Category: Blurb

Susan Schadt retired as chief executive officer of ArtsMemphis in 2015, and has spent her time since diving into the world of publishing with Susan Schadt Press and two new releases this fall.

 

The Chubby Vegetarian: 100 Inspired Vegetable Recipes For The Modern Table is the second vegetarian cookbook by Justin Fox Burks and Amy Lawrence. They have endorsements from TV host and author, Lloyd Boston; Chef Bryant Terry, former Memphian and host of two PBS series, Urban

Organic and The Endless Feast; and Joe Yonan, food writer; among many others. Their first book, The Southern Vegetarian (Thomas Nelson, 2013), was featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and several other national media outlets. The couples’ blog, The Chubby Vegetarian, has had over 3.5 million views.

 

Upcoming events:

 

Thursday, Oct. 27^th

Book signing

Booksellers at Laurelwood

6:30 p.m.

 

Nov. 5^th

Justin & Amy demo and signing

Rhodes College — Cajun Fest

11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

 

Nov. 6^th

Book release party

Second Line

6 – 7:30 p.m.

 

Nov. 16^th

Book signing

Babcock Gifts

4:30 – 6 p.m.

 

Dec. 10^th

Holiday Market

Memphis Farmers Market

8 a.m. – 1 p.m.

 

Reel Masters: Chefs Casting About With Timing And Grace features eight celebrated chefs and a foreword by Peter Kaminsky. The book employs a cookbook anthology model, incorporating stories, chef biographies, and recipes to tell the stories of chefs’ sought-after fishing spots or unknown gems. Through the voices and photographs of passionate fishermen, guides, chefs, and guests, the book

 captures the heart and soul of these revered retreats and the memories and traditions that make each so special. This time we are going fishing in the bayous , backwaters, and bays, and along the coastlines of the sporting South, from Toledo Bend, Louisiana, to Richmond, with stops in Venice, Pensacola, Charleston, and other treasured spots. 

 

Featured celebrated and award winning chefs:

 

Jeremiah Bacon, Charleston

John Besh, New Orleans

Walter Bundy, Richmond

John Currence, Oxford

Kelly English, Memphis

Chris Hastings, Birmingham

Donald Link, New Orleans

Kevin Willmann, St. Louis

 
Upcoming events:

Nov. 1^st

Signing with Kelly English

Booksellers at Laurelwood

6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

 

Nov. 6^th

Book release party

Second Line

6 – 7:30 p.m.

 

Scholar and Slate pop critic Jack Hamilton will be signing and discussing his new book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, this Thursday at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

In his book, Hamilton addresses the issue of white artists’ appropriation of black music, employing an interdisciplinary combination of historical research, musical analysis, and critical race theory to demonstrate how rock-and-roll “became white” during the 1960s. In doing so, he parallels Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” revealing that despite the songs’ similarities, Dylan was considered a rock genius, while Cooke is perceived as a master of “soul” — a disparity that resonates later in the 1960s with the conflicting perceptions of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Dusty Springfield later in that decade. 

Just around Midnight also details the infatuation that British bands had with African American music, charting the Beatles’ collaboration with Motown artists and the undertones of racial transgression in the Rolling Stones’ hit songs. Hamilton elucidates the implications of Jimi Hendrix’s ascent to stardom amidst an increasingly white rock and roll landscape, and describes how Carlos Santana, one of the major guitar virtuosos of the post-Hendrix era, challenged the boundaries of music’s racial imagination.

In her 1973 Harper’s magazine essay “Ripping Off Black Music,” Margo Jefferson equated white artists’ appropriation of black music to cultural plunder: “The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites.” Just around Midnight enriches our understanding of racial perception and authenticity in America and reinforces that black musicians played a crucial role in establishing the rock and roll sound that came to define second half of the 20th century.

Jack Hamilton
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
926 E. McLemore Avenue
Thursday, October 27th
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Free admission

It’s autumn! Forget what the thermometer says, I know it’s autumn because it’s time once again for the Friends of the Library Fall Book Sale. Beginning this Friday, Oct. 21^st, and going on through Saturday, book (and film and music) lovers have the chance to get some great deals. Books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, sheet music, vinyl records . . . it’s all there for your perusing. 

 

Prices range from a quarter all the way up to $2. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Memphis Public Library & Information Center, its collections, programs, and resources throughout the18 locations citywide.

 

For more information about the Friends of the Library Fall 2016 Book Sale, call (901) 415-2840.

 

Friends of the Library Fall Book Sale

Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library meeting rooms

Friday & Saturday, Oct. 21-22

10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

(Members only preview sale is Friday, 8-10 a.m.)

by Jesse Davis

I had not heard of Julia Elliott before I picked up her first novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, but I immediately felt drawn to the book. I liked the cover design — what appeared to be a primeval hog-dragon trampling swampland and belching flame. I flipped the tantalizingly titled tome over for a look at the details on the back cover only to find that Tin House Books, an imprint of one of my favorite literary journals, published the novel.

