Chapter 16

An Artificial Village

Book excerpt: Perfect Little World

By Kevin Wilson | December 15, 2016

Kevin Wilson’s second novel, Perfect Little World, will be released on January 24, and he will give readings from it at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 24 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26. In this excerpt, Dr. Preston Grind meets a wealthy benefactor with an idea for a research experiment to prove the truth of the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child.

“The Law is Skinny with Hunger for Us”

Why novelist Kevin Wilson waited for more than a decade to use a single line

By Kevin Wilson | April 19, 2012

April 19, 2012 In my book The Family Fang, one of the main characters listens to a tape recording of his father saying this line: “We live on the edge…a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” It serves as inspiration for the character, Buster, a writer, to begin a new novel. It’s a weird line, a wonderful line, and it’s a line I did not write.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly