Author: Leonard Gill

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Blurb Books

Hampton Sides in the Kingdom of Ice

Turns out, this past Friday was a fine time to touch base with writer Hampton Sides, who’d just arrived in his hometown. In a few hours, he’d be discussing and signing his latest book, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (Doubleday), at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, and he’d just received, in his words, “100 percent good reviews” in the 10 or so publications that had recently featured the book — publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. So: “So far, so good” Sides said by phone of the cross-country positive reaction. But for this native Memphian early into a book tour, Sides also said that it’s always good to be back in Memphis to see family and familiar faces.

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For those who don’t know about Sides’ latest book, see the writeup in the Flyer, and for those unfamiliar with the remarkable tale told in In the Kingdom of Ice, you’re not alone. Sides himself wasn’t familiar with the story (though it was world-famous in its day) before he set out to write of the voyage of the USS Jeannette. What follows: highlights from that phone interview on Friday.

Flyer: How did you come to write “In the Kingdom of Ice”? I’d never heard of the USS “Jeannette,” its voyage to the Arctic in 1879, or its captain, George Washington De Long.
Hampton Sides: I’d never heard of it either. Or of De Long. But I was in Oslo, writing a story for National Geographic about a Norwegian explorer named Fridtjof Nansen. He was obsessed with the Jeannette expedition, which happened about 20 years before Nansen’s own voyage to duplicate the Jeannette’s: get locked in the ice, drift for two years on the theory that he’d drift to the North Pole, and he came very close. And he survived.

Nansen’s ship, the Fram, is housed in an Oslo museum, and everywhere in that museum you see references to the Jeannette. I was like, what’s the Jeannette? I’m an American, never heard of it, never heard of George Washington De Long. Then I just filed it away, thinking this could be a good story. I didn’t know if there were survivors. I didn’t know the material I’d be working with. I got home, started tinkering, and went down this “ice hole” for four years.

The story felt right. The timing for this book was right. I love it when you can resurrect something that was once so well known and now forgotten instead of writing yet another book about, say, Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt.

I’ve been interested in the Gilded Age and finding a story that shows the times — the outlandish characters, the enormous wealth, a big story influenced by just a few people. To me, the Jeannette expedition was a metaphor for the Gilded Age.

Were there previous histories of the expedition you could turn to?
Not many. The last book on the Jeannette was in the 1980s, written by a naval historian and published by the Naval Institute Press. Before that, there was a book that came out in the ’30s — a fictionalized account, a novel called Hell on Ice. Then you have to go back to the 1880s, to the original accounts. George Melville wrote a book called In the Lena Delta. De Long’s journal was published back then too and became a best-seller.

Arctic literature, though: There are so many books. I’d never paid much attention, and even now I’ve barely scratched the surface. And I’m not even talking about books on the South Pole. I read more for In the Kingdom of Ice than any other book I’ve done.

What did you hope to bring to the story that previous writers had not?
With these kinds of stories, the biggest task is to make the reader care about these individuals so that when things start going wrong, you care whether the characters live or die. In most of the accounts I read, you have little sense who these people were. So, I did genealogies. I dug up old newspaper accounts to make at least a handful of the characters come alive. If readers aren’t emotionally invested in the characters, the book won’t work. Readers won’t keep turning the pages. That was my biggest task.

Another thing: Early in my research, I found out about a relative of De Long’s, in Connecticut, who had a trunkful of letters in her attic — the kind of scenario that historians dream about. She was going to throw those letters away. I flew to Connecticut immediately and found the personal papers of De Long’s wife, Emma — letters to her husband in the Arctic, letters from their courtship days, photographs. That really made the story come alive for me.

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And another thing, to answer your question: What could I bring to the story? For a long time, it was almost impossible for anyone to get to that part of Russia, Siberia, where part of the story takes place, because during the cold war that whole area around the Lena River delta was completely closed to the outside world. As far as I know, no American went there since the 1880s. So, when I went two years ago, it was possible to go where De Long and his crew went. I’ve written about that trip for Outside magazine, about my journey through the Bering Strait, through the Arctic, to the Lena River delta.

Sounds like the most travel you’ve done for any of your writings.
Most extensive by far, because so many of the elements to this story were scattered.

The expedition was predicated on an idea by German cartographer August Petermann, so I went to his hometown of Gotha in Germany. New York Herald Tribune publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., meanwhile, was all over the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. but then mainly in Paris, where I visited the Tribune archives. (I could already tell that Bennett was going to be a really interesting character, to say the least.) And then I went to Siberia, about as far away as you can go.

It would have been easy if I’d just gone west from Alaska. Instead I had to go around the world, because there were about 20 permits I had to get, permits from Moscow. All this then, and all around the United States. So yeah, by far this is the most travel I’ve done for a book. Next time around, I’ll try something a little closer to home.

What was Siberia like?
It’s still extremely remote. The people are suspicious of you. They don’t know why you’d be coming there, because for centuries that’s where the Russian government sent people. It’s very bleak, and because it’s above the tree line, it’s tundra. I’ve never been anywhere like it.

But the people there know about the Jeannette expedition, and that was true throughout Russia. I went to villages where people said relatives had helped with the rescue. The main tribe is the Yakuts, and most of them don’t even speak Russian. But it was a really great trip. I went first to the east coast of Siberia, got on a Russian ice breaker, went to Wrangel Island after passing through the Bering Strait.

And the ice you saw?
I’m no expert by any means, but I did want to at least experience it once, get a feel for it. Ice entered into the book’s narrative in a lot of ways, so when I look at the book now, I’m like, yeah, the descriptions of the ice, the sounds, the whole feel of the Arctic … it’s a very special atmosphere that you can’t fake.

And this is a story that seems tailor-made for a film.
The whole story is cinematic, but the thing about filming in the Arctic is that earlier attempts have run into a problem … you know, all these men in furs start to look alike. You have to find a way to differentiate people. We’ll see where a possible film goes.

In the past, you’ve mentioned to me what you call “synthetic suffering” — individuals who nowadays test the limits of physical endurance, who perform spectacular stunts, for the adrenaline rush. How do you think they’d stand up to the rigors of a 19th-century sea voyage to discover the North Pole?
The Jeannette expedition was real suffering. But it’s amazing to me how many thousands of people signed up for it … applications from all over the U.S. and the world. People knew that this expedition was guaranteed to produce hardship and probably death, and it’s hard to imagine our current generation doing something like that. But we still have the exploring impulse, and the will to survive is in all of us. I just don’t think we’d be signing up now in droves for an expedition like the one headed by De Long.

At one point in “In the Kingdom of Ice” you bring up the ultimate irony: that by 2050 the Arctic ice cap, due to climate change, could in fact become an open sea, the very thing that De Long and his crew were hoping to find.
After talking to a bunch of climate people, 2050 is a safe date. But it will probably be before then. De Long set out in search an open polar sea that didn’t exist, but it may well exist, at least in the summertime, in the next 20 or 30 years. That is this story’s deep irony. •

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Book Features Books

Hampton Sides’ Voyage to the Pole

Think of it: the North Pole as ice-free — a temperate sea circled by a ring of ice. Follow what was believed to be a warm-water Pacific current through the Bering Strait and beyond, and a gap in the ice would be your gateway to the pole … smooth sailing. That’s how one widely held theory in the 19th century had it.

