Tag: books

Categories
Book Features Books Cover Feature News

Roaring Back into the ’20s

Memphian Avery Cunningham debuts her novel at the end of January. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)

Avery Cunningham was destined to be a storyteller. Even at a young age, she would stand on a stepping stool in her childhood kitchen in Jackson, Tennessee, and just orate what she now calls “stream of consciousness tales.” People would filter in and out, and Cunningham would keep telling her stories. “I would do this for hours,” she says. “And I guess that’s the clearest representation of the type of person I am and how I’ve always been this person who wanted to tell stories even if no one was listening.”

Except people are ready to listen to Cunningham’s stories. At the beginning of 2022, she sold her debut novel to Hyperion Avenue on proposal, a rare feat for a debut author but, as Cunningham assures, more common than one might think. “I honestly wish that more people talked openly about it, so writers don’t feel this incredible pressure to have written the perfect book right out of the gate,” she says.

She didn’t have years to sit and ponder. She had a deadline, and a full-time job at Southern College of Optometry’s student services. There were late nights with “big dead eyes” stretched open to the glare of the computer screen. There were two-hour-long walks with her Bernese mountain dog, Grizzly, while she devised her story’s structure. And there were visits to Memphis coffee shops and hotel lobbies where she wrote and wrote and wrote, and occasionally looked up to watch those around her, the way they moved, the sound of their voice, could they fit a character’s description?

“They don’t tell you when you’re in a writing program where you have all of this time built in to discover your craft that the challenge is working on this incredible craft and art — these really soul- and time-eating pursuits — while also trying to be a constructive member of society,” Cunningham says. “And that’s a challenge but also that’s part of what it means to be a working novelist right now. … I love that part. I didn’t love it at the time when I was up at one o’clock in the morning, but I love that part of the writing experience and it helps it feel a bit more real.”

This was, after all, what Cunningham had been working towards, what she’d gone to undergraduate and graduate school for at DePaul University in Chicago, and on January 30th, she will celebrate the launch of her novel The Mayor of Maxwell Street, a historical drama about the Black elite in 1920s Chicago.

Cunningham frequented coffee shops and hotel lobbies to write and observe passersby in the making of her novel. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)

ON MAXWELL STREET

Avery Cunningham’s book doesn’t open with the glitz and glamor you’d expect from a 1920s drama — that comes later. Instead, a prologue settles the reader in a dilapidated plantation in Alabama, a sign of the Old South, where a white woman falsely and maliciously accuses a Black man of rape, a tragedy that history is all too familiar with. Yet, this is not the story at the center of Cunningham’s novel, though it’ll reveal its relevance as the plot unravels. The prologue, ultimately, serves as context, a contrast for the unfamiliar yet vibrant aspect of American history that has seldom been honored or explored in media.

Within The Mayor of Maxwell Street, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” Nelly Sawyer, finds herself the premier debutante of Black society after the sudden death of her only brother, and immediately, she is whisked off to a number of social engagements as part of her coming-out, much to her chagrin. She has her secrets, though — for the past year, she’s written as an undercover investigative journalist, reporting “the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow.” Nelly’s latest assignment: to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street. Soon, she enlists the help of the mysterious low-level speakeasy manager, Jay Shorey.

So, yes, there’s glitz and glamor, guns and gangsters, speakeasies and soirees in this novel that seeks out life’s contradictions and doesn’t shy away from its harsh realities. At once Cunningham’s Chicago is alluring, dazzling even, yet its underbelly is foreboding, her characters under the pressure of “the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the Black upper class, and the violence of Prohibition-era Chicago.”

“I wanted to honor that era,” Cunningham says. “And I tried to be as historically accurate or representative of the place and the time and the people as I could. But of course, I also didn’t want to attempt to match Fitzgerald’s style or [Nella] Larsen’s style or any writers that were really prevalent during the ’20s. Because it was a different time, a different place, and different readers. So I just hope that my own voice kind of came through but also still managed to honor as much of the historical accuracy as possible.”

THE MAKING OF THE BOOK

“I’ve called myself a writer for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of written language,” Cunningham says. “And historical fiction has always been what I’ve enjoyed. … One of my first novels ever, or technically a novel — it’s buried somewhere in a box from when I was 13 years old — but even that first experience of novel writing was set in medieval France. And so I love the research aspect of historical fiction. I love how history is so often stranger than fiction or stranger than what we think reality might be. And there are already so many amazing stories nestled in the past. And through historical fiction writers can really bring all of that to light and expose new readers and new people to the stories and kind of really honor the lives of the past.”

In 2020 and 2021, mainstream media began to incorporate people of color in historical settings that traditionally excluded them, Cunningham says. The Netflix series Bridgerton, for instance, cast Black men and women in roles of British aristocracy during a period when slavery was central to Britain’s economy. “I think that there was a hunger with stories like Bridgerton — that yes, thank you for the representation, but also let’s not pretend that this didn’t already exist in its own community,” Cunningham says. “Instead of trying to rewrite a history that never tried to include us in the first place, maybe acknowledge the history that really did exist at the time and all of its seriousness and all of its wealth and joy and happiness. … I was really hungry for a story that made Black Americans the primary narrative.”

Through books like The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham, Cunningham says she was awakened to the truth of Black wealth and all the facets of Black history in this country. Some of the historical figures she read about during her research even make appearances in her novel. “I wanted to make sure that people could read this book and know that these people could exist,” Cunningham says. “This is not is not a fantasy. This is not someone trying to create some kind of alternate history. These individuals, even though they may have not gone through the specific trials or the experiences, existed in this world. And my hope is that people might [look up] Robert Pelham [a journalist] or The Chicago Defender [the African-American paper Nelly writes for] … and learn about this whole different side of life they may not have realized existed in the first place.”

At the time of her research, Cunningham also happened to be reading The Great Gatsby. “It really is such a fascinating tale of wealth and intrigue and kind of the corruption and the artifice of the American dream. And I thought that was a narrative that was really prime to the Black experience, one never really seen through any kind of diverse perspective.”

