In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit
Alice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, is the fictional last will and testament of a real-life Motor City culture maven, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, who emceed at storied show clubs,…
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…
Nichole Perkins explores themes of identity, liberation, and belonging
…this before,” we are brought into Perkins’ Black-girl chamber of secrets, as she contends for sexual, social, and intellectual freedom on the page. She reconstructs text message conversations, which sometimes…
A hilarious and poignant YA novel about finding your place in the world
…a loner, often irreverent, sometimes vulgar, incredibly funny, a nature lover, and artistically gifted. When she’s not working as Star’s uncredited and unpaid staff, she creates beautiful collages using natural…