But was the North Pole a place of sea monsters? The site of a lost civilization? Or did a powerful whirlpool lead to the center of the earth? Or maybe the Arctic wasn’t an ocean at all but a land mass rich in minerals and a link between the Old World and the New. Nobody knew, because no one, by land or by sea, had made it to the North Pole. But that didn’t stop scientists and cartographers from theorizing about it and the popular imagination from fantasizing over what had become, in the words of the journal Nature, “the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”

By the mid-1870s, James Gordon Bennett Jr., playboy-publisher of the New York Herald, wanted in on that field of discovery: He would finance, out of his own deep pockets, a voyage to the North Pole. Bennett had already sent Henry Stanley into Africa to find David Livingstone, and Stanley’s dispatches published in the Herald had been a sensation — and a sure-fire way to sell newspapers. But who to head an expedition to the Arctic? Bennett didn’t need to think hard or look far. He had his man: Lieutenant George Washington De Long, who’d made a name for himself on icy seas (and in the pages of the Herald) in the heroic search for a lost ship off the coast of Greenland in 1873.

Before that mission, De Long had never been to the Arctic, had never expressed any interest in the Arctic. But when he returned to New York, his wife, Emma, saw in De Long a changed man. As she put it, “The polar virus was in George’s blood to stay.” It was a “virus” that would stay with him throughout “The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette.”

That’s the subtitle to the remarkable new book by native Memphian Hampton Sides, and “grand” and “terrible” are indeed the polar opposites but twin terms to describe the epic, harrowing voyage that Sides recounts in In the Kingdom of Ice (Doubleday).

Sides’ Ghost Soldiers took readers on a rescue mission in the Philippines during World War II. His Blood and Thunder headed to the American West of Kit Carson’s day. And Hellhound on His Trail brought Sides — who lives today in Santa Fe — back to his hometown and in the footsteps of James Earl Ray.

In the Kingdom of Ice takes us into the heart of the Arctic and draws from primary source materials, including ship logs, journals, diaries (which miraculously survived the expedition), along with letters and committee hearings, to reconstruct every knowable triumph and disaster aboard the Jeannette, the steam-driven ship captained by De Long and manned by 32 fellow officers, seamen, scientists, special-duty crew members, a cook, a steward, and two Inuit hunters and dog-drivers. Could central casting have assembled a more memorable cast of characters, each of them brought vividly back to life by Sides? And could there have been a more capable captain than De Long to head such a crew? De Long was single-minded (but never reckless), enormously resourceful, a brilliant observer, skilled writer, devoted husband, and respected leader: a man among men in a test of endurance in the otherworldly kingdom of ice.

“A beautiful spectacle,” De Long at one point wrote to describe the trapped Jeannette shrouded in snow and frost. But he would go on to write less enthusiastically of an enormous, floating ice pack (“terribly wild and broken,” “terrible masses of hummocks and rubble,” “puzzling masses of ice and water”) until, late in the voyage, language itself seemed to give out and arrive at one word: “mess.” As in: “a fearful mess,” “such a mess of … rotten ice.”

I won’t do Sides the disservice of describing this profoundly moving, unforgettable story’s fearful outcome. Readers should go into it with as little foreknowledge as possible — the better to discover for themselves (as De Long and his crewmen did) parts unknown.

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Blurb Books

Lisa Howorth: On Tour

“The Lisa Howorth event was grand. Good crowd, good reading. She won me over,” said Corey Mesler, co-owner (with his wife, Cheryl) of Burke’s Book Store. Mesler was referring to Howorth’s appearance at Burke’s on July 10th to read from and sign her debut novel, Flying Shoes (Bloomsbury).

Just so happens, Howorth herself is the book-store co-founder (with her husband, Richard) of Square Books in Oxford, and that’s where Howorth began her publicity tour in mid-June. Her Memphis visit came at the tail end of a month-long tour, which took Howorth across the South, to Washington, D.C. (where she grew up), to Seattle, and to San Francisco before returning to Mississippi, where, in Tupelo, she recently had yet another signing. But for someone who’s watched more than her share of authors on tour, Howorth’s own has been something of an eye-opener.

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“It’s been great,” she said by phone from Oxford on the morning of her Memphis signing. “But real hectic. Too many 7 o’clock flights in the morning. But it’s shown me how much kindness authors on tour need. They’re usually exhausted, played out.”

Howorth didn’t sound played out during our interview. What she was was candid. Asked about reader response as she traveled the country, she responded: “I got complimentary things. What else are they going to say? You’re usually dealing with an audience that hasn’t yet read the book. You don’t get a lot of feedback.”

For feedback from the Flyer, see my favorable notes on Flying Shoes in the July 10th summer book issue. Howorth’s mother, the author said, has been supportive from the beginning. This despite the fact that the novel revisits, though in sometimes slightly fictionalized form, the murder of Howorth’s stepbrother when the boy was only 9. As for Howorth’s three surviving brothers, they’ve been equally supportive, with one of them critical to Howorth’s writing process.

“He took it upon himself to go back and do all the research,” Howorth said of that brother and the murder case, which has gone unsolved. “He went through police files. He interviewed people who were actively working on the crime. He analyzed all that information and was instrumental in helping with my treatment of the case in Flying Shoes.

“But the case has not been reopened,” Howorth added. “I hope maybe that will happen. But it’s been 48 years now. The suspect — they know who he is — is free. There was a lot of mishandling of the case, including the loss of physical evidence, which would make prosecution and conviction harder. But I still think it could be done.”

Howorth wants it known, however, that Flying Shoes is not, strictly speaking, a crime story or police procedural.

“Some readers, I think, have been disappointed that it’s not a true-crime or mystery book. It’s not something where the crime gets solved and everybody lives happily ever after. I had other things I wanted to write about. I wanted to make it a bigger novel, more complex. I wanted to document Oxford, Mississippi, in the 1990s, before it started to change so radically. I wanted to look at bigger issues — crime, for instance, and the inequalities in sentencing. I wanted to talk about race, about Southern history.

“I’d started out thinking it would be a memoir, but I realized quickly that that wasn’t going to work for me. It was very unpleasant to spend time back in that time … the murder, thinking about it. I didn’t want to put it in Washington, D.C., which is where the murder happened. I moved it to Richmond to give my family a little privacy, some distance.”

Doesn’t mean there aren’t residents of Oxford, where Flying Shoes is largely set, wondering if the novel is a roman a clef. Howorth maintains it is not.

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“Almost every character is entirely fictional or a composite. There’s some anecdotal Oxford stuff, but I made up almost everything, and that’s been hard for some people to get. People keep trying to figure out who’s who in real life, and I keep wanting to say, ‘Knock it off!’”

Howorth began Flying Shoes back in the early ’90s. But with three children to look after, a business to run, and teaching to do — art history; Southern studies — at the University of Mississippi, she was short on time. A fellowship in 2007 at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire helped her find the time, and she finished the novel — Howorth’s debut novel — in 2012. Was the fact that Howorth is in the book business make it any easier to find an agent and publisher?

“I’d say it was probably easier, because I knew some people,” Howorth admitted. “But I ended up with an agent and editor I didn’t know at all — had never even heard of.