Cunningham’s novel was almost a Gatsby retelling, she admits, but as her story took shape, it became less and less like it. “Over the course of the writing process, it became … [about], more than anything, the kind of the sacrifices that people were forced to make when challenging the status quo in this country, especially during times when that status quo is changing,” she says. “And we’re living in a very similar time where the status quo not only in this country but truly across the world is shifting dramatically, and still to this day people who seek to challenge that status quo … are facing terrible backlash. So I felt like it was truly reflective of the times that we’re living in now and that we might be living in future years.”

“Everything informs everything else,” Cunningham adds. “That’s one of the fascinating things about historical fiction, that you may be researching a certain time or certain place, but everything that you’ve learned or absorbed from every time period or past experience is informing that time or that place because people change, people move around, people who represent different communities relocate and change that community.”

In fact, prior to working on The Mayor of Maxwell Street, Cunningham had been working on a novel centered around Memphis hoodoo. “So this city was very much still in the back of my mind because of all that research and work I’ve done on Memphis during the 1920s,” she says. “And it did feel like, as I did more research, there were so many similarities between the two cities and the experiences of the two cities that just rounded it out in a way that I really hadn’t anticipated. … So, I think living here and writing this story really informed the entire process and gave the entire soul of the book something more rich and meaningful.”

Cunningham called Grizzly a “great writing partner.” (Photo: Avery Cunningham via Instagram)

TO DEBUT

Today, Cunningham revels in “all of the emotions, every emotion that one could ever possibly feel” as the launch of her debut approaches. “It’s strange,” she says. “And I talked to a lot of writers who go through a similar feeling that even though you’ve put so much work and time into a story or a book — it’s something that you really love and believe in and are passionate about — there’s still this sense of almost like an impostor syndrome. Like, how am I worthy of being the one to tell this story? Am I the appropriate person to tell this? Should someone else who’s more educated, who’s more experienced, who has more talent — should they be the ones to honor these characters?

“It is super exciting, and I’m so honored that this story gets to be kind of my start in this career professionally. And I think it was a professor of mine who I was talking to and they said that every person’s individual experience is important and that every story that is told is important. Even if someone else tells a similar story to The Mayor of Maxwell Street, it’s still incredibly valid because it would be derived from their experience. So it does kind of uplift you to think that because of who I am, who my parents are, who my family is going back 300 years, that makes this book particular and specific and unique. So it’s not a question of am I worthy to tell this story? It’s bigger than just me.”

Cunningham continues, “The wonderful thing also about art is that you will find your audience that really sees themselves in your stories and you eventually learn and accept and really revel in the fact that you’re writing for them. You’re not writing for the world. You’re writing for the people who maybe need this more than even you do.”

But two readers’ opinions have mattered more than others’: those of her parents. “They both were very supportive and they said they really liked it. That’s it. As long as they think it’s good, then it doesn’t matter.”

The Mayor of Maxwell Street is available in hardcover and paperback for preorder wherever you buy your books. Avery Cunningham will celebrate the launch of her novel with a “Meet the Author” event at Novel in conversation with Tara Stringfellow, author of Memphis, on Tuesday, January 30th, 6 p.m.

Categories
News News Blog News Feature

George Floyd Book Event at Whitehaven High Squeezed By Tennessee Law

Students at Whitehaven High School in Memphis attended an assembly with the authors of “His Name Is George Floyd,” but restrictions associated with Tennessee law prevented them from hearing excerpts of the book. (Courtesy of Memphis Shelby County Schools)

Students at Memphis’ Whitehaven High School got a chance last month to hear from journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on George Floyd — his life, his brutal killing by police in 2020, and its aftermath. 

But the students didn’t get to hear any excerpts from His Name Is George Floyd, and they weren’t allowed to take home copies of the book from school. The authors had to give their presentation without going too deep into the book’s main theme of systemic racism. 

Who determined the restrictions and why is unclear. The organizers of the event, a local partnership called Memphis Reads, said their instructions to the authors were based on guidance from the school district on complying with Tennessee law that requires that books used in school be “age appropriate.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools officials disputed their account, but repeatedly declined to answer questions about what they told the organizers or how they interpreted the law. In an email to the authors after the event, district communications chief Cathryn Stout said MSCS did not run the book through its review process before the visit. 

In the end, the authors told Chalkbeat, the students who gathered at Whitehaven that day were shortchanged by restricted access to the book and a censored experience. 

“Neither Tolu nor I know who to cast blame on,” Samuels said. “I’m not sure we could, or we should.”

But the ambiguous restrictions in this and other Tennessee laws have caused concern at the local level about compliance, Samuels said, resulting in “messy, potentially explosive debates between entities that usually get along.”

Floyd was killed during an arrest in May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for several minutes. An onlooker’s video recording of the event went public, triggering a huge outcry and calls for and policing reform. The officer was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder.

Samuels and Olonnuripa’s book, written while both were reporters at the Washington Post, looks not just at the incident but also at how pervasive racism in education, criminal justice, housing, and health care systems shaped Floyd’s life. “We learned about the man himself … and much more than how he died,” Samuels said during a forum at Rhodes College.

They also wrote about what happened afterward: a season of demonstrations, dialogue, and unrest during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by what they call a “burgeoning backlash” to the racial justice movement, resulting in state laws across the country that stifled classroom discussions on race.

Tennessee was among the first states to legislate what public school students can — and cannot — be taught about race, gender, and bias. And the penalties are steep. Educators who violate the law may have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked. Districts can be fined for repeat offenses.

MSCS officials and the Memphis Reads organizers did not specifically cite this law as a factor in what ultimately happened at Whitehaven, but the law nonetheless hangs over educators’ decisions about what topics are appropriate for classroom discussion. Two Memphis teachers are among five in Tennessee challenging the law in federal court.

Tennessee’s Age Appropriate Materials Act, meanwhile, requires schools to publish a list of what’s in their library collections online and develop policies to review and remove books that aren’t appropriate — a term that the law leaves undefined. 

MSCS has leeway to interpret this law, but longstanding tensions between the majority-Black, Democratic-led city and the mostly white, GOP-dominated state government mean the district can ill afford to risk a fight with the state over the nuances of race and books.

