around to publishers. The collection started as her thesis requirement for an MFA at the University of Memphis (where Mulroy worked with John Bensko, after working with Tina Barr at Rhodes College). She’s sent the manuscript to several presses, but she’s also gone back in, written new poems to add to the manuscript, re-edited older ones, reorganized the sequence, or scrapped some poems entirely, so that, according to the author, “the manuscript as a whole is very new to me.”

Just as the mythological stories that have inspired Mulroy may be new to readers. Doesn’t mean readers won’t be moved by the poems in Swallow Tongue. Those poems can be in the form of traditional verse. They may be prose poems. They can be violent or loving, bloody or tender, sorrowful or celebratory, but all of them are artful, be it the stuff of myth or contemporary life.

“The poems may be loosely based on myths,” Mulroy said, “but I wanted them to still be accessible to readers who don’t know the myths at all.”

Inspiration can come from anyplace, Mulroy added, and that includes a popular song or an episode of Parks & Recreation. “When you’re open to inspiration,” she said, “you end up hearing it everywhere.”

You can also take inspiration from one’s own experience, though Mulroy said her work needn’t be read strictly autobiographically. She does, however, admit to feeling emotionally connected to Greek and Roman mythical figures. “Hera being left by her husband?” Mulroy said. “That feels autobiographical, but on a detailed level: not at all.

“It’s hard for me to write about specific personal things in my own poetry, because I find I can always express what I need to without recounting the tiny details. The story comes out differently [in the poems], but the feelings are always the same.”

As in Mulroy’s poem “Hurricane Andrew,” from Part I of Swallow Tongue, which does borrow from the poet’s own life.

“That poem details a girl’s father having a heart attack and the doctor saying, ‘He died on the table.’

“That really happened. My father had a stress heart attack when I was 9, and the doctor came out and told my mother that he had died on the table, but they were able to bring him back. In ‘Hurricane Andrew,’ I followed the idea all the way through, imagining what it might have been like if my father had died — imagining a moment that seems small in my memory, but [making it] greater, scarier.”

In Part II of Swallow Tongue, the moments can take on an added dramatic edge, and that’s nowhere better illustrated than in the ambiguous lines from “The Swamp Wife”: “ … Love is knowing/another’s breaking point.”

The third section of the collection includes more recent poems, and they often deal with failed pregnancy — again, if not autobiographically then certainly inspired by Mulroy’s own difficulties and frustrations, as in this line from “How to Talk About Your Miscarriages”: “Motherhood a country you weren’t meant to reach.” Or this from “For the Baby I’ll Never Have”: “The Greeks once fixed broken pots with gold./Each repaired seam lovelier than the terra cotta./Damage has a history, they thought, damage/is beautiful.”

Given these serious concerns, Mulroy’s latest writing project is a big change of pace for the poet. The project is a young-adult, sci-fi novel, and for a writer who’s written realistic literary fiction under Stephen Schottenfeld at Rhodes and Cary Holladay at the U of M, the book has so far been, according to Mulroy, fun to write, even if she isn’t sure where the story will lead.

“I’m 80 pages in!” she said. “And there’s something about writing fiction. It has this fantasy attached to it: I’ll just sell this, and I won’t have to do my day job. I thought, let me try it.”

“Try it. See what it’s like”: That’s also what Mulroy said to those who have never been to a poetry reading or never been to “Impossible Language,” a series she heartily supports.

“Ashley Roach Freeman [who created and hosts “Impossible Language”] and Heather Dobbins have done such a great job making poetry more a part of Memphis,” Mulroy said. “Memphis has a quiet poetry scene, but it’s getting louder.” •

“Impossible Language” with readings by Tara Mae Mulroy, Bobby C. Rogers, and Elizabeth Witte is Friday, February 6th, 7:30 p.m. at story booth, 438 N. Cleveland.

Want to meet a trio of visiting authors and do your part to promote literacy in Memphis?

The authors are debut novelist Natalie Baszile, best-selling novelist Patti Callahan Henry, and award-winning Mississippi novelist Michael Farris Smith, and they are this year’s featured writers at the Literacy Is Key luncheon and book signing presented by the Memphis Kappa Kappa Gamma Alumnae Association. The event will take place at the Holiday Inn-University of Memphis (3700 Central) on Thursday, January 29th, beginning at 10 a.m.

