Lady Emily Ashton has never lacked confidence. In the deft hands of her creator, former Nashvillian Tasha Alexander, this widowed nineteenth-century beauty drinks port with the boys, studies ancient Greek, solves murders (including that of her late husband), and clears the falsely accused. In her latest adventure, Tears of Pearl: A Novel of Suspense, Lady Emily is as stylish as ever, and newly married to the handsome Colin Hargreaves.
Scott Pratt
Onyx
358 pages
$7.99
“Pratt’s richly developed characters are vivid and believable. … Readers will eagerly anticipate Dillard’s further adventures.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Young fiction writers in America tend to receive their early training around the workshop tables of college creative writing programs. They next prove themselves in the minor leagues, writing short stories for the handful of respected journals that continue to print them. When the stories are good—as Tennessee native Kevin Wilson‘s surely are—the writer is rewarded with a rookie contract to the majors, which is to say, a big-name publisher agrees to put out a collection, with the promise of a (usually yet-to-be-written) novel. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth proves that Harper Perennial’s faith in Wilson was justified, but the book also illustrates the foibles inherent in the farm-team system.
“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.
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.
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.