Christian Brothers University runs the Memphis Reads program in partnership with other community groups. In communication with Chalkbeat, CBU cited the Age Appropriate Materials law as the reason it understood that books and materials couldn’t be distributed at the Whitehaven event and said that the guidance came from the Memphis school district.

CBU and other Memphis Reads partners “were under the instruction of MSCS leadership when completing the formatting and regulations concerning the Age-Appropriate Materials Act,” Justin Brooks, the CBU community engagement director who heads Memphis Reads, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat. 

MSCS officials wouldn’t confirm that to Chalkbeat, or explain whether Tennessee’s law regulating classroom conversations about race influenced any restrictions.  

In the email to the authors after the event, shared later with Chalkbeat, Stout wrote that time constraints prevented the district from going through its own process to approve the book. Stout wrote that the district regretted that their “experience was anything less than welcoming.”

“Given the new, more detailed process, it will take some time to coordinate, but please know that ‘His Name Is George Floyd’ is now under consideration to be added to the Whitehaven High School library collection,” Stout wrote to the authors, “and we look forward to having conversations with other school communities as requests arise.”

Separately, Stout shared with Chalkbeat a copy of a description from library book distributor Baker & Taylor that categorizes the book as “adult” and among the American Library Association’s “Notable Books for Adults.”

Stout also wrote in a public social media comment explaining the district’s position that the American Library Association labeled His Name is George Floyd as “adult literature (18 and older).”

ALA spokesperson Raymond Garcia told Chalkbeat that the group “does not rate books” for age appropriateness. 

Booklist, a book review magazine published by the ALA — and listed among resources for librarians in an MSCS manual — uses its “adult” label not to be restrictive but to signal that a book would be of interest primarily to adults, Garcia said. 

His Name is George Floyd is also categorized as “nonfiction” and “social sciences.” 

If the label was a factor in the decision not to allow Memphis Reads to distribute the books at Whitehaven, then that’s an “inaccurate understanding” of the purpose of such book labels, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.  

“We can think of any kinds of works of literature that would have been originally rated as of interest to an adult reader that are absolutely fine for young people to read, and it’s not too controversial,” Caldwell-Stone told Chalkbeat, citing “To Kill a Mockingbird” as an example.

Nonetheless, the ambiguity in Tennessee’s standard of “appropriateness” creates gray areas and heightens the stakes for local districts concerned about avoiding a violation, Caldwell-Stone said. 

If a person or district cannot risk breaking the law, “then you’re going to be very thoughtful about what books you offer,” she said, “and thereby limit the opportunities to learn and engage with all kinds of ideas, even controversial or difficult ideas.”

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Education says MSCS did not reach out to the state for guidance, and MSCS didn’t respond to a question from Chalkbeat about that issue.

Thanks to a donation from the publisher, Viking Books, students who want a free copy of the book will be able to get one from Respect the Haven, a community development group in Whitehaven that’s part of Memphis Reads.

Whitehaven High School serves some 1,500 students and is known among Memphis for its school pride and focus on students’ post-secondary scholarship achievements. Almost all of its students are Black, and about half of them are from low-income families.

“This event basically got censored out of fear of violating some law,” said Jason Sharif, head of Respect the Haven. “With us being a predominantly Black city, a predominantly Black school district, you cannot keep books like this or stories like this from being told to Black students.”

By the time Samuels and Olorunnipa arrived at Whitehaven High School for the event on Oct. 26, they knew some of the restrictions they would have to operate under. The two reporters were prepared to tell students about the journalistic work that went into writing the book, but to avoid going into depth about many of the issues it raised.

Brooks, from Memphis Reads, had told them they wouldn’t be able to read directly from the book, or talk about the book’s discussion of how systemic racism created many barriers for Floyd, long before his arrest and killing. MSCS was involved in setting these restrictions, Brooks said. The district did not comment on its role. 

Instead of an open question-and-answer period, five students were pre-selected to ask Samuels and Olorunnipa prepared questions, which was different from the open conversations at the two other panels that Memphis Reads organized. This was in line with MSCS protocol for events, Brooks said.

Brooks said it was CBU’s call to keep the event closed to media, out of concern for student safety. A Chalkbeat reporter attended two similar events at the college level.

Stout said Brooks and Sharif had created a narrative about the event that is “inconsistent” with the district’s point of view and its own initiatives. She highlighted a Memphis school integration curriculum and a social emotional learning curriculum involving the death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who was fatally injured by Memphis police after a traffic stop in early 2023. 

MSCS told Chalkbeat that it was glad Whitehaven students had the opportunity to hear the journalists speak, as did CBU in its own communication. 

And Samuels and Olorunnipa, who had early doubts about being part of an event with restrictions on their speech, said they were grateful for the opportunity, too. They were approached at the end of the event by a Whitehaven high schooler with a notebook full of questions who said he wanted to be a journalist. The authors relished the chance to expand what the student imagined for his future. 

“Even through this period of backlash, we think it’s important to continue to push forward and continue to make a pathway for people who are caught up in the back and forth,” Olorunnipa said during another forum. 

“A lot of these kids have nothing to do with the politics,” Olorunnipa added. “They are just trying to make it. They’re just trying to live their best lives. And sometimes they become pawns in our political fights.” 

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Skol-astic Adult Book Fair

Special bookmarks in the style of the event poster will also be for sale.

If you like beer, books, and nostalgia, you better book it to Soul & Spirits Brewery this Saturday for the brewery’s first-ever Skol-astic Adult Book Fair.

In case you didn’t catch on to the pun there, Skol-astic is a nod to those Scholastic book fairs from childhood, with the “skol” part being the Scandinavian word for “cheers.” “We wanted to recreate that feeling of being so excited to buy new books, but with beer,” says Blair Perry, who planned the whole shebang with her friend Mandy Martin. “We wanted to create an event that is very different than any other event in town and that is geared towards people who love books because a lot of times readers are kind of introverted” — and sometimes introverts want to be social, too.

For the day, Martin and Perry were able to get all the bookstores and book vendors in town to set up shop at the brewery, with each focusing on a “niche style of book,” says Perry. Friends of the Library, the nonprofit that supports Memphis Public Libraries, will sell used books; Novel will bring bestselling contemporary fiction while Burke’s Book Store will bring books by Memphis authors and a classics collection. Online vendors Cafe Noir (which is set to open a brick-and-mortar location later this year) and DeMoir Books & Things will sell BIPOC classics and Afrofuturism books, respectively. Plus, South Main Book Juggler will bring children’s books and YA novels.