[jump]

All three authors are Southerners or have Southern roots, and all three have had books published in paperback in the past year. Baszile will be signing her Louisiana-set Queen Sugar (in paperback this month from Penguin), Henry will be signing her South Carolina story And Then I Found You (St. Martin’s Griffin), and Smith will be signing his post-Katrina, Gulf Coast novel Rivers (Simon & Schuster).

Literacy is indeed the key for this event. The Memphis Alumnae Association of Kappa Kappa Gamma Fraternity — a nationwide women’s organization founded in the 19th century to promote leadership, learning, and philanthropy — presented its first annual Literacy Is Key luncheon/author fund-raiser in 2011. It’s been growing in attendance ever since. First Book, the national nonprofit that provides low-income, at-risk children with new books, is the beneficiary — with increased literacy among Memphis children the goal of the local alumnae group.

Individual tickets to the Literacy Is Key program and luncheon on January 29th are $55 each, with tables available for groups. Go to the organization’s website for tickets and for more information. The Booksellers at Laurelwood will be handling books for the event. •

In an interview with his publisher and included in the publicity materials to his debut novel, author Tim Johnston talked about literary fiction (the kind he was schooled in at the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst) and the other kind, the fiction he’d grown up on and always been excited by: plot-driven page-turners — in Johnston’s own words, “the kind of story I loved to read before I knew the world made a distinction between a great story and great writing.”

[jump]

Descent (Algonquin Books), Johnston’s debut novel, is both — a story that, in broad outline, reads as if borrowed from today’s sensationalized headlines, but it’s a story with more to it than any one headline could convey.

“Gone Girl”? Yes, Descent is an abduction/suspense story, and the girl at the center of it is a high school track star named Caitlin Courtland. When the book opens, she’s 18 and headed for college in the fall, until, on a family vacation and while jogging in the Rockies near the Great Divide, she goes missing, with only her brother, age 15, as semiconscious witness to what happened.

Months then years later, Caitlin is still missing, and her parents and brother are as separated from one another as Caitlin is from them. Her father, Grant, has stayed in Colorado on the off-chance that a clue to his daughter’s whereabouts (or remains) might materialize. Caitlin’s mother, Angela, has returned to Wisconsin, where the family lived and where she descends deeper into her own past and present griefs. And Caitlin’s brother, Sean, has taken off, alone, to drive from Wisconsin back to Colorado to join his father. But before reaching his father, the boy is full witness to more lessons in just how unjust (and random) the world can be.

Interwoven throughout these and other intersecting plot lines there is Caitlin, whose story we follow in fragments and according to the resourceful girl’s limited sense impressions, until, in the closing pages of Descent, her nightmare predicament reaches a shocking finish.

Yes, Caitlin’s suffering is rendered in raw detail. But there is throughout Descent Tim Johnston’s lyricism, a feature of his writing that must have caught the judge’s eye when he was awarded the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for his story collection Irish Girl.

That lyricism, in even the blackest of circumstances, caught the attention of David Sedaris as well. He included the title story of Irish Girl in his anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. And as Sedaris is used to doing for lesser-known but deserving authors he admires, he promoted Irish Girl on his 2010 book tour, a kindness Johnston called “the most head-spinning publicity available short of an Oprah sticker or a glowing New York Times review.”

“It’s dark in here, but brilliant,” Sedaris wrote of Irish Girl. “Tim Johnston is as wise as he is original, and his stories are impossible to forget.”

Johnston’s Descent: It’s dark in there too. It is also the best of both worlds (great story, great writing, no distinction), and these days the author teaches in the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis. He’s director of the program’s literary journal, The Pinch. And on Thursday, January 22nd, from 6 to 8 p.m., he’s at story booth (438 N. Cleveland).

The event — free and open to the public — is this year’s opener in the “Literary Tastemakers” series (co-presented by story booth and the Booksellers at Laurelwood), which combines readings, discussion, food, and drink to provide Memphis readers with a “taste” of new and noteworthy books.

New and noteworthy: That would describe Descent, a novel impossible, trust me, to forget. •