Rhythm and Books

Turnrow Players Present 'Glengarry Glen Ross'

We've hosted some exciting events this year at Turnrow. Our own Jamie Kornegay launched his debut novel Soil here at the store on March 10. A few weeks later we packed the house for Greg Iles, who signed and spoke about The Bone Tree, the second installment in his Natchez Burning trilogy. Later in the spring we hosted DJ and musicologist Robin Tolleson who presented a 'spin-terview' on Greenwood's native jazz pianist, the late Mulgrew Miller. And this August Turnrow will present its own theatrical production for the first time. Performances of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross will run from August 13-15 right here in the front of our store.

Glengarry Glen Ross takes place over two days in a downtrodden Chicago real estate office. Prompted by a particularly cutthroat sales competition, the realtors take increasingly desperate measures to hang on to their jobs. Pandering, deception, bribery, blackmail, and robbery are only the beginning. And Mamet lets his characters stretch and distort every possible means of 'selling' something, whether it's property or their own integrity. The original productions of the play in London and on Broadway led to a film adaptation in 1992 with an all-star cast that quickly became a cult classic.

Proceeds from tickets will directly benefit our partner the Greenwood Mentoring Group, which provides tutoring and activities for area youth. Tickets can be purchased for all three nights at our website or here at the store. Get your tickets early! We expect to sell out every show very soon. Doors will open at 6:30 with drinks available to purchase. Some surprise guests will be joining us for a special event each night at 6:45 and the show starts at 7:30. Please note: this play contains pervasive adult content and language. No person under 18 will be admitted.

Announcing: The Story First Book Club

In the years since we established A CHILD’S FIRST BOOK CLUB, we have watched as its numbers and popularity have grown along with its readers. What started as a fun way to help parents build a home library of great picture books for their children has blossomed into a major operation with subscribers in sixteen states and new members signing up each month. But some of our young readers have been with us so long that they’re beginning to pick up chapter books and novels with less illustrations and more emphasis on fantastic storytelling. To meet the appetites and aspirations of these readers, we’re moving on with them to the next step: THE STORY FIRST BOOK CLUB for discerning young readers.

The audience for this book club will be kids in Grades 4-8, but of course it’s open to fans of great fiction of all ages. The new club will build on the successful formula from the original kids club. Every month subscribers will receive a signed first edition of a brand new book for young readers. The books will come with our customary pen pal letter, along with an invitation to meet and discuss the latest selection with other members in an afternoon gathering here at the store. Who knows – the authors themselves may join us!

To launch such an exciting new venture, we’ve picked a spectacular new book to match it: debut novelist Cassie Beasley’s CIRCUS MIRANDUS. It's the story of a boy named Micah and his Grandpa Ephraim. Grandpa used to entertain Micah with tales about a mythical circus he supposedly visited as a boy. But when Grandpa becomes seriously ill, he sends Micah on a fateful mission: find the real Circus Mirandus and seek out its greatest magician -- the Lightbender, who just might be able to save Grandpa's life before it's too late.

So join us as we embark together on this new adventure! Sign up today by calling Turnrow at 662.453.5995 or visiting us here in the store. See you this summer at Turnrow Books!

Jonathan Odell's Delta Odyssey

How better to kick off the new Turnrow Book Discussion Group than with a novel born out of this very land and told by a compelling new voice in Mississippi letters? Jonathan Odell, a Mississippi native whose novel The Healing was a surprise bestseller in 2012, will be here this Wednesday, May 20, to sign and read from his new novel, Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. We'll be discussing the novel at our inaugural book club meeting on June 4, but we encourage you to come out this Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. to meet the author and hear him speak about the book.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Greenwood and the surrounding area, so we asked Jonathan to illuminate us on his inspiration for the setting. He generously delivered this account:

 

Even though I'm from the piney barrens of South Mississippi, when decided to write a novel about my home state, my fascination lay up north in the Delta, the place James Cobb calls  "the most southern place on earth." I began by taking off several weeks a year to drive from Minnesota down the Memphis, and then enter the most mystical, magical and historic region of the entire country. I never used a map. I would spend days just driving mile after mile, taking thousands of photos and purposely getting lost so I could drive up to a complete stranger's house, black or white, ask for directions and then strike up a conversation about this land they inhabited. And believe me, Delta residents, whether planter or sharecropper, love to tell stories about home.  Many of the people as well as their stories went into the book. (To view a few of the photographs I took, here's the link. I had this special background music composed to match my own experience of driving the land.)

As for finding a specific town in which to place my characters, it wasn't until later, quite by accident, that I turned off Highway 82 and found myself in one of the most enchanting, picturesque towns in Mississippi. I had never even heard of Carrollton and figured it had to be one of Mississippi's best-kept secrets. It was such a contrast to the flattened out places I had been exploring! Splendid homes, filled with history from the earliest days of Mississippi statehood were nestled like gems in the winding lanes. I knew this had to be my literary town and has served as such in all three novels, and will in the fourth as well. When I read the lovely memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, by Carrollton's illustrious literary citizen Elizabeth Spencer, I was sold.