“For every $10 that you spend [on books], you’re going to get to pick from the little freebie bags like you did as a kid,” says Perry, adding that every time you purchase a beer, you’ll also get entered into a raffle for a bigger prize. “Every 30-ish minutes, we’re going to be drawing a ticket for a free prize that our vendors have donated.”

The brewery is also releasing a special beer for the book fair. “It’s a surprise,” says Perry, “but I’ll say that it’s bookish-related, so something that you would enjoy drinking while you’re reading.”

Perry and Martin have also partnered with Amy Dobbins of Mint Cream Market, who has recruited literary-themed vendors and local authors to discuss and sign their books, while Paper Plate Pavilion and Tacos Mondragon will have food available for purchase.

And, don’t worry, there will be a quiet space for those who want to read (and drink) in peace in the Low Tones Room, which also happens to be where the brewery hosts its Beers and Books Club every first Friday of the month. “We don’t tell you what book to read,” Perry says of the club. “We just provide a quiet space for a couple of hours for anybody to come in and read.”

Skol-astic Adult Book Fair, Soul & Spirits Brewery, Saturday, August 12, 1-7 p.m.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Summer Reading Guide 2023

Photo: Consuelo Barreto | Dreamstime

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the bugs are buzzing. Yep, it’s still summertime, and we’re sure that you’re all tired out from the plenty of summer and staycation activities we’ve thrown your way over the past couple months. So what better time is there to plop down on the patio (or, preferably, a nice air-conditioned room) and crack open a new (or old) book? Read on for some of our 2023 recommendations.

The Slough House series, Mick Herron

I’m not entirely sure how I fell into the world of Slough House, but I’m glad I did. It’s an eight-book series by British author Mick Herron about a bunch of losers from MI5 (the British CIA, basically) who’ve been banished to a decrepit office building in a crumbling London neighborhood.

The building itself is called Slough House, and its denizens are a group of agents with one thing in common: They’ve screwed up their careers so badly that they’ve been assigned to an obscure outpost where they can’t do any further harm to the country’s intelligence operations. Maybe they had a drinking problem or botched a critical operation or fell victim to vicious inter-office politics. They’re called “slow horses,” and each of them wants nothing more than to redeem themselves and get out of Slough House and back into the action.

They are led by the mysteriously competent — and notoriously gross — Jackson Lamb, who somehow has managed to retain a bond to MI5’s leader, Diana Tavener. She has a habit of surreptitiously using Lamb and his slow horses for off-the-books ops, and messy complications always ensue.

The horses are a colorful crew of characters, all flawed, but in ways that make you care about them. But don’t get too attached because Herron seems to have no problem with offing one of his central figures, only to replace them in his next book with someone just as weirdly interesting. He keeps enough of his central core of actors that each book offers familiar protagonists, as well as a quirky newcomer or two.

The plots are all over the place, and in a good way: kidnappings, murders, double agents, assassinations, international intrigue, betrayals of every kind. You never know who you can trust. Herron is a master storyteller with a flair for humor that he occasionally slips in like a dagger in the night.

It’s an eight-book series, and yes, I read them all. Herron has been called the “John le Carré of this generation,” and that’s high praise, indeed, but Herron is much more readable — addictive, even. Start with the first book — Slow Horses — and I bet you’ll be moving on to the second one (and third) in no time. 

— Bruce VanWyngarden

Ripe, Sarah Rose Etter

I’ll admit I wasn’t in the best of moods on April 29th. It was raining, and my friend was already an hour late for meeting me at the Cooper-Young Farmers Market. So I retreated to Burke’s Book Store, where it was dry and where I knew my mood would be lifted. As it so happened, April 29th was Independent Bookstore Day, and right at the store’s entrance was a big ol’ pile of free books as part of the day’s party favors. This, I knew, would redeem the day. After what felt like an hour, I finally found the free book I’d be taking home with me: an advanced reader’s copy of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, set to come out July 11th. 

The book’s cover, the juicy insides of a pomegranate, caught my eye initially. (Okay, I judge books by their covers, sue me.) But what really drew me in was the first sentence: “A man shouldn’t be seen like that, all lit up.” And then I couldn’t help but read the second sentence and then the third and then the next and the next — okay, I practically started reading it on the spot, probably standing in the way of other book-lovers looking for their own free book. I didn’t care that my friend was now two hours late (?!); I just wanted to sink my teeth into this novel. And soon, I did just that — sunk my teeth right on in and tore through the pages, all of them, in one day. 

A character-driven novel at its core, Ripe follows a 33-year-old, disillusioned Cassie, whose most loyal companion is a black hole that never leaves her side — an obvious nod to the depression, anxiety, and loneliness that enrapture the main character. A year into what should be her dream job at a Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is stuck — stuck in a fruitless romance, stuck in an unsatisfying job and hustle culture, stuck in a city where obscene wealth and abject poverty persist. When her job begins to push her ethics and she finds herself pregnant, she must choose whether to remain stuck and whether to be consumed by the black hole that follows her.

Throughout this contemporary novel full of deep and unusual reflections, Etter’s strikingly raw and vulnerable writing weighs on the reader as she explores our late-capitalist society through a dystopic lens. A master of rich imagery and language, Etter hasn’t created a “happy” book but instead an immersive book that crawls under your skin and tugs at your very being.

— Abigail Morici

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

“One of the ways creativity works is the brain tries to fill in holes and gaps,” writes Bob Dylan in The Philosophy of Modern Song. “We fill in missing bits of pictures, snatches of dialogue, we finish rhymes and invent stories to explain things we do not know.” Not only is it a fundamental principle in both songwriting and song listening, it’s an apt description of Dylan’s own songs. He makes no bones about borrowing from this or that old blues tune, at times functioning more as a curator of phrases and riffs, arranging them in inventive, thought-provoking ways. 