“I probably did nothing that you’re supposed to do: I finished the manuscript. I didn’t want anybody to see it. I just sent it out to a couple of editors I knew, one agent I didn’t know and one agent I did know. Both agents wanted it. Maybe they were thinking, ‘Hot damn! Book-seller’s wife. This is bound to go well.’

“But I also have lots working against me: I’m not coming out of an MFA program. I’m not 25, 35 years old. My publisher, though — Bloomsbury — has been wonderful. They did Robert Gordon’s book on Stax, Respect Yourself.”

Bloomsbury will also be publishing the Memphis-set Bluff City Pawn by Stephen Schottenfeld in a few weeks, but what’s on tap for Lisa Howorth now?

She said she has a group of stories to get back to (though she knows that in today’s publishing climate short-story collections are a hard-sell), and one or two of those stories could maybe be developed into at least one novel. But she has an idea for a nonfiction book as well and two children’s books that are finished, but she hasn’t shopped them to publishers.

“If I can just live that long,” Howorth said of her publishing plans in general. “Because I am so slow as a writer. I wrote Flying Shoes by hand on legal pads. That’s how sort of sad it is — and lame.” •
For more on Lisa Howorth and Flying Shoes, there’s a well-produced introduction to the author and the novel on YouTube. That’s where you’ll find Howorth reminding readers of what I haven’t mentioned here: the book’s humor. And the photo of the author that appears above? It was taken by Maude Schuyler Clay of Sumner, Mississippi, and she’ll be at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, July 17th, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The occasion: to sign copies of her book of photographs, Delta Dogs (University Press of Mississippi). As with Flying Shoes, read more about Delta Dogs in the Flyer‘s July 10th issue.

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Cover Feature News

Endpapers: Memphis Books for Summer Reading.

Books about Memphis, the Mid-South, or the South in general. Books by Memphians, Mid-Southerners, or Southerners in general. No time like the present, summer 2014, to take stock of what’s new and what’s in store for readers this season. And not only this July and August. Last week’s Flyer reported on the newly created Mid-South Book Festival, slated for September — a festival that will highlight the record number of writers who make or made Memphis home. In this issue, the Flyer staff takes a look at the latest from local and regional writers and at titles of interest to local readers, so take your pick: fiction and nonfiction; Southern foodways and full-gospel folk art; Memphis politics, Memphis music, and lesser-known Memphis history. We’ll start with some signings this month and move to two titles due in August.

The Booksellers at Laurelwood and Burke’s Book Store certainly do their part to spotlight local writers, and Barnes & Noble at Wolfchase will too this week in its annual salute to Memphis-area authors. On Saturday, July 12th, 2-4 p.m., the store has invited close to a dozen of them to discuss and sign their work. Go to barnesandnoble.com, find the Wolfchase location, and click on “Local Author Panel 2014” for a list of the writers who will be on hand.

Earlier in the week, on Thursday, July 10th, 5:30-6:30 p.m., physically be at Burke’s for a book signing but mentally head for the hills — the hill country of north Mississippi. That’s where you’ll find a university town very like Oxford, and it’s the primary setting for Flying Shoes (Bloomsbury; $26), the debut novel from Lisa Howorth. Howorth’s nonfiction has appeared in Garden & Gun and Oxford American, and 35 years ago, she and husband Richard opened Oxford’s fabled Square Books. But was there ever a hint that Howorth herself would have such a good hand at writing fiction? Flying Shoes is proof Howorth has indeed a sure hand. The story is partially based on the murder decades ago of Howorth’s 9-year-old stepbrother, but despite that grim subplot, this character-driven novel is winning in so many ways. Where to begin counting the ways? With Mary Byrd Thornton, wife of an art-gallery owner, mother of a pair of children perhaps too smart for their own good, best friend to the gay neighbor who’s head of a chicken empire, sometime customer of a sexy but ne’er-do-well drug dealer, and employer of Evagreen, the woman who keeps order in the Thornton household until Evagreen’s own daughter winds up in jail in Memphis for murder. Add in a fine-art photographer not unlike William Eggleston, a semi-homeless Vietnam vet Mary Byrd calls on for odd jobs, and back to Mary Byrd herself — soldiering on with wry humor, a good heart, a well-deserved cocktail or three, and a cigarette now and then.

Now switch gears and head due south of Memphis. You’re going to the dogs. Photographer Maude Schuyler Clay did in her travels through the Mississippi Delta. Readers of Delta Dogs (University Press of Mississippi; $35) can too, and there’s no need to wait for summer’s dog days. Clay will be signing her book at Burke’s on July 17th, but don’t go looking in these pages for pure breeds and leash laws. The dogs Clay captures in black and white are as tied to the landscape as kudzu and farm fields and often free to roam — in packs or standing solitary, loping along, high-tailing it, or sitting nobly as if command of, if not indistinguishable from, the stark landscape.

Want “stark” but in an urban setting? Travel the stretch of Lamar Avenue where Bluff City Pawn does business. Bloomsbury has a real handle on Memphis and parts south this summer, because in addition to Flying Shoes it’s publishing Bluff City Pawn, due the first week of August, by Stephen Schottenfeld. He teaches these days at the University of Rochester, but he once taught at Rhodes, and this debut novel of his is solid storytelling that’s as character-driven as Flying Shoes. Family-driven too: three adult brothers — the oldest: a super-successful developer; the youngest: a semi-dangerous deadbeat; the middle brother: a hard-working pawnshop owner who’s offered a valuable gun collection to sell. That one collection could earn Huddy Marr the money to move his pawnshop from deteriorating Lamar to thriving Summer — and to maybe a better life. Only thing is: Huddy’s older and younger brothers get in on the deal and mess up the works big time. Here’s the deal with Bluff City Pawn: Schottenfeld teaches English, but this novel had me thinking the author’s a cultural anthropologist, because his book is a spot-on depiction of contemporary Memphis, from low end to upper level.

On to the very upper level: the North Pole, which is where Lt. George Washington De Long and his crew thought they were headed in 1879. The expedition was to confirm theories that the Pole was an ice-free open sea. But leave it to native Memphian Hampton Sides — author, most recently, of Hellhound on His Trail — to tell where and how De Long and his crew ended their adventure in In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (Doubleday). The book is indeed grand-scale, and the bulk of Sides’ narrative is devoted to De Long and his crew as times get tough, then tougher, then … no reason to spoil it for readers before In the Kingdom of Ice appears the first week of August. No reason, however, not to say this now: Sides’ telling of the resourcefulness these men displayed and the hardships they endured is some of the best writing he’s ever done. — Leonard Gill

On This Day in Memphis History

By G. Wayne Dowdy

The History Press, 396 pp., $14.99 (paper)

Something of note happens every day in Memphis. And that’s the basis of G. Wayne Dowdy’s book On This Day in Memphis History. The author, manager of the Memphis Public Library and Information Center’s history department, tells 365 of those stories, one for each day of the year.

In the introduction, Dowdy says some Memphis stories — fascinating as they are — just don’t fit into the city’s larger narrative. So he wanted to tell those stories and avoid the big events in the city’s history. “My hope is that most of the daily entries are not known to those who have studied Memphis history or even just lived here for a long period of time,” Dowdy writes.