      



The New and Improved Romie Futch introduces the reader to the title character as he girds himself for yet another depressing bender. He is balding, pot-bellied, recently divorced, and his failing taxidermy shop is limping along like a maimed animal, not long for this world. A man with limited options, Romie lives in a small, Southern town, and he finds himself consistently in the shadow of one of his high school friends (now more “frienemy” than anything), an ATV salesman and a picture of stereotypical Southern masculinity. With a brief and disastrous encounter with his ex-wife — she glows; Romie glistens with alcoholic sweat; she is accompanied by her new beau; Romie slumps forlornly among his male cohorts — the scene is set for Romie’s transformation. What else, Romie is forced to wonder, could he possibly have to lose?



So after seeing an online pop-up ad promising a radical, life-changing transformation, Romie throws a few articles of clothing into a duffel bag and signs up for the experimental treatment. This, dear reader, is where the novel gets weird, with new genres rearing their heads, chimera-like. What began as a fairly straightforward New-South-meets-Southern-Gothic foray into contemporary fiction is suddenly a story about low and high art verily vrooming with verbiage. It is also a postmodern grotesquerie that attempts to reconcile the varied, mismatched parts of the Frankenstein monster that, so Elliott would seem to suggest, is the essence of compartmentalized, modern existence. And I would be remiss if I did not give a tip of the hat to the novel’s brave willingness to wear the paranoid science-fiction hat from time to time. (The program in which Romie enrolls smacks of MKUltra, the CIA’s illegal, 23-year-long mind control program.)



The program works, however, and Romie gets smart. He gets super-smart, Flowers for Algernon smart. So are the voices he’s hearing in his head just in his head, or are they some sort of Project Monarch-like intervention undertaken by secretive men and women in lab coats? Is the so-called “hogzilla” terrorizing the countryside also the product of clandestine genetic modification? Is the world ready for a conceptual taxidermy art installation based, in part, on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison?



The New and Improved Romie Futch is absurd in the most satisfying of ways. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the novel adequately interfaces with the inherent absurdity of contemporary life. While it would be easy to say that Romie’s sadness and loneliness — the original impetus for his enrolment in the experiment in the first place — get lost in the genre shuffle, it is really up to the reader not to let that happen. Romie’s loneliness is right there all along, just under the surface of the fizz and bubble of verbiage and concepts. In fact, it is only accentuated by Romie’s improvement. Whereas before, he hardly fit in with his contemporaries, post-treatment Romie has no peers. He is a true freak — too redneck to fit in with the academics with whom he can suddenly converse and too brilliant to be content pounding domestic beer with his old high school buddies.



Julia Elliott has crafted an achingly heartfelt novel, propelled by a page-turner of a plot all the way until Romie’s inevitable confrontation with the hopped-up “hogzilla.” The New and Improved Romie Futch, true to its postmodern and chimera-like form, deftly balances its strange mix of Southern Gothic and science-fiction, heartfelt and thought-inducing prose, and the result is an infinitely readable offering. Though the novel, with its gene-spliced hero and monstrous boar, is ideal for the Halloween season, it will surely stand the test of time. I’m calling it here and now — this one is destined for cult classic status.

Jesse Davis is a copy editor for The Memphis Flyer and a bookseller for the Booksellers at Laurelwood.

Memphis is becoming a literary hotspot and has had its share of renowned authors visit its bookstores, libraries, and reading spaces this year — Jess Walter, Chris Offutt, Jacqueline Woodson, Erik Larsen, Lauren Groff, and Jesmyn Ward, to name a few. Add to this list Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler, coming to story booth on October 13th to discuss his new novel, Perfume River.

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian, teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert’s own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. William Quinlan, Robert and Jimmy’s father and a veteran of World War II, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across all their lives once again, when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father’s bedside. And an unstable homeless man whom Robert meets at a restaurant and at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.



“What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Vietnam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be — with a measure of genius — almost simply stated. Butler’s novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace.” — Richard Ford



“This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes.” — Booklist (starred review)



From one of America’s most important writers, Perfume River is an exquisite novel that examines family ties and the legacy of the Vietnam War through the portrait of a single North Florida family. 



Robert Olen Butler

story booth

438 N. Cleveland Street

Thursday, October 13

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.



 

Acclaimed folklorist and author, William Ferris, will be presenting his newest book, The South In Color: A Visual Journal, this Saturday at The Memphis Cotton Museum.

Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Ferris’ two previous books — Give My Poor Heart Ease and The Storied South — The South in Color completes an informal trilogy of his documentation of the South’s tumultuous 20th century.

Since the moment his parents gave 12-year-old Ferris a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, he passionately began to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The 1960s and ’70s were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative collection of 100 of Ferris’ photographs of the South, taken during this formative period, capture the power of his color photography. 

The event is open to the public and includes a reception with light hors d’oeuvres, local craft beer, and live music by The Side Street Steppers. Tickets are $25.00 for museum members and $35.00 for non-members, and are available for purchase online. A portion of your ticket purchase is tax deductible. Attending this event supports the mission of the Cotton Museum: Preserving and promoting a historic space open to the public and devoted to sharing the story of cotton — a crop that created empires, transformed American culture and changed the history of a nation and the world.

An evening with William Ferris
Saturday, October 8th
The Memphis Cotton Museum
65 Union Avenue
6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
$25.00 for members, $35.00 for non-members

“If you could see the writer’s mind as a living, breathing thing, it might look like Ishmael wandering the narrow streets of New England before climbing aboard the ill-fated Pequod. Or perhaps like Sal Paradise passing a bottle among Okies on a flatbed bound for California. It might look like Captain Nemo diving 20,000 leagues below the surface of the sea. Or it might look like Robert Walker, the aptly named protagonist of Corey Mesler’s latest novel by the same name, as he walks the streets of Memphis from Overton Park to the Mississippi River, to the University of Memphis and back again.”

That is the opening to my review of Robert Walker in the September 2016 issue of Memphis magazine. Since reading Corey’s newest offering, I feel as though I’ve seen this traveling man, Robert Walker, at every turn — as I ride my bike through Overton Park, stop into Memphis Made for a pint, or even visiting Burke’s Book Store, the 140-year-old shop that Corey and his wife Cheryl own in Cooper-Young. This will be the site Thursday, September 29th, of a reading and signing by Corey.

From Goodreads: “Robert Walker is homeless. He awakes one morning in his box to find half his face paralyzed. In anguish, he walks to mimic normality. He also walks because walking for him is life. Eventually, in opposition to his dedication to desired anonymity, he is forced to rejoin the world. The novel follows two crucial days in his journey while he traverses Memphis, encountering the familiar, the foreign, the desolate, and the joyous.”

Corey has published more than 30 novels and poetry collections. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. His fiction has received praise from John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Lee Smith, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Peter Coyote, Steve Yarbrough, and Greil Marcus, among others. If you stop by Thursday evening, be sure and pick up one (or all!) of Corey’s other books, I’m sure he’d be happy to sign those for you as well. 

Corey Mesler
Burke’s Book Store
936 S. Cooper Street
Thursday, September 29th
5:30 p.m.

Memphian Lisa Turner splits her time between her hometown and Nova Scotia working on police procedurals such as The Gone Dead Train and A Little Death In Dixie. Her new novel, Devil Sent The Rain (William Morrow), once again featuring Detective Billy Able, will be released on Tuesday, September 27th, with a reading and signing at the Booksellers at Laurelwood.

“Fresh from solving Memphis’ most sensational murder case, Homicide Detective Billy Able and his ambitious new partner Frankie Malone are called to a bizarre crime scene on the outskirts of town. A high society attorney has been murdered while dressed in a wedding gown. Billy is shocked to discover he has a very personal connection to the victim. When the attorney’s death exposes illegal practices at her family’s prestigious law firm, the scandal is enough to rock the southern city’s social world.



In a tale of the remnants of Old South aristocracy and entitlement, twisted by greed and vengeance, Billy must confront the secrets of his own past to have any chance at solving the murder of the girl he once knew. But as he seeks the truth, he’s drawn closer to an embittered killer bent on revenge— and eliminating the threat Billy poses.”

Kirkus Reviews: “A well-wrought procedural that takes a hard look at the old South’s influence on the new. ” 



Publishers Weekly: “[A] shifting narrative, a keen sense of place, and a steady stream of suspects and red herrings propel the mystery to a satisfying conclusion.” 

Lisa Turner

The Booksellers at Laurelwood

Tuesday, September 27th

6:30 p.m.

I’ve written quite a bit about the upcoming Mid-South Book Festival in this space and in the print edition of the Flyer, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the events surrounding Memphis Reads. The program touting itself as “the city’s largest book club” this year chose Salvage the Bones by award-winning author Jesmyn Ward.

