Category: Blurb

Jamey Hatley

Memphis fiction writer Jamey Hatley has won a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers, the awards are $30,000 each.

Jamey Hatley is working on her first novel, The Dream-Singers. It is the story of twins, one born at the moment Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his final speech and the other at the moment King dies. After the devastation of the assassination, the people in an all-black neighborhood of Memphis fixate on the babies as a symbol of hope. Their hope is short-lived when the boy twin dies under mysterious circumstances just three months later. Her nominator writes, “Reading her work is like witnessing past, present, and future on one page. She creates a very convincing community and voice through her use of fable.”

Hatley has recently returned to her hometown of Memphis to care for her elderly parents. She says, “So many of the themes that were already present in my novel have become starkly real since my return: dreams as debt, who gets to leave home and who must stay, the responsibility to home, and collective amnesia. It attempts to interrogate the cliché to ‘just follow your dreams’ and reveal what a complex proposition that is for a community where one of the most famous dreamers of all time is killed.”

Her work has appeared in Callaloo, The Account, and Oxford American, among others. She has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for the past five years and is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She received her B.S. from the University of Tennessee, her M.A. in journalism from the University of Memphis, and her M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. Hatley plans to use her award to cover living expenses during the next year so she can write full-time and complete her novel.

Novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program in 1995. Now in its 22nd year, the awards have helped women to build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded more than $2 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Elif Batuman, Eula Biss, Lan Samantha Chang, Rivka Galchen, Rebecca Lee, ZZ Packer, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Lev Grossman’s debut novel gets the rerelease treatment.

by Jesse Davis

As I selected my latest find from the ever-growing stack of Advanced Reader Copies that looms on my bedside table, I felt the tendrils of expectation reach into my stomach, anticipation pupating and breeding the butterflies of excitement. Not only was I going to make a dent in my to-read stack, but this time I was probably in for a real treat. Why? Because I was about to, at last, read Lev Grossman’s first

 novel.

Though I had read and loved Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy (Viking/Penguin Books), I had never gotten around to scouring the library or Amazon for a copy of his long out-of-print debut, Warp, (originally released in 1997 by St. Martin’s Press). Based on the success of his recent work, or perhaps in celebration of the debut novel’s 19th anniversary, St. Martin’s is rereleasing Warp.

Why they chose to republish the novel a year before the more auspicious 20-year mark, I can only guess, but the whole rerelease — and the novel itself — feels a little underdone to me.  

Warp rests comfortably in the coming-of-age-tale category. It is replete with references to famous literary and cinematic wanderers, from Joyce’s Leopold Bloom to Picard’s Enterprise, suggestive perhaps that Hollis, the book’s protagonist, has become unmoored, never having found the tether that should have kept him grounded in adulthood. As the plot unfurls, there is no shortage of a conspicuous consumption of alcohol and resulting rum-soaked repartee, and the archetypal proto manic pixie dream girl shows up right on cue, leaning against a phone in an ATM vestibule, stealing long-distance calls from the bank, ready to rock Hollis’ world and waken in him something unnamed or unnamable.

The primary movement of the novel centers around Hollis’ decision to eschew the settled, office-bound career path and lifestyle his ex-girlfriend and most of his friends have chosen. Since Hollis’ friend, Peters, is housesitting for a wealthy couple, the irreverent pair set up shop, drinking down copious amounts of their unsuspecting host’s expensive wine. I remained uncertain as to why exactly the two cash-strapped loafers had to sneak into the house if Peters had been engaged as its temporary caretaker, but that small hurdle in logic was hardly the biggest thing troubling me as I read.

It wasn’t until about this point — page 166, the end of chapter 11 — that I realized I had read Warp when it was originally released, back at the tail end of the ’90s. Rarely do I find myself reading over half a novel only to have my memory jogged by an interesting plot device or some particularly memorable bit of dialogue. No, as such an avid supporter of Grossman’s later work, I find myself uncomfortably compelled to admit that the novel fails to significantly differentiate itself from any other bildungsroman.

It’s a decent first foray, but Hollis reads like little more than an early-model Quentin Coldwater, the hero of Grossman’s infinitely more mature and fully realized Magicians trilogy. Like Quentin, Hollis makes abundant references to popular culture, particularly to other flaneurs and antiheroes. Like Quentin, Hollis suffers from a post-collegiate ennui as he affects a halfhearted search for meaning and direction. The key difference is that, by the time he has written The Magicians, Grossman has something to say, and he has the polished skill and familiarity with his craft to get his point across. Warp finds him still searching for those tools, hanging lumpy dialogue on poor Hollis, making him a mouthpiece instead of letting him just be a character.