This richly illustrated book is built on the same principle. Despite its treatise-like title, potentially offering some stuffy rubric or taxonomy, the 66 essays here, each centered on a song by another artist, whether popular or obscure, are instead a kind of pastiche, a quilt of impressions, imaginings, and history, and a celebration of the way a song can spark a listener’s creativity. Only then, with Dylan’s flights of fantasy, fiction, and fandom established as the modus operandi, will the author occasionally offer an observation on songcraft as an aside.

The end result is not unlike a Bob Dylan album, bubbling over with snatches of traditional verse, noir scenarios, archaic pop-culture references, semi-Biblical metaphysics, and the same down-home vernacular that’s peppered his language since his first Beat-flavored liner notes. “My songs’re written with the kettledrum in mind,” he wrote in 1965, “a touch of any anxious color. Unmentionable. Obvious … I have given up at making any attempt at perfection.” 

That impulse to avoid the definitive, perfect statement in favor of walking the listener through a gallery of images and dramas, all via a cultivated plain-speak that still echoes Woody Guthrie, is alive and well here. As one reads it, remember that Dylan won the Nobel Prize as a writer of fiction. Like any novelist, he inhabits the characters in each song until they become “you,” as he riffs on where you’re coming from, walking you through whole worlds suggested by the song like a figure in a dream. This, too, emphasizes the creativity inherent in the simple art of listening. “Take any lyrics and run with them,” Dylan seems to say. “Here’s one story they might hint at.”

While any song’s essay might reference a dozen other songs by way of making a point, Dylan’s no completist. The typical reader of Songwriting For Dummies won’t find chapters on Lennon and McCartney, John Prine, or many others typically revered in the pantheon of songwriting. No, this author is following his own path, dropping bread crumbs as he goes. Take it far enough and it adds up to a full meal. 

— Alex Greene

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Is it too quick to judge a book by its cover, even if it looks pretty dang cool? Ok, well if that’s a bit too fast, maybe the first line of Tamysn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth might be best to clue readers in as to what’s coming: “In the myriad year of our lord — the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! — Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Coupled with Gideon’s portrait on the cover, clad in black, adorned in skull face paint and sunglasses, and with her sword scattering skeletons to and fro … buckle up.

I was a couple years late to the party, but the first book in The Locked Tomb series was sold to me by friends via an intriguing hook: lesbian necromancers in space. Gideon is a speck in the Dominicus star system, comprising nine planets that are each home to a Great House well-versed in the arts of necromancy, all of whom are in service to the Emperor/Necrolord Prime. Gideon is an indentured servant to the Ninth House, a death cult with an eternal mission to guard a locked tomb that supposedly imprisons the Emperor’s greatest enemy. One of two children at the House, Gideon is constantly menaced by her chief tormentor and heir to the Ninth, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, until a surprise summons comes from the Emperor. He’s in need of new Lyctors — powerful and immortal necromancers — who essentially serve as his lieutenants in wartime.

There’s certainly some table setting that needs doing, but of course, Gideon and Harrow find themselves as the two representatives of the Ninth House, whisked away to the isolated Canaan House with pairs from the rest of the Great Houses (so many houses), and then the real fun begins.

Muir blends her various schools of necromancy into a deep-space take on gothic horror, but the fright is constantly alleviated by Gideon’s brash and foul-mouthed perspective, moments of tension punctured by cursing, dirty jokes, or a passing infatuation with one of the other female House representatives. It really brings a refreshing take on fantasy and sci-fi adventures, blending a light touch of political machination alongside the darker instances of violence and body horror that come with the necromantic territory. There’s a slowly simmering tension underneath it all, with the ten participants expected to pass a series of tests to qualify as a Lyctor. But there’s no exiting Canaan House once the trials have begun, and something else lurks in the shadows, picking off representatives one by one. 

There’s a constant drip of psychological and supernatural horror throughout Gideon the Ninth, mixed in with a steady helping of isolated-murder-mystery-induced dread, and plenty of snarl, raunch, and snark to spare. The anxious claustrophobia snowballs as the novel really picks up pace, and I’m not sure there’s anything quite like the cocktail that Muir mixes up here (at least not something that I’ve read). So if you’re eager for a bone-crunching good time, the first Locked Tomb book won’t disappoint.

TL;DR: Lesbian necromancers … in space!

— Samuel X. Cicci

Malfunction Junction Vol. 2: Close Encounters of the Third Street Kind, various authors

In January of last year, I wrote about a group of eight local writers who collaborated on a collection of short stories. The collection, titled Malfunction Junction, contained 15 stories, covering a range of genres, but all set in Memphis. In a way, they were love letters to the Bluff City. For their work, the authors earned Memphis Public Library’s first-ever Richard Wright Literary Award for Best Adult Fiction this March, so it’s no surprise that most of these authors returned for a sequel collection and even picked up a few other writers along the way. 

Unlike the first Malfunction Junction, whose uniting element was simply that the stories were set in Memphis, this second collection explores the theme of encounters — that, yes, happen to happen in Memphis and the Mid-South area. For Malfunction Junction Vol. 2: Close Encounters of the Third Street Kind, returning writers Rikki Boyce, April Jones, Rae Harding, Justin Siebert, and Daniel Reece, plus newcomers K.M. Brecht, Cori Romani, Michael Chewning, K.D. Barnes, and Imogean Webb, have each approached the theme in unexpected ways, varying in genre from horror to fantasy to mystery. 

Within the pages, you’ll read of a vampire during the yellow fever epidemic, a satyr romping down Beale, a demon at the Crystal Shrine Grotto, an experimental project with the MPD, and a drink with a familiar stranger at RP Tracks. Compelling and unmistakably Memphis, these stories will leave a reader hoping for a third Malfunction Junction.

— AM

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow

I’ve been addicted to Sid Meier’s Civilization games for longer than I’d like to admit. Players start in the middle of a map of unknown territory with a settler to found a city and scout to look around. The challenge is to explore new lands, discover new scientific principles, exploit natural resources, increase in wealth, found new cities, and go to war to expand your civilization until it dominates the world. The mini-narratives of alternative history which emerge from the game can have uncanny parallels with real history — when the bloody remnants of your grand army are retreating from your rival’s capital, you understand how Napoleon screwed up so badly. In my perfect world, one of the presidential debates would be replaced with a Civilization V tournament. 

