In his new YA novel, Silas House explores post-Vietnam tensions and summertime self discovery
Today’s young readers, coming of age in a post-9/11 world, should be deeply familiar with a central question of our times: what does it mean to be patriotic, to love—and protect, or protest—one’s country? It’s one question, among others, that they’ll find tenderly explored in Silas House‘s first young-adult novel, Eli the Good.
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Is a story still “Southern” if it sounds like a bulletin from Anywhere, U.S.A.?
“Rootedness used to be the core quality of Southern culture,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in his introduction to New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best. Bell goes on to note that the lives of contemporary Southerners have taken on a “nomadic quality” that competes with the former importance of place. And that presents a problem for this collection, the twenty-fourth in the series.
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Former Bredesen speechwriter Lydia Peelle discusses her debut story collection—and the pleasure, and usefulness, of writing what you don’t know
It’s impossible to tell from reading her debut story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, that Lydia Peelle isn’t a native Tennessean. Chapter 16 investigates how a born-and-bred New Englander—a woman who grew up in Massachusetts, went to boarding school in New Hampshire and to college at Amherst—could write a collection of stories that places her firmly among this generation’s finest Southern writers.
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Journalist Clay Risen looks at the legacy of King assassination, then and now
Clay Risen‘s A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination offers a detailed examination of the riots that ravaged U.S. cities after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including firsthand recollections, Risen depicts a country that was not united in mourning, but divided by rage and fear.
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In her controversial new novel, Rebel Yell, Alice Randall dissects the apparent paradoxes of a black conservative
Abel Jones, Jr., the posthumous protagonist of Alice Randall‘s Rebel Yell, is a tragic send-up of that all too unlikely character: the black conservative. Slightly younger than his real-life counterparts Shelby Steele and Clarence Thomas, Jones is, by turns, a Foreign Service officer, a CIA agent, a banker in Nashville, and, at his death, the George W. Bush Administration’s “Special Advocate” in the Pentagon, a fictional position that places Jones at the center of the run up to the Iraq War.
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Is a Ponzi scheme always founded in evil?
Meet Robbie Case. Thirty-five-year-old CEO of multi-national Core Communications. Wunderkind manager. Technical guru. Beloved boss. Darling of Wall Street. Liar extraordinaire.
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