On This Day in Memphis History begins with a bang — many bangs. Hundreds of Memphians rang in the beginning of 1950 with firecrackers and “sidewalk torpedoes” on Main Street. That New Year’s Eve fell on a Saturday and “spirit was at its highest in Memphis.” Police arrested none of the revelers, save one: John Brown “lost his head” and threw a firecracker at the feet of two police officers.

Among Dowdy’s other findings: African-American street preacher Mary Jones declared on March 27, 1906, that she would sink Memphis into the Mississippi River (in hopes of scaring her wayward husband back home). On May 16, 1919, a grand jury declared Memphis a “lawless town,” criticizing the city’s unwillingness to enforce its own laws. And the Memphis Rogues, the city’s North American Soccer League franchise, notched its first win at Liberty Bowl Stadium on May 20, 1978.

On This Day in Memphis History is filled with great tales that will delight and engross everyone — from the new-to-towner to the hardcore native Mempho-file. But a welcome addition would have been an index in the back of the book to help readers find their favorite topics. — Toby Sells

Three Story House

By Courtney Miller Santo

William Morrow, 416 pp., $14.99 (paper)

Later this summer, keep an eye out for the second novel from Courtney Miller Santo, an instructor and administrator in the University of Memphis’ creative writing program. Santo’s interest in familial relationships inspired her California-set, debut novel, The Roots of the Olive Tree, and she continues that theme in her second novel, which brings the drama home to Memphis.

In Three Story House, Santo tells the tale of three cousins (and childhood best friends): Lizzie, Elyse, and Isobel. The book follows the women, now in their late 20s, as they reunite in Memphis to help Lizzie rescue and renovate the historic house where she was raised by her mother and late grandmother. The move to Memphis and renovation project are a last grasp at hope for Lizzie, who feels lost after a knee injury forces a hiatus in her professional soccer career. Meanwhile, Isobel’s acting career in Los Angeles is at a standstill, and Elyse’s life in Boston is marred by unrequited love. So the two decide to move with Lizzie to Memphis to provide emotional support and because “the only way to forget your own problems is to get involved in helping someone else overcome theirs,” according to Elyse.

Three Story House is told in three parts, with each part focusing on one of the cousins’ lives and perspectives. As the women work on the house, which sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, they accidentally unearth some hidden family secrets as well as some wounds of their own, which show that family can be a source of great joy or great pain — and often both. — Hannah Anderson

Courtney Miller Santo will be reading from and signing Three Story House at the Booksellers at Laurelwood on August 19th at 6:30 p.m.

Strange Paradise Issue #1

By Anna Rose and Jenny Zych

54 pp., $20

Strange Paradise Issue #1 is whimsical and freaky, both at the same time — a true tribute to Asian horror. The fanzine may be unsettling to some, but that would be the perfect reaction, because it’s a celebration of all things creepy. Its pages, meticulously illustrated by more than 30 artists, feature an alternative, supernatural universe of mutilated bodies and vampires, while post-surgical mutations grace other pages. Even the cutesier illustrations are bizarre.

Co-editors Anna Rose — who grew up in Memphis, the daughter of Pamela Denney, food editor for Memphis magazine — and Jenny Zych graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City last year. It was Zych who came up with the idea for Strange Paradise, according to Rose.

“Jenny and I have been very inspired by the genre of Asian horror films in our own art, so we wanted to give back to something that was dear to us. All contributors were also fans of the genre, and we asked everyone to pick a film that deeply inspires them and create something based off it,” Rose said in an email. “For me, it’s a toss-up between the pacing and the imagery of Asian horror films that I love so much.

“Unlike western horror, Asian films seem to have a slower progression in the plot, so the tension and suspense feels much stronger. There are many reoccurring visual themes I do love as well, such as beautiful, vengeful ghosts or taking normal objects and subverting their everyday appearance to something much more sinister.” — Alexandra Pusateri

To purchase Strange Paradise Issue #1, go to astralrejection.bigcartel.com.

Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues

By Paul Garon and Beth Garon

City Lights Publishers, 408 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Did you know that the mills of ancient Rome shut down during a festival celebrating the virgin goddess Vesta? Grinding didn’t start with the Memphis Grizzlies or with Prince’s “Darling Nikki” or even as a corollary to the bumps of Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s an ancient sexual idiom dating back at least to Roman satirist Petronius, as Paul and Beth Garon point out in Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, a scholarly biography of the pioneering blues singer and player.

The Garons take readers on a short tour of agro-industrial metaphors as an introduction to Minnie’s often covered “What’s the Matter with the Mill,” a song thick with effortless double entendres and bridging traditions between down-home country blues and vaudeville. Muddy Waters performed it regularly. So did country piano player and Jerry Lee Lewis inspiration Moon Mullican. So did Western Swing superstar Bob Wills. As the Garons show again and again, Minnie’s earthy appeal was broad. Her playing was, as described by poet Langston Hughes, like “heartbeats mixed with iron and steel.”

Lizzie Douglas, known to blues fans as Memphis Minnie, lived a colorful life. The hard-drinking guitar player described money as her birthstone, and she liked to play while she worked and to work while she played. Minnie cut more than 200 records in a career that spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s, earning her uncommon respect for her playing and songwriting in a male-dominated industry. Woman with Guitar follows Minnie from rural Mississippi to Beale Street to Chicago and back to Memphis again, documenting the groundbreaking highs and the heartbreaking lows. It also digs deep into her discography, running down threads of protest and cultural commentary.

Originally published in 1992 by City Lights, the new 2014 edition of Woman with Guitar comes with new information regarding Minnie’s disputed birthplace, new images, and an extended discography that includes digital formats. — Chris Davis

To order Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues directly from the publisher, go to citylights.com.

Orange Mound

By Jay Fingers / Be Cool Books, 218 pp.,

$24.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper)

The history and culture of Orange Mound is both fascinating and unfortunate. The first community to be built and sustained by African Americans in Memphis, it has diminished over the decades as a result of high crime rates and teen pregnancy. The novel Orange Mound by Jay Fingers, a native Memphian now living in Brooklyn, captures the hardships experienced by a cast of Orange Mound characters and how those hardships can be both inspirational and detrimental.

The novel revolves around Ant, a young, humble drug dealer with aspirations of going legit. After a routine transaction turns into a life-changing situation, Ant trades his illicit activities for his dreams of becoming a chef and owning his own soul food restaurant. In the midst of his career change, Ant meets Tuffy, a gorgeous hair stylist who’s pulled the plug on a demeaning relationship and is secretly a drug courier. The two develop a friendship that quickly evolves into a passionate love affair. But their separate dealings with the Memphis City Syndicate, a drug-trafficking ring, come back to haunt them.

The novel also highlights how Ant’s best friend, Cornelius, a local drug peddler, isn’t too thrilled about Ant’s decision to leave the drug game. Cornelius’ determination to become a prominent figure in the Syndicate — along with his links to Gigi Garcia, a beautiful woman with an appetite for murder — guarantees disaster for anyone in his way. Ant is no exception, and after he becomes aware of Cornelius’ deceptive, greed-driven ways, Ant’s life, along with Tuffy’s, is placed in jeopardy.

Orange Mound is filled with humor and romance but also drama and suspense. Relatively explicit, it’s not appropriate for all ages, but it’s a thrilling read for any fan of urban fiction. — Louis Goggans

Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing

Edited by Francis Lam

The University of Georgia Press, 273 pp., $24.95 (paper)

My sister hasn’t lived in the South for two decades, but the region looms large in her imagination. She has these huge and romantic truths she shares with her L.A.-raised husband — truths that paint the South with a broad and humid to the point of steamy brush. It’s a place where women, no matter what, dress in their finest and in full makeup to go to the grocery store.