Warp serves as a portrait of an artist on the cusp of hitting his stride, still grappling with the ideas and methods that will propel the rest of his career. While it may not have been the most memorable novel, it was Grossman’s first step on what I sincerely hope will be a long career. And there is something to be said for first steps. Without them, the destination remains nothing more than a dream. 

Nashville-based Army veteran Odie Lindsey has had stories published in Best American Short Stories, the Iowa Review, Columbia, and the anthology Forty Stories, among others. This week, his short story collection, We

Come to Our Senses (W. W. Norton & Company), will be released and Lindsey will be at The Booksellers of Laurelwood on Thursday, July 28th, to read from and discuss the book.

We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women directly and tangentially affected by combat, and the ways in which war touches their lives back home.

“Evie M.” is the story of a veteran-turned-office clerk whose petty neuroses derail even her suicide. In “11/19/98,” a couple obsesses over sitcoms as a distraction from darker complications. In the story “Colleen,” a young woman redeploys to a small town in Mississippi where she must confront the superior who abused her while at war, and “Hers” addresses the sexual politics of a combat zone.

“I read Odie Lindsey’s We Come to Our Senses in a way that books rarely compel me to…Not only compulsively readable, the thoughts these war stories stirred were rich and complex and heartening in their universal humanity. This is a remarkable collection by a splendid new writer.”  — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Lindsey writes with quiet confidence and sometimes arch humor that invites comparison to Ben Fountain and Phil Klay, but that wouldn’t displease Flannery O’Connor. Superb atmospherics coupled with arresting story lines.” — Kirkus starred review

Odie Lindsey
Thursday, July 28
6:30 p.m.
The Booksellers at Laurelwood
387 Perkins Road Extended

Our good friends at the Pinch Literary Journal have put together a series of writing workshops to be held in early June. Writing is a craft, and it’s hard, so if you want to get better it’s a good idea to listen to those who
do it.

From their website:

“If you are a fan of the Pinch, you know that we pride ourselves on selecting and publishing diverse poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. We are also a hardworking staff of graduate students in the English Department at the University of Memphis. We take and teach classes in creative writing at the university and we work hard for the Pinch. We write, we publish, we are the people we want to see in literary journals. We’d like to share some of that experience with the creative community in Memphis. We’ve got a plan. It’s a good one. Won’t you join us?”

Classes will be held at story booth (438 N. Cleveland), and run June 4th, 11th, and 18th. These dates correspond to classes in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Classes are taught by instructors and MFA candidates from the University of Memphis, which sponsors the Pinch.

For more information and guidelines on how to apply, visit the Pinch.

It’s been a productive time of reading around here, despite the demands of work and family and the beautiful weather luring me into outdoor activities.

Lee Smith is an acquaintance and sent her new book, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Algonquin Books), to my wife when it came out last month. I quickly claimed it as my own and devoured it. Smith focuses her superpowers of acute observation of characteristics, mannerisms, and personalities, and the culture of a region, to her own life in this series of essays. She touches on her time growing up in Grundy, Virginia, and what she gleaned from its people and time spent in her father’s dimestore. From her childhood comes a love of books which would lead (lucky for us) to a life of writing. It hasn’t always been an easy life, but Smith handles the stories of depression, divorce, and suicide with the tenderness that has resounded in her prose for decades.

Reading Dimestore led me immediately to our bookshelves and the first Smith novel I could lay my hands on, 1995’s Saving Grace (G.P. Putnam’s Son’s). It is everything I wanted after reading about the author’s life and where she grew up. Florida Grace Shepherd is part of a devout family led by a charismatic, snake-handling, preacher as father. The book follows her life in and out of that family, and explores a person’s ties to religion and faith, and the feeling of comfort within one’s own skin. I plowed through it in a matter of days, rushing through Grace’s life with an eagerness to learn where she might end up.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf), by comparison, has been a slog. Good story, interesting characters, but a length and various plotlines that have left me feeling as though I’ve walked uphill through Lee Smith’s Appalachian mountains in the dead of winter. More on this book in a forthcoming issue of the Flyer.