But the world we live in isn’t perfect and never has been. What if we’ve been going about this “civilization” thing all wrong? 

That’s the premise of The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow. The book begins by questioning the concept of the “noble savage,” first popularized during the Enlightenment by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which posited that humanity used to live in a naive state of equality and squalor until the development of agriculture led to the founding of cities. The evolution of hierarchies like king and peasant emerged from necessity. Graeber and Wengrow use recent discoveries to weave together the argument that complex social structures and hierarchies long predated agriculture. The people who built Göbekli Tepe, the 9,600-year-old temple in Turkey that is the oldest known permanent human structure, were hunter-gatherers, not pastoral farmers. Nor is progress a given: There’s evidence that prehistoric inhabitants of England developed agriculture, then abandoned it in favor of a diet based on hazelnuts, before learning to farm again. 

At 704 pages, this is not a quick beach read. Graeber and Wengrow are good enough writers to sustain your interest through chapters with titles like “In Which We Offer A Digression on ‘The Shape of Time’” and “Specifically How Metaphors of Growth and Decay Introduce Unnoticed Political Biases Into Our View of History.” They wield a dazzling array of historical anecdotes which challenge conventional wisdom about who we are and where we came from. You’ll sometimes find yourself questioning their conclusions, but that’s the point of the book. Human societies have come in all kinds of flavors, and there’s nothing inevitable about how we live now.

— Chris McCoy 

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Blue If Only I Could Tell You

In high school, my English teachers told us to analyze poetry with the TPCASTT method. What do all those letters mean? I have no idea, but I remember the acronym and I remember when I saw that on the chalkboard, it was time for the dreaded poetry week and the dreaded method that dissected all the fun of what I thought poetry could be. What a way to turn a gal off from poetry, and I’m sure many people can empathize, right? Well, Richard Tillinghast gets where I’m coming from, and he’s a real-deal poet (and yes, he knows it).

“It seems like when you’re taught poetry in school, somebody is always kind of trying to drum it into your head: What does this mean?” Tillinghast says. “As I’m concerned, poetry isn’t particularly asking to be understood as much as it is asking to be loved. … Maybe one of the main things that I’m trying to do in my poetry is to communicate pleasure.”

Tillinghast’s latest collection of poems Blue If Only I Could Tell You does, admittedly, touch on the darkly complex history of America, particularly the American South, but the poet says, “Writing or singing about something that’s really painful, it really does have a cathartic effect. … I write about a lot of dark subjects, but I don’t consider my points downers. Kind of talking, writing about stuff like that, and experiencing it through the art of poetry, you feel better once you’ve done it.”

For this book, the poet has distinguished his topics by grouping poems into sections. One section, for instance, is about the Indigenous plight through the effects of colonialism; another is about the systemic racism in the South. Set in Memphis, where he grew up, the poems in this section are mostly autobiographical.

The poem, “Cake,” is dedicated to Ollie, whom his family hired for housekeeping when Tillinghast was younger. “She kind of raised us,” he says of Ollie, whose last name he doesn’t remember though he remembers her fondness for country music and the cakes she would bake for his birthday. In the poem he writes, “There’s no going back in time/but I wish I could go back./I’d like to get inside/the mind of this woman/who was paid to look after me.”

In all, Tillinghast uses poetry to grapple with his privilege stemming from the America’s violent past, while also acknowledging his love for the South’s culture and his upbringing in Memphis. “I feel so lucky to have grown up in the place that I did,” he says. Now, after living all over the world from Ireland to Michigan, Tillinghast splits his time between living in Sewanee and Hawaii. “I love going to Memphis. It’s a big highlight for me whenever I’m able to go back to Memphis.”

This Thursday, the poet will return to Memphis to discuss and sign his book at Burke’s Book Store.

Reading with Richard Tillinghast, Burke’s Book Store, Thursday, February 23rd, 5:30-6:30 p.m.

Categories
Books Music Music Features

Marina Bokelman and David Evans’ Going Up the Country

“Anthropologists are thrice-born,” my old instructor in the discipline, T.O. Beidelman, once asserted in a lecture. He had us all captivated with his tales of fieldwork among the Dinka in the Sudan. “First, we are born into our own culture. Secondly, we enter the cultures we study as children, and gradually are born as social beings in that community. And thirdly, we are reborn when we return to our own culture, seeing it with fresh eyes.”

Those words have echoed in my mind while reading a stunning new collection of field notes from the ’60s by two graduate students — one of anthropology, the other of folklore/ethnomusicology — in the blues communities of Mississippi and Louisiana. Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s (Univ. Press of Mississippi) evokes all the excitement of discovery, of being reborn into another culture, that only a person putting their life and time on the line can feel as they aim for complete immersion. And it’s especially gripping for Memphis-based music lovers, as one of the authors is David Evans, onetime director (and founder) of the ethnomusicology program at what is now called the University of Memphis.

His time at the university is highly regarded among blues aficionados, for he not only studied the form but also performed it (often with the legendary Jessie Mae Hemphill) and produced it, running the small High Water Records label with Richard Ranta, which released many singles and a few albums by lesser-known artists in the ’70s and ’80s. Now retired, he’s still a performer and an appreciator of the blues. Yet all he accomplished at the University of Memphis is but an afterthought in this work, which focuses on earlier chapters of Evans’ life. But he wasn’t alone then.

“It was co-authored with my friend at the time, Marina Bokelman,” Evans explains, noting that Bokelman passed away in May of last year at the age of 80. This book is a fitting tribute to the magnificent work the two did over a half century ago. “We focus on the fieldwork that we did in 1966-67,” Evans adds. “It’s based on the field notes that we took as we did the work. Each day we’d write the notes, describing what we did, our encounters with artists and others. And then there are some other chapters providing background on that, discussing fieldwork, and a little bit about our lives before and after that period.”

The core of the book is an evocative tour through the lives of blues and gospel singers, with a level of detail and attention to both the music and their lives rivaling any blues study before or since. The co-authors’ notes and photographs take the reader into the midst of memorable encounters with many obscure but no less important musicians, as well as blues legends, including Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Babe Stovall, Reverend Ruben Lacy, and Jack Owens.