Notions of the South are just that, notions, and apply to any place. (Who’s to say the ladies in Seattle don’t put on their finery for the store?) It’s this dilemma that New Jersey native Francis Lam, editor of the seventh edition of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation series, addresses in a sharp and knowing fashion. You see it in the very first sentence of the introduction. Lam writes, “In my younger, more offensive years, I used to say that Michigan was the South’s northernmost state, on account of the popularity of pickup trucks and country music.”

The collection of Southern food writing that Lam has gathered spans decades and is smart and oftentimes flat-out funny. As to the latter, it’s seen in Bill Heavey’s amazing “Grabbing Dinner” about frog hunting in Louisiana and Dan Baum’s often hilarious “Hogzilla” about wild-pig hunting in Texas.

The real prizes of Cornbread Nation 7, though, are the eye-opening essays that address “otherness” in the South. Eddie Huang’s “God Has Assholes for Children” is a sweet ode to his mother, who backed him no matter what. “Mississippi Chinese Lady Goes Home to Korea,” by Ann Taylor Pittman, details how the author was inspired by a child’s comment (“Hey, Chinese lady!’) to explore her Korean roots. Other fine essays include Julia Reed’s “The Great Leveler” and Lolis Eric Elie’s “Willie Mae Seaton Takes New York.” — Susan Ellis

River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865-1954

By Elizabeth Gritter

University Press of Kentucky, 356 pp., $40

Elizabeth Gritter is the latest of an increasing number of gifted historians aspiring to document the struggle for civil rights and political self-sufficiency for blacks in Memphis prior to the epochal Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. What she chronicles in River of Hope becomes a stream of useful information about brave and resourceful African-American pioneers — progressing from post-emancipation hopes to early 20th-century avatars like Robert Church Jr. and J.B. Martin, entrepreneurs who did their best to develop black pride and capability in an age dominated by the de facto dictatorship of Boss Ed Crump.

This was an age of paternalism in which blacks had some patronage benefits and could vote as directed and one in which a prominent local laundry could advertise its services with pictures of servile black workers washing dirty white underpants.

Church and Martin, who attempted to channel opposition to Crump into black Republican organizations, were both forced into exile and succeeded locally by such enduring leaders as Lieutenant George Washington Robert Lee, a World War I veteran whose scaled-down activities via a Republican “Old Guard” in black communities were better tolerated because they were considered less threatening.

Spurred on by the statewide election successes in 1948 of white anti-Crump Democrats like Estes Kefauver of Chattanooga and Gordon Browning of Huntington, a new crop of African-American politicians — some Republicans, others Democrats in alliance with the new anti-Crump white leaders — came to the fore. The author then segues her story into plotlines with characters whose names are more familiar to our own time, men like Benjamin Hooks and Russell Sugarmon, who between them marked the transition from Republican to Democratic loyalties among Memphis blacks.

River of Hope is an eminently readable, almost novelistic account of how several generations of reformers finally fused into a movement destined, at least in certain basic ways, to overcome. — Jackson Baker

The True Gospel Preached Here

By Bruce West

University Press of Mississippi, 65 pp., $35

I’m not religious, but I probably could have found Jesus at Margaret’s Grocery in Vicksburg. Or at least I would have enjoyed listening to the far-out gospel according to the Reverend H.D. Dennis and his wife, Margaret.

The elderly couple ran a roadside grocery store/nondenominational church/living folk-art gallery in their Mississippi home for years before the reverend’s and Margaret’s deaths in 2012 and 2009, respectively. The garish abode was decorated with hand-painted signs proclaiming God’s love for all and instructing passersby to read their Bibles. All manner of bits and baubles — empty egg cartons, hair ties, stuffed animals, plastic flowers, and enough Mardi Gras beads to supply all the topless women in the world — were glued to every square inch of the inside and outside of the grocery store and school bus, which acted as the church sanctuary.

Bruce West, professor of art at Missouri State University, discovered Margaret’s Grocery on Highway 61, and he couldn’t resist stopping in to photograph the couple’s roadside attraction. But before he could snap a photo, Reverend Dennis invited West into his school-bus church, its front windows covered with a faded print of the Last Supper, for a bit of evangelizing. Naturally, the photographer was intrigued by Reverend Dennis’ approach to worship, and before long, an intimate bond was formed. West visited the couple time and again over the course of 20 years, documenting the ever-evolving art of the church. Surfaces were continually being painted over, and in the couple’s later years, Margaret added her own touches of pink and yellow to the reverend’s red-and-white color scheme.

Eventually, the African-American couple began referring to West as their “white child,” and the reverend even asked West if he’d take over the church as his health began to fail. West politely declined, but he continued to document the couple and their art until their passing. His gorgeous full-color photographs in The True Gospel Preached Here stand as a lovely tribute to a couple whose love for God was their art. — Bianca Phillips

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Death of the King and the Rise of Punk Rock

By Dylan Jones

The Overlook Press, 295 pp., $27.95

Dylan Jones is a fashion writer. Let’s get that out in the open before we slog through his book about the cultural revolution that passed a torch from Elvis Presley to John Lydon. Jones’ book Elvis Has Left the Building (official publication date August 16th) is in some ways about Elvis, but it’s primarily about 1977, the most overanalyzed year in music criticism.

Jones has a point to make: Rock (Elvis) got fat and some folks from New York and London traded the gilded Cadillacs and gaudy mansions for music that was whittled down to an angry minimum. Jones’ strength as a writer lies in his ability to tie the Lancaster and Tudor schools of rock into the personal histories of people whose very identities were derived from the King or Johnny Rotten.

I’m not sure the world needs another discourse on how the Clash appropriated Elvis’ hair and album art. And while any further writing on the Ramones and Iggy Pop is perhaps interesting to someone out there, it’s not to me. The problem with analyzing punk is that it intentionally stripped away all pretenses. So the application of intellectual rigor not only misses the point, it makes the reader want the writer to die on the john. And about that john …

Jones is the editor of British GQ and winner of the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Editor of the Year Award. Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh or most of what many Brits write can’t have much hope for decorum and manners. So if you’re looking for a detailed description of Elvis’ corpse being crammed into its coffin or of the panic his attendants endured upon his demise, this is your volume of history. Others may decide there are more important things to read. — Joe Boone

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History

Edited by Rose Fox and Daniel Jose Older

Crossed Genres Publications, 370 pp., $19.95 (paper)

When you think about it, perhaps the most unbelievable thing about most Western tales within the supernatural, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and other speculative fiction subgenres is the fact that the heroes are all white dudes.

That’s in part because so many of the writers have been white dudes, though there are plenty of exceptions, including Octavia E. Butler, Walter Mosley, Samuel R. Delany, Sherman Alexie, Gabriel García Márquez, Pauline Hopkins, David Anthony Durham, N.K. Jemisin, and even W.E.B. Du Bois.

