Bradley Sides’ debut collection delivers sincerely strange stories
…mythical creatures abound, as human characters struggle to understand the unknown and, often, each other. In multiple stories, young believers try to convince fearful authority figures to embrace the supernatural.…
Ed Tarkington talks about the class conflicts at the heart of his second novel, The Fortunate Ones
…ongoing identity crisis, one that really came into focus for me during the 2015 mayoral election, which became unusually divisive for an office that’s supposed to be nonpartisan. Mayoral contests…
In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit
…city is also expiring, “dynamited to pieces in the name of urban renewal, singed in the embers of righteous rebellion.” Ziggy’s gilded-era Detroit goes by various aliases: Black Camelot, Motown,…
Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann
…for an imagined alternative: Stanford University, in sun-glazed California. Mason drives us down a Route 66 of fantasy, back to the Summer of Love, marijuana brownies and be-ins, the Beatles…
Blues legend B.B. King gets the royal treatment from biographer Daniel de Visé
…King B.B. King, who died in 2015 at age 89, gets the royal treatment from his biographer, and rightly so. We get it all, a life in full, from dirt…
Rickie Lee Jones recalls her family and career in Last Chance Texaco
…icon.” I spoke to the legendary pop savant ahead of her virtual event with the 2021 Southern Festival of Books. Jones always meant for her memoir to be, as she…