I’m reading The Baby Thief by Barbara Bisantz Raymond (Carroll & Graf Publishers) for purely information purposes for another project I’m working on. Not so much reading, really, as taking it up now and then to pick my way through it as I tend to do with nonfiction. The story of Georgia Tann, who turned the world of adoption on its ear with her business of selling babies through her children’s home in Memphis, is a fascinating and heartbreaking one. The book is well-written, too, and I look forward to getting in deeper and learning just how and why a person might do what she did, and of what happened to some of her victims.

I have read everything Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo has ever written. Much of it more than once. When I first saw he had a new novel coming out, I was beside myself with anticipation. Then I looked closer at the advertisement and realized it’s a sequel to 1993’s fabulous Nobody’s Fool (Random House). That book was the third in his Upstate New York novels, following Mohawk (Knopf) and The Risk Pool (Random House). Russo’s ability to bring a place to life is unparalleled in my opinion (though Lee Smith does give him a run for his money). My fear was that he would take the beautifully wrought characters of Sully and Rub and even Wacker, and wring their stories dry like a dishrag. I’ve been burned before. I anticipated 1997’s voluminous Bridge of Sighs (Knopf) — which took Russo from his comfort zone of New York State and academia to fine art and Venice, Italy — as much as any book ever, and was disappointed in its ramblings. (He would vindicate himself in my eyes two years later with That Old Cape Magic [Knopf].) Anyway, I got Everybody’s Fool (Knopf) the day it came out earlier this week and, though only on page 20 or so, I’ve already laughed out loud twice. I have a good feeling about this one.

What are you reading?

Courtney Robertson: “I just got the book, but so far so good. It’s about a family, the dad is an author and he’s having writer’s block, if you will, and the mom recently lost her job so they were looking for a fresh start. I think their child is being bullied at school as well, and they didn’t like Manhattan, so they end up going to stay in this house that’s out in the woods in rural New York. There are things going on in the woods, and slowly things are starting to unfold.”

New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter will do a reading and signing as part of the Jack D. Farris Visiting Writers Series at Rhodes College. There will be a Q&A following Walter’s presentation on Tuesday, April 19th.

Walter is the author of such acclaimed novels as Beautiful Ruins, The Financial Lives of Poets, The Zero, and We Live In Water. He as been a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and the PEN/USA Literary prize in both fiction and nonfiction, and won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe award. His work has been published in 30 languages and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harpers,McSweeney’s, Esquire, and more.

Along with author Sherman Alexie, Walter was the host of the podcast A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment from the Infinite Guest network.

Jess Walter
Tuesday, April 19
7 p.m.
Rhodes College — Buckman Hall

Author Michael Hicks Thompson will visit the Booksellers at Laurelwood on Saturday, April 16, to discuss and sign his latest novel, The Rector (Shepherd King Publishing).



If Solo, Mississippi, had any claim to fame in the 1950s, it was due to the small town’s proximity to notorious Parchman Farm Penitentiary. When the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church dies suddenly, most locals believe he had a heart attack. Martha McRae, widow and owner of the local newspaper and boarding house, disagrees. She knows the young rector was carrying on with Martha’s friend, Mary Magden Grater, wife of the wealthy Capp Grater. Martha believes Capp had more than enough motive for murder. Martha’s suspicions go unvoiced — in part because she hopes to shield Mary’s past from public scrutiny and in part because the new rector captures her attention. Father Cain’s brand of prosperity preaching and good works captivate everyone in town, but something about the man doesn’t sit well with Martha. Then Cain is murdered. Everyone’s a suspect. Including Martha. When the new rector arrives, she encounters a different sort of puzzle, one that takes her into Parchman Penitentiary where she comes face to face with evil.



Born and raised on a Mississippi farm, Thompson can claim more than a little knowledge about small towns, strong Christian women, alcoholic men, and Jesus. A writer of movie scripts and novels, Thompson is a self-taught artist, licensed offshore sailor, and scuba diver. He is the writer and director of the two-volume David, an illustrated novel on the life of King David. Volume one was awarded the Silver Medal IPPY from the Independent Publisher’s Association in 2011, with volume two winning the Best Graphic Novel award from International Book Awards in 2013.



Michael Hicks Thompson

Booksellers at Laurelwood

Saturday, April 16

2:00 p.m.

Laurie Amento: ‘It’s a historical fiction book that takes place in the Belle Époque period in Paris, a woman has fled New York and a treacherous husband. It looks like there’s going to be some sorcery, witchery, and some art. I like it so far, it’s very intriguing.’