It was all part of the authors’ studies in the fledgling folklore and mythology program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where they began dating. There was clearly an intellectual as well as a romantic bond there, and the scholarly standards of the field notes are high. But this is also an adventure story of sorts, as the young couple describes searches for musicians, recording situations, social and family dynamics of musicians, and race relations, not to mention the practical, ethical, and logistical problems of doing fieldwork. The book features over one hundred documentary photographs that depict the field recording sessions and the activities, lives, and living conditions of the artists and their families. As you read along, you’ll want to listen to any recordings of the artists that you can get your hands on.

While the field adventures are gripping, so too is the milieu of the young scholars in Los Angeles at the time, living in Topanga Canyon, and playing host to a young Al Wilson, with whom Evans performed previously in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Evans describes introducing Wilson to Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues,” and we read of Wilson founding the famous group named after that 1928 record. With this section, occupying nearly the first hundred pages of the book, and the “after the field” biographical essays detailing the authors’ lives after splitting up and pursuing their respective passions, this book is a glowing portrait of two insatiably curious souls, a fitting memoir of two lives well-lived.

“We had some real adventures,” reflects Evans. “They’re all in the book.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Tyler Keith’s “The Mark of Cain” Evokes Deepest, Darkest Florida

“I prayed, ‘Dear nothing, come into my life. Fill me with your infinite space. No one knows the size of your great nothingness. In nobody’s name, Amen.’” So says Ronnie Harrison, recalling his own loss of faith as his fellow ex-cons sing “I Saw the Light” at Camp Eden’s Wednesday prayer meeting in Gulf Breeze, Florida. In a deft touch capturing the complexity of the character, author Tyler Keith portrays Ronnie reflexively singing right along with the other denizens of the halfway house, even as his thoughts turn cold and nihilistic.

Keith, best known as the songwriter and guitarist behind such bands as The Neckbones, The Preacher’s Kids, and The Apostles, includes some fine character studies in his debut novel, The Mark of Cain (Cool Dog Sound), but none as subtle as the book’s protagonist. Yet, paradoxically, this very character is a cipher as the novel opens. Ronnie, freshly paroled from federal prison, begins the tale as a blank slate.

“I had nothing … I doubted if I was even me anymore. I’d put myself in suspended animation for so long I couldn’t remember who I used to be. All I knew was, that when the prison doors opened it also opened up a flood of the deepest pent-up emotions that’d I’d hidden away for so long.” So Ronnie muses, and as he allows memories in, so too does the reader learn of the tangled family web in which he is caught.

Most of the novel is set in Camp Eden, the combination ministry/rehabilitation program where Harrison eases back into life on the outside. Eden, a finely-drawn universe unto itself populated with ex-cons who never seem to go further than a halfway house, is a sorry excuse for freedom, a kind of purgatory from which Ronnie can’t escape. But it nonetheless is a perch from which he can avoid the real danger zone: Holmes County, where family ties offer no salvation, only a return to his former life of crime.

“You’ve heard of the three M’s of Holmes County?” one character asks. “Moonshine, marijuana, and methamphetamines.” Presiding over the county, trafficking all of the above and owning the local judges, is the shadowy figure of Uncle Albert. The kingpin is made all the more threatening by his absence, as Ronnie negotiates living as a free man while steering clear of his compromised family past. It all seems safely at arm’s length until a certain Travis Campbell, with close ties to Uncle Albert, shows up at Eden, trying to coax him back into his former life.

Meanwhile, Ronnie’s preoccupied with his other former life, his ex-wife Tammy and their now grown daughter Tina. Wracked with guilt over his lost years in prison, he clings to them as his one hope for a straight life. A failure as a dad, he broods over his own father, a preacher who, the story goes, disappeared early in Ronnie’s life. Such bouts of longing and regret reveal Ronnie at his most sympathetic, drawing us down his inexorable road back to Holmes County and his past.

The language here is basic yet evocative. Keith, who grew up in north Florida, conjures up the landscape and its people as only a native can. Even when the hard boiled, matter-of-fact prose descends into cliched sentiments of the heart — “Tammy was the only woman I ever really loved” — one can hear Ronnie’s credible voice behind it. If the characters think in cliches, that’s just another prison, constraining them to courses of action that take on their own logic.

That’s what makes this a compelling page-turner that, in the grand tradition of Jim Thompson, elevates the noir thriller into loftier realms of literature. Our hapless narrator’s default approach to life is to “just let it all happen,” a passivity that has only led him to prison and a trail of broken relationships. But his time at Camp Eden, however corrupt and confining, leads him, through the unfettered violence of the final pages, to confront his own past and find some kind of redemption. Even that is broken, somehow, but he’ll take it.

Tyler Keith will read from his new novel (with Mississippi author Tim Lee) at Goner Records, Saturday, December 17, 5:30 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Censoring History

Author Alice Faye Duncan (Photo: Alice Faye Duncan)

“That was first time in my life that I saw a living writer. I assumed most of them were dead.” Alice Faye Duncan recalls the day in the sixth grade at Snowden Elementary School in Memphis that the poet Etheridge Knight spoke to her class. Duncan, the child of two educators, was the one walking around with “oodles” of journals, filled with poems and short stories. It was that day her life changed. After that, “I told anyone who would listen, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’”

Today, Duncan is an award winner, the author of 12 books, including her latest, Yellow Dog Blues, the story of a boy and his runaway dog, the Blues Trail, and Beale Street. The New York Times and the New York Public Library have honored the book (with illustrations by Caldecott Medal-winner Chris Raschka) as one of the Best Illustrated among children’s books published in 2022. Duncan’s writing is considered to be in line for awards as well.

Now, Duncan’s 2018 book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, has been pulled into a growing controversy — the banning of books aimed at young readers in conservative-leaning states. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop received a Coretta Scott King Books For Children Honor Medal in 2019, but since January it has been banned “pending investigation” by the Duval County (Jacksonville, Florida) Board of Education. Speaking on the WKNO-TV series A Conversation With (available at wkno.org), Duncan calls book-banning “anti-intellectual” and “unhealthy” and says it “contributes to the dumbing down of America.”