The editors of a new anthology, Long Hidden, take it a step further. And like the anthology series Dark Matter, it’s a step in the right direction. The introduction to the collection frames Long Hidden as “representations of African diasporic voices in historical speculative fiction, and the ways that history ‘written by the victors’ demonized and erases already marginalized stories” — the stories about the “victors” commonly promising “to take us to places where anything was possible, but the spaceship captains and valiant questers were always white, always straight, always cisgender, and almost always men.”

Not so in Long Hidden. And of note: Two of the stories are by Memphians: Jamey Hatley and Troy L. Wiggins.

Hatley has written for Oxford American and has won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for a Novel-in-Progress. Her story here, “Collected Likenesses,” takes place in Harlem in 1913. It’s a slow-boil about freed slaves, the lingering “wounds of bondage,” and patient revenge, and it has a nice twist ending.

Wiggins’ “A Score of Roses” is set in Memphis in the 1870s, not long after the city’s race riots (that part of the narrative is not speculative). Sunshine, a passionate woman, meets Baby, an earthy, old soul. The two hit it off, maybe because there’s something special about each of them.

“A Score of Roses” is more folk-fantasy, about fire and persistence and hereditary memory, while “Collected Likenesses” is more domestic horror. But both stories show the breadth of what’s possible in speculative fiction and what’s possible when new voices join the conversation. — Greg Akers

Second Editions 2.0: You Are There

The good folks at Second Editions at the Central Library (3030 Poplar) have an announcement to make: In addition to the fine-quality used books, music, and DVDs for sale, the store has expanded its selection of children’s books, young-adult titles, and paperback adult fiction. It is also offering signed books on a permanent basis, with new titles introduced every couple of weeks. You can now find paperback advanced readers’ copies of brand-new books too. They’ll be available 90 days after the publication date of the hardback edition, all advance copies priced at $2 each.

And that’s not all. The store has introduced vintage paperbacks from well-known writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Lawrence Durrell, Damon Runyon, and C.S. Lewis, as well as books by mystery and western writers. All are priced to sell, according Herman Markell of the Friends of the Library, which operates Second Editions — meaning, you won’t find prices this low, even on the internet.

It’s also important to note that all money generated by Second Editions sales — together with the library’s community-donated material sold on Amazon and the library’s semiannual, citywide book sale — go 100 percent to the Memphis Public Library system. That’s an annual $400,000 going back into the library’s operating budget, a point that’s important for Memphians to remember.

The expanded Second Editions has been operating for only two weeks now, so it’s perhaps too early to judge customer response, according to Second Editions Manager Antonio Quinn, who worked with others at the library (“co-conspirators,” he called them) on the idea of expanding the store’s offerings and categories. On the topic of future expansion, Quinn is, however, taking a cautious approach.

“It depends not only on the demand but the space,” he said. “It’s pretty packed now, and the only direction we can go is up, so we’d have to get more shelving. We’re at a point now where if we put anymore out, we’re going to look like a rummage sale. We’re trying to avoid that look.”

“Entering our 12th year, Second Editions is thrilled to now speak of our ‘new and improved store’ — improving on what is arguably the best and least expensive used book store in the Mid-South,” Markell added in an email. “More and more people are enjoying our amazing selections. And best of all, every penny of profit goes back to support our entire Memphis Library system. See for yourself, in the lobby of Central Library. Turn right after entering, and you’re there.” — Leonard Gill

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Book Features Books

Mid-South Book Festival Booked For September

This may be the first week of July, but the last weekend of September is on the minds of the folks at Literacy Mid-South. That’s because planning is very much in the works (and has been for months now) for the organization’s first-ever, citywide, and mostly free Mid-South Book Festival September 25th-28th. Dozens of authors, panelists, speakers, and workshop leaders — the majority of them Memphians or Mid-Southerners — are set to appear. Multiple venues have agreed to serve as event sites, and sponsors are in place. So too festival apps, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account.

For a list of participating writers, events, venues, and updates, go to midsouthbookfest.org. Among the invited writers are Memphis Flyer Associate Editor (and cookbook author) Bianca Phillips and Flyer photographer Justin Fox Burks (cookbook co-author along with his wife, Amy Lawrence). Other Memphians slated to be on hand: Steve Bradshaw, Jennifer Chandler, Heather Dobbins, Robert Gordon, Aram Goudsouzian, Mark Greaney, Lisa Hickman, Corey Mesler, Lisa Patton, Courtney Miller Santo, and Barry Wolverton. But there are out-of-towners scheduled to appear too, among them: Julia Reed, Scott Heim, and Michael Lowenthal.

Dean, Heather Nordtvedt (Literacy Mid-South’s community relations manager), and the organization’s staff have been working hard since the idea for a book festival was raised at a board meeting last summer.

“Nobody thought it was going to happen anytime soon,” Dean admitted. “The festival was simply in our five-year plan — a signature event, not just a fund-raiser. Then our fall reading campaign fell through for this year, so we thought we’d try out the book festival idea. It was going to be a small thing. We thought: Let’s try it and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll get rid of it.”

And indeed, the festival began small: a one-day event at the Memphis Botanic Garden. It’s now expanded to four days — with programs for children and young adults and live-music components — and the venues so far include, in addition to the Botanic Garden, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Burke’s Book Store, and the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center.

What prompted the expansion? Immediate and enthusiastic local author interest, for one thing. Public response, for another. According to Dean, when the festival launched its Facebook page, the site received 250 “likes” the first day.

Early in the planning stages, Literacy Mid-South was thinking maybe a couple hundred people would show up for the festival. The organization is now expecting thousands. Which all goes to show, Dean is convinced, that Memphians have been looking for such a festival in their own town. Nashville has its Southern Festival of Books. Little Rock has its Arkansas Literary Festival.

It was at the festival in Little Rock this past April that Dean talked to author Mary Roach, who’s no stranger to the book-festival circuit. Dean told Roach of Literacy Mid-South’s plans. She immediately convinced him that the Mid-South Book Festival needed to expand beyond a single day and single venue — and the better to meet one of the festival’s goals: funding local literacy programs. Proceeds from Literacy Mid-South’s onsite Bookworm store, concessions, and three creative-writing workshops during the festival will go to supporting those programs.

“I’m a big proponent of growing things — starting small, then growing,” Dean said of the festival.

But growing this fast? Dean has just hired someone to manage the festival for the next couple of years. And there’s been talk about doing some publishing at Literacy Mid-South: a collection of writings by festival authors about Memphis.

“This all shows a need that we’re filling, even among people who don’t necessarily know what a book festival is,” Dean said of the Mid-South Book Festival. “And what’s crazy: We have all these best-selling authors in Memphis, and I didn’t even know they live here! Putting the festival together has been educational for me too.”

But as planning the festival reaches its final stages, Dean had this to add: “Everything’s nailed down. Now it just has to happen.”

midsouthbookfest.org; facebook.com/midsouthbookfest; @MSouthBookFest

Categories
Book Features Books

Bucket List, Memphis Style

Graceland? Been there, done that, you say. Beale Street? Ditto.

But how about Graceland on the cheap? If you’re budget-minded, Samantha Crespo knows how to do it. Beale not by night but by day? Crespo says try it, whether you’re a tourist in town or a Memphian born and bred. Crespo has plenty of other ideas as well, and besides Graceland and Beale Street, check out the 98 additional entries in her bucket list of all things Bluff City: 100 Things To Do in Memphis Before You Die (Reedy Press).