Jesmyn Ward

 

Memphis Reads, with its first event of 2016 on Monday, Sept. 12^th, comes on the heels of the Book Festival, which has its last event the day before. Now, I don’t understand the politics and inner workings of promoting reading and literacy, but it seems to me that the organizations in charge of these two book-loving affairs should get together — maybe have a little affair of their own — because the Book Festival is timed perfectly to be the opening event to a month-long celebration of books, reading, and literacy. Bringing nationally regarded authors into town to speak with school-age kids and would-be writers only ensures that future generations will make reading and education a priority. The sheer marketing power behind presenting organizations and sponsors such as Literacy Mid-South, Christian Brothers University, the Memphis Public Library system, Rhodes College, MLGW, Hilton, the National Civil Rights Museum, and Shelby County Schools, among many, many others could ramp city-wide reading up to a whole new level.

 

But I digress.

 

Christian Brothers University associate professor, and the planner of Memphis Reads, Karen Golightly, said, “We hope to break down the physical and metaphoric walls that exist between Memphians by giving them a common reading experience. Through the events scheduled in September, attendees can learn about the issues addressed in the book through art exhibits, documentaries, films, panel discussions, and author/expert talks. The point is to find a way in which Memphians can participate in different aspects and viewpoints of the issues at hand, in order to build community one book at a time.”

 

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood awards for essays, drama, and fiction. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford, from 2008-2010, she has been named the 2010-11 Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

 

From Salvage the Bones: “A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn’t show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting.

 

“As the 12 days that make up the novel’s framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family—motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.”

Memphis Reads 2016 events:

 

Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808 – 1865

National Civil Rights Museum (State of Tennessee Gallery)

September 12 – mid-November 2016 (Free with museum admission; Tennessee residents may enter free of charge on Mondays after 3 p.m.)

 

Screening: Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (Parts 1 – 2)

University of Memphis (304 University Center, Bluff Room)

Thursday, Sept. 15th

5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. film screening (Free and open to the public)

 

Screening: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library (3030 Poplar Avenue, meeting room C)

Monday, Sept. 19th

5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. film screening (Free and open to the public)

 

Panel Discussion: My Whole City Underwater – Race, Trauma, and Surviving Katrina

University of Memphis (342 University Center, Shelby Room)

Thursday, Sept. 22th

5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. discussion (Free and open to the public)

 

Jesmyn Ward discussion and book signing

Christian Brothers University (650 East Parkway South, CBU Theatre)

Wednesday, Sept. 28th, 7 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

 

Q & A with Jesmyn Ward and book signing

Rhodes College (2000 North Parkway, Bryan Campus Life Center)

Thursday, Sept. 29th, 6 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

 

Great Conversations with Rhodes Professor Ernest Gibson

Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library (Memphis Room, 4th floor)

Thursday, Oct. 4th, 5:30 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

 

For more on Memphis Reads, visit memphisreadsbook.org.

 

Listen up, readers, there is a lot going on this weekend with the Mid-South Book Festival. It kicks off Wednesday with the Literacy Summit, but Thursday night is the first literary event with a reading and signing by acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson at story booth.

 

Woodson, known and celebrated as a young adult writer, has just released her first work for an adult audience, Another Brooklyn (Amistad).

 

Another Brooklyn is a short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper. “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet,” the narrator begins, which perfectly conveys the novel’s suspended sorrow. Now an anthropologist who studies the way different cultures honor their dead, August is an adult looking back at her adolescence in the 1970s. She came to Brooklyn with her younger brother two decades earlier when their father hoped they could all start a new life away from the tragedies that shattered their family back in Tennessee.

But August and her brother aren’t so much renewed as arrested in this alien, dangerous place. Unable to acknowledge her mother’s death, young August pines for her return while staring out the window, month after month. “If someone had asked, Are you lonely? I would have said, No,” August says. “I would have pointed to my brother and said, He’s here. I would have lied even as the empty street on rainy afternoons threatened to swallow me whole.”

 

The signing is presented by The Booksellers at Laurelwood and Nicole Yasinsky, marketing manager for Booksellers, was recently quoted about the novel for a story in Bookselling This Week from the American Booksellers Association, which chose it as last August’s “Next List” pick.

 

“Effortlessly weaving poetic prose, Woodson tells the story of the relationships young women form, their yearning to belong, and the bonds that are created — and broken,” said Yasinsky. “Brooklyn itself is a vivid character in this tale — a place at first harsh, but one that becomes home and plays a role in each character’s future.”

 

Author Ann Patchet has said, “Another Brooklyn is a sort of fever dream, containing both the hard truths of life and the gentle beauty of memory. The story of a young girl trying to find herself in the midst of so many conflicting and desires swallowed me whole. Jacqueline Woodson has such an original vision, such a singular voice. I loved this book.”

 

Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Woodson was recently named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation.

 

Jacqueline Woodson

story booth at Crosstown Arts

438 N. Cleveland

Thursday, September 8^th

6 p.m.

crosstownarts.org

midsouthbookfest.org