Duncan’s book is one of almost 200 on the Duval County banned book list. Calls and emails to the Board of Education have not been answered. According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, more than 1,600 titles have been banned or restricted in libraries across America.

Tennessee, through what’s called the Age-Appropriate Materials Act, is one of the states leading the movement to restrict student access to certain books. The act, signed into law in April by Governor Bill Lee, requires “each public school to maintain and post on the school’s website, a list of materials in the school’s library collection.”

While the new Tennessee law is aimed at screening “obscene materials or materials harmful to minors,” the study by PEN America estimates that at least 40 percent of bans nationwide “are connected to either proposed or enacted legislation” or from “political pressure to restrict the teaching or presence of certain books or concepts.” Among those concepts is racism. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop looks at the ill-fated 1968 strike by sanitation workers from the point of view of a 9-year-old girl, whose father is one of the strikers.

Another of Duncan’s books, Evicted!: The Struggle For The Right To Vote, also published in 2022, chronicles the story of voter registration drives led by Black people in Fayette County, Tennessee, starting in the 1950s.

“My mission is to write books to leave a record for the children who weren’t there,” she says. “Because if we don’t share the history as we are seeing it, people will say it never happened.”

Duncan has three other books currently in the works and says she won’t allow censorship to affect what she writes, or how. You can learn more about Alice Faye Duncan and her books at alicefayeduncan.com.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Bob Towery’s Magnolia Song

“If you had asked me while I was at Rhodes College [in 1969] what I was going to do with my life,” Bob Towery says, “I would’ve told you that I’m gonna race automobiles and then I’m gonna write about it.” Well, he’s raced cars, earned a fourth-degree black belt in taekwondo, founded Memphis magazine, established Towery Publishing, sailed in two hurricanes, and at long last, he’s written his first novel — though there’s not a lot of race car driving in it, just a former NASCAR driver-turned-crooked sheriff.

The novel, titled Magnolia Song: A Saga of the New South, chronicles the stories of two Memphis families intertwining from 1915 through 2018, and it has marijuana, reptiles, incest, murder, lots of absurdity, dozens of illustrations, over 150 characters, and 530 pages.

“I hope that it conveys, as much as anything else, a joy of living,” says Towery. “One of the main things I wanted to do is just make people laugh. When you start trying to make people laugh, sometimes it just turns dark, but laughing is one of the great tonics in life. It should be pursued at all levels.”

Towery began writing the book in 2016 but made substantial headway after Covid struck. “I took a long time to get around to writing a book, but I had great fun writing this thing,” he says. “It all came out of my fevered brain. What I was trying to capture is the kind of social change that took place between then and today, which encompasses the greatest social change in human history.”

Already, Towery is working on the sequel: Black Widow’s Waltz, scheduled for release in fall of 2023. This novel will begin in 1775, which was how the author planned to open Magnolia Song before realizing how long his novel was shaping up to be. “It’s very long,” he says. “I’m kind of a long-winded sort.”

But don’t mistake the Dickensian length as unapproachable. “My favorite book of all time is War and Peace,” Towery says. “I’ve read it five times, kind of once every generation since I was an adult. I think it’s a magnificent book, and unfortunately people think of it as this unapproachable tome. And it really isn’t. It’s a wonderful galloping story.”

And that’s the kind of story Towery aims to tell. “I hope that the book is an anthem to our community,” he says. “I’d say that if there is a main character, it’s probably Memphis.”

Towery will read from Magnolia Song and sign copies at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, November 17th. The reading will begin at 6 p.m.

Magnolia Song is available for purchase at Burke’s, Novel, and btowery.com, where you can also find cheat sheets for characters and a timeline for when you’re reading.

Reading and Book Signing with Bob Towery, Burke’s Book Store, Thursday, November 17, 5:30-6:30 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Liv Albert’s Greek Mythology Adds a New Spin to Old Tales

Excerpted from Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook by Liv Albert. Illustrations by Sara Richard. Copyright © 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

Some stories have staying power. Like old blues standards that get covered and reworked and rerecorded and covered again, these stories find their way into the DNA of even the most cutting-edge of popular culture. That is especially true of the mythology of Ancient Greece, which got a facelift with Liv Albert’s new collection, Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook (Simon & Schuster).

Albert’s feminist retelling of Greek mythology exists on a spectrum somewhere between Stephen Fry’s relatively no-frills Mythos and Heroes books, and the raucous, word-drunk manifesto that is Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung. Albert’s tone is fairly straightforward — the word “handbook” in the subtitle is a clue to the “Who’s Who” nature of the book. It’s a primer on the Olympians, heroes, titans, and other movers and shakers in the world of Greek myths. But the author works to address the misogyny that is often baked into these tales (remember — in one version of the story, Pandora, the first woman, is created by Zeus as a punishment for men who had angered him).

“Adonis caught the eye of Aphrodite the moment he was born (we won’t dig too deep into just how troubling that is).”

“Most of the moons of Jupiter have been named after ‘lovers’ of Zeus (again, he was really more of an assaulter),” Albert writes. “Interestingly, the NASA spacecraft Juno orbits Jupiter. Basically, this means NASA sent Zeus’s wife to watch over him and the women he had affairs with.” From reminders about the more problematic elements of these stories (and there are plenty) to references to popular culture, astronomy, and the later Roman myths inspired by tales of the Olympians, Albert is careful to both entertain and enlighten. She traces these stories’ paths through history, delivering enough wry jokes to keep the pages turning. And she’s careful to set the record straight where it needs it. One example? Heracles, of the 12 Labors of Heracles fame, is spelled according to the traditional Greek pronunciation, and he sports his classic lion-skin cape and giant club.

Excerpted from Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook by Liv Albert. Illustrations by Sara Richard. Copyright © 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

The book’s illustrations, masterfully rendered by Sara Richard, are worth the price of admission alone. Drawn by Richard, the minotaur is hulking, monstrous, a Greek shield impaled on his horn. The witch Circe is elegant as she holds a chalice of steaming potion; she is depicted surrounded by boars with eerily human hands, a reference to Odysseus’ crew and their transformation at Circe’s hands.

In all, the book is a delightfully updated version of many of the most famous Greek myths. It’s a primer for anyone interested in the roots of many modern stories.