Some of those sights to see — Sun and Stax, the Brooks and the Dixon, Overton Square and Overton Park — are no-brainers, but Crespo gives them a fresh spin. Some, however, may come as a surprise. Crespo recommends the “sonic massage” at the Memphis Drum Shop on South Cooper. Or the book club and speaker series at Elmwood Cemetery. Or an impromptu visit with the ranger at Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park. Or a hands-on tour of the St. Blues Guitar Workshop on Marshall. Or, see what’s in season and there for the picking at Jones Orchard in Millington.

Crespo’s also had some fresh ideas when it comes to promoting her book. Her signing at Burke’s earlier this month may have taken the traditional route, but she’s also had a recent reading at the Center for Southern Folklore and set up shop at the Cooper-Young and Botanic Garden farmers markets. On Saturday, June 21st, at 1 p.m., she’ll be at South Main Book Juggler (548 S. Main) as part of the store’s “After-Market” series of guest authors.

That series is timed to follow the weekly Downtown Farmers Market, and Crespo has timed her book to appear during the summer tourist season, tourism being Crespo’s specialty. She’s a former managing editor for a tourism publishing firm in her home state of Florida. She’s written for the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau. She’s been a blogger for the federal government’s “Discover America” tourist program. And she’s written for Tennessee’s Department of Tourist Development, with a focus on Memphis and West

Tennessee.

Crespo, who moved to Memphis four years ago when her husband took a job at Medtronic, wrote Things To Do in Memphis Before You Die with local readers, in addition to out-of-towners, in mind.

“That’s the true test for this book,” Crespo said by phone. “For Memphians to pick it up and say to themselves, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to do that.’ So, I want people to understand that I very much wrote the book for locals. Yes, it’s a travel guide and I didn’t want to ignore the obvious, but I wanted to dig a little deeper. People who simply read the book jacket … they may think, I’ve done that. Or, I’ve lived here my entire life. I don’t need to do that. But the book is a celebration of the city and especially its creativity.”

Crespo doesn’t want any excuses. She talked to one Memphian who had never heard of the Four Way restaurant, another who had never been to the National Civil Rights Museum, and another confused by the location of Stax. You too? Doesn’t mean you’re a lesser person, Crespo, whose enthusiasm for the city is downright infectious, said. Just means you’re busy, she understands, and maybe you just need to break out of your routine. You have a bored child on your hands this summer? Take it from Crespo: “I’m going to have my own son open my book, and whatever he turns to, that’s what we’re going to do.”

It could very well be a visit to Overton Park. Crespo said it’s her number-one place in town to pass the time, and it’s not far from her Midtown home:

“When my husband and I moved to Memphis, we had one weekend to find a house. And when we saw Overton Park, we fell in love with it. We chose our house to be near Overton Park. It’s why the park gets five of the 100 things to do in Memphis — so many ways to enjoy it, whatever your budget, your age, or your interests.”

And whatever you do, don’t sell Memphis short on things to do. Crespo doesn’t. She’s got a running list already in mind for a future edition of Things To Do in Memphis Before You Die. Last count, she said, that list was up to 70.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Bill Courtney Booksigning

”You must absolutely be beside yourself,” said the reporter to the man on the red carpet. “How will the movie winning the Oscar change your life?”

“It won’t,” answered the man. “Tomorrow, they’re going to roll the red carpet up and next year, another great movie will come out, and I’ll be an afterthought.”

The man being interviewed was Bill Courtney. The movie about his coaching the Manassas High School football team in Memphis was Undefeated, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2012. And an “afterthought” Courtney may be in some quarters. Don’t tell that, though, to the inspired audiences who hear Courtney on the speaking circuit. And don’t tell that to readers of Against the Grain (Weinstein Books), Courtney’s book of life lessons (co-written with author and journalist Michael Arkush), which Courtney will be signing at the Booksellers at Laurelwood on Saturday.

The book draws from Courtney’s own life; the lives of the students he coached; the lives of his workforce at Classic American Hardwoods (the local lumber company Courtney owns); and the lives of fellow Memphians, including Dr. Scott Morris, Jim Strickland, Fred Smith, and Jacqueline Smith. The book’s subtitle covers the territory: “A Coach’s Wisdom on Character, Faith, Family, and Love.”

Courtney covers his coaching philosophy in just a few words too. Never mind the standard X’s and O’s. Courtney “starts with believing that players win games and coaches win players.” And elsewhere in Against the Grain: “I didn’t coach football. I coached kids who played football.”

And no, winning isn’t the only thing, according to Coach Courtney. There’s something to be said too for commitment, civility, perseverance, personal responsibility, and dignity. Grace, too, and forgiveness when times get tough, on or off the field.

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Book Features Books

Catching up with Cartoonist Graham Sale

CREDIT: Graham Sale

Let’s start with the hate mail cartoonist Graham Sale has received over the past few years.

According to one disgruntled writer: “You have a sick depraved mind and need counseling. I know a Christian Counseling Center that can help you. I’ll be praying for you. There is a day of accountability and you need to prepare for it, Mr. Sale.”

Another wrote: “Your cartoon portraying the Lord Jesus Christ as a dark-skinned, foreign-born, anti-war liberal socialist who wants to give away health care and food to the masses in no way represents the Christ of the Bible.”

Another put it simply: “You are an idiot.”

But then there was one writer who put to him this question: “Your cartoons are so stupid. How can you accept money for them?”

Graham Sale accepted money for them because Chris Peck, former editor of The Commercial Appeal, hired him in 2010 to do weekday political cartoons and a series of cartoons called “Men in Hats” for Saturday’s editorial page.

Sale continued to do them until budget cuts at the paper led to his layoff. But here those cartoons are again, only this time they’ve been collected in three volumes — Cartoons & Illustrations, Political Cartoons, and Men in Hats: If Idiots Could Fly — and, no surprise, it’s Sale as you love or loathe him: mincemeat-maker of the GOP (and not a few Democrats), super PACs, the NRA, big banks, one-percenters, Fox News, and Bible thumpers. That’s in addition to Sale’s acute observations of life’s everyday indignities and inanities. Call those observations his gag cartoons. “A breath of fresh air amidst a swamp of paranoid bible/gun nuts” was how one fan described Sale’s political cartoons in a letter to the CA.

Sale recently also heard other kind words from a politically sympathetic Midtown neighbor: “You and Garry Trudeau were the only two people who got us through the last election cycle.”

Sale, who grew up in Elmira, New York, and graduated from Parsons, has good words for Memphis, where he’s met a number of likeminded people and where, let’s face it, the cost of living’s relatively cheap.

“I’d been in Los Angeles for 15 years. Before that, Philadelphia. Before that, New York City,” Sale said recently by phone. “But in 2010 and with the economy the way it was, I didn’t feel the need to be in L.A. Been there, done that. A friend in Mississippi said, ‘Why don’t you come here? See what Southern hospitality is like.’ I said, ‘Why not? I’ll try something different.'”

And it has been different, Sale said. The opportunities have been better than expected; the ease of meeting people a far cry from the competitive East/West Coast mob scenes. They’re scenes Sale knows very well, because in a variety of creative ventures, you name it, Sale’s done it.

In addition to licensing greeting cards, beach towels, and coffee mugs and creating Boneless Chuck (a bean-bag toy figure with a worldwide following) and a clothing line for kids called Club Crib, Sale has been a freelance advertising illustrator, an insurance salesman, a T-shirt designer (Ron Silver wore one of his shirts in Reversal of Fortune; the band UB40 wore them on Saturday Night Live), a financial planner, and self-help author of What Women Want: A Gentleman’s Guide to Romance. He’s working now on a related title called Win at Work Without Losing at Love. And what’s not to keep a cartoonist from also being a full-fledged author? Nothing, according to Sale: “You have some paper, a pen, you’re in business.”

“I read adventure stories as a kid,” Sale said. “I’ve always wanted a life full of adventure, of risk, for better or for worse.”

But it’s cartooning that’s held and still holds particular pride of place:

“People cut my stuff out and post it. It’s touched them in some way. That yellowing cartoon of mine that they’ve kept? People take it off their bulletin board when they move. They put it back up after they’ve moved. It’s the coolest thing. That’s more to me than winning a Pulitzer. That bulletin board has been the real prize.”

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Blurb Books

Daniel Friedman Returns to Town

Buck is back. That’s Baruch “Buck” Schatz, 88 years old and retired from the Memphis Police Department, but he’s still got a way with words and he’s not afraid to use them. As in this exchange between Buck and a young detective on the force (the subject, crime in general; the asterisks not in the original):

“That’s how you and I are different,” Buck says. “You look at crime as a computer program. As a collection of statistics. It’s easy to take a compassionate view of criminals when you treat them as a group of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden. You have to sympathize with them in the aggregate, because on an individual basis, these mother****ers are goddamn intolerable. And statistics turn the suffering of the victims into an abstraction. Crime, to me, was always personal; a thing people do to each other.”

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One crime in particular: a heist from the Cotton Planters Union Bank in downtown Memphis back in 1965 — a crime committed by a famous Jewish thief using a gang of Jewish accomplices and with the help of corrupt Jewish police.

Flash forward to 2009, and Buck is still wearing his Members Only jacket, and that famous thief, named Elijah, is once more on the scene (Memphis) in Daniel Friedman’s second (and latest) Buck Schatz mystery, Don’t Ever Look Back (Minotaur Books). And Buck being Buck, he’s still got a way with words and his own understanding of Old Testament history. Elijah (the prophet)? He’s, according to Buck, “the sneakiest bastard in all of Jewish theology.”

For more on Don’t Ever Look Back, on its hard-nosed but hard to dislike protagonist, and on its author, see the May issue of Memphis magazine. On a more serious note, for now, consider this, according to Friedman:

Friedman__Daniel_CREDIT_Keziban_Barry.jpg

“The question of who [Buck] is, whether he’s right or wrong in his worldview, whether he’s ultimately a good guy or a bad guy, his rationalizations and defense mechanisms: The greater business in the [Buck Schatz] series is … getting to the core of those questions. Ultimately, at the center of the story is Buck’s character and his journey or refusal to take the journey toward embracing his own frailty and own mortality …. There’s a good mystery novel in there as well.”

There sure is, and local readers need to know the name Daniel Friedman. His first book, Friedman admitted by phone from New York, where he now lives, was a bit of a sleeper. But foreign sales of that book, Don’t Ever Get Old, have been good, and in Germany, it’s made the best-seller list. Libraries and independent book stores in the U.S. have been supportive too.

But Friedman’s hoping that Don’t Ever Look Back will “double-down” on readers’ awareness of Buck Schatz and the two mysteries so far starring him. Memphis readers, also be aware: On Tuesday, May 27th, 6-7 p.m., Daniel Friedman is here to sign Don’t Ever Look Back at The Booksellers at Laurelwood. “Back” because the writer’s hometown is Memphis, Tennessee. •

Categories
Blurb Books

Salinger Goes Digital (Legitimately) Thanks to Devault-Graves

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It’s official: On the evening of May 21st, fans of J.D. Salinger could do something they couldn’t do before: Go to Amazon, type in “J.D. Salinger” and “ebook,” and download the result onto their Kindles. This makes Three Early Stories (for $9.99 and at just under 80 pages) the first time Salinger’s been made available in ebook form, and readers have Memphis-based Devault-Graves Digital Editions to thank.

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The collected stories in Three Early Stories are:

“The Young Folks” (originally published in Story magazine in 1940, the first time Salinger saw a story his in print); “Go See Eddie” (from University of Kansas City Review, December 1940); and “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (Story magazine, November-December 1944). Illustrating the stories is New York-based Anna Rose Yoken, daughter of Memphians Tony Yoken and Pamela Denney, dining columnist and food blogger for the Memphis Flyer’s sister publication, Memphis magazine. (Shown below: one of Yoken’s illustrations for “The Young Folks.”)

All three stories are notable for what they reveal of Salinger’s early debt to Hemingway and as early indicators of Salinger’s style. In “The Young Folks,” the banal cocktail-party chatter between a young woman and a college boy says far more to the reader than that young woman and student know themselves. In “Go See Eddie,” the erotic charge between a man and his sister is unmistakable, the threatening undertones of their exchange made suddenly manifest in a single, alarming gesture. In “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” by a writer who’d seen more than his share of World War II horrors, a man prepares to enter the service — and prepares, perhaps, his wife and mentally failing aunt (and himself?) for the possibility of personal tragedy.

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According to Tom Graves, who co-founded The Devault-Graves Agency with business partner Darrin Devault, publishing these three Salinger stories was the ideal project for an agency whose mission is to bring neglected titles, out-of-print titles, and uncopyrighted titles to the reading public in a polished ebook format.

in the past, Devault-Graves has “rescued” the autobiography of the photographer Weegee, collections by celebrity profiler Rex Reed, and a novel by noir master Jim Thompson. The company’s biggest seller has proved to be Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. But in the case of Salinger, Devault-Graves is planning to go beyond ebooks. A print edition (the agency’s first) of Three Early Stories is scheduled for June, Graves said by phone this past week.

“We’ve been a little hush-hush about all of this,” Graves said, “but we’re really proud of Three Early Stories. We only went ‘live’ with it on Amazon on Wednesday night. It’s a coup for us” — an enterprise Graves compared to David (Devault-Graves) vs. Goliath (the larger publishing world). “We want word of it to build.”

What Graves didn’t want was a cover that too closely mimicked the one for the famous paperback edition of The Catcher in the Rye, which features simply the title and author’s name on a solid maroon background. But he and Devault did ask that graphic artist Martina Voriskova keep the cover of Three Early Stories equally simple. What Graves would like to emphasize, however, is that Three Early Stories is (as stated on the book’s Amazon page) “the first legitimately published book by J.D. Salinger in more than 50 years.”

Bootleg, unauthorized, and editorially sloppy versions of Salinger’s stories have been leaked before. “Leaked” is not the word for Three Early Stories. Legitimacy is.

The stories were never (“ever,” according to Graves) registered to Salinger. Three Early Stories with its illustrations — together with high editorial standards and clean layout — means that the Devault-Graves Agency has its own copyright to the edition. It’s the business of the agency to do the deep research to obtain and secure that right.

“Long-term, we hope to build a lasting reputation for the excellence of taste in our book selections and for producing a quality ebook product,” Graves said.

And who knows? Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger could be just the “coup” to put Devault-Graves on the big map. •