I rechristened Carrollton "Delphi," for the site on Mount Parnassus home to the ancient oracles sought out by travelers the world over for a glimpse into their futures. It fit, because each of my major characters arrive in Delphi, Mississippi, for the same reason, to seek out a new future. 

My fictional county, Hopalachie, is actually the combined counties of Leflore and Carroll. It roughly translates from Choctaw as "to calm the waters."

I'm eternally grateful to the proud Mississippians for providing me the most interesting array of characters with whom any author has been blessed. I only hope that through my imperfect prose, they can sense the love I have for their home.

SOIL: The Compost Interview

Our own Jamie Kornegay's debut novel SOIL has been out for almost two weeks now and it has already taken the country by storm. Of course, we knew it would, but we were delighted to see how much others have enjoyed it. Check out some of the press here: Kirkus, Memphis Flyer, Clarion Ledger, Boston Globe, Mountain Xpress, Publisher's Weekly, Deep South Mag, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jamie was even asked to write a piece for The Daily Beast about one of his favorite...er...amateur hobbies: covering up crimes. Well we thought since he was granting interviews to every hack with a keyboard, why couldn't he spare the time to answer some of OUR questions? After all, we're the ones with the gall to ask the hard-hitting questions no one else will. So here it is: the most exclusive Jamie Kornegay interview you'll read this month!

TR: Where are you right now? Shouldn't you be pushing your book in Shreveport or something?

JK: I’m on the third floor of a hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eavesdropping on the valets talking trash beneath my window.

TR: You've been on the road for over two weeks and you're plowing through the Carolinas. How has the tour treated you so far? What's your most lurid tale from the road?

JK: The tour has been great. I’ve been heartened by the fact that, at every stop, there’s at least one person from Mississippi who has come out to say hello. Virtually all have spent time in Greenwood and a large percentage have been to Turnrow, which is great to hear. Nothing too lurid thus far, although I did compare raccoon penises with George Singleton in South Carolina. Photo attached [editor's note: state law prevents us from publishing this photo].

TR: Let's get personal. In the compost heap of the world, what are you? A worm? Dirty napkin? Coffee filter? Engorged zucchini?

JK: I think an old nasty sweet potato with an eye sprout that refuses to die.

TR: These days everything is getting a film adaptation (children's books, board games, Twitter feeds, etc.) and authors have more control than ever (see Gillian Flynn writing the screenplay for Gone Girl). When SOIL is turned into a movie, is there a way you can use your influence to resurrect Steve Guttenberg's career?

JK: I haven’t seen Steve in a while, so I don’t know how old he looks. I wonder if he can do a convincing Southern accent. Maybe he could play the deputy in charge of the missing persons case, the one relocated from St. Louis. Is it terrible that I don’t remember that character’s name? I’d look it up, but I left the book down in the car.  

TR: Who would do a better job directing the film adaptation of SOIL -- Wes Anderson or Michael Bay?

JK: Anderson. It would lose its regional identity, perhaps, but it would be worth it. Maybe he’d get Owen Wilson to play the deputy and Bill Murray to play Hatcher, the hippie neighbor.

TR: In other interviews with far more reputable publications, you've cited Fyodor Dostoevsky and Barry Hannah as major influences. Cut the crap. Who's the biggest influence on you that no one else could have guessed?

JK: Quentin Tarantino. I wonder if he’s free to direct.

TR: Ben has been your loyal employee for eight years and even played a major role in the creation of this book. Why did you decide to immortalize him as a rotting corpse in SOIL?

JK: The dead guy was from Ohio and died on Ben’s birthday. I know you won’t believe this, but it was totally subconscious. But somehow deserving, don’t you think?

TR: Be honest: how many animals were mutilated, cremated, or otherwise injured in the writing of this book?

JK: At least two, not counting myself.

TR: What's the stupidest question anyone has ever asked an author at a Turnrow appearance?

JK: I can’t remember anyone asking an author a stupid question. Let’s put this one in the running.

TR: Which character in SOIL most deserves a spinoff?

JK: Granger, supposed guru of Danny Shoals. Sam Jackson can play him if Tarantino directs.

TR: Which autobiographical part of the book would readers be most surprised by? Please keep it mildly tasteful.

JK: Someone really took a dump in my compost. I was so mad about it, but now I’m grateful. It was the impetus for the story.

TR: In your experience as a writer, which of these pieces of furniture is most conducive to imaginative writing: swivel chair, barstool, beanbag, bamboo mat, pile of goo, wicker chair?

JK: Probably a bar stool and all that comes with it. You can make a spark at the bar, really sit there and soak up stories. I’ve scribbled ideas on plenty of bar napkins. I don’t think I could sit at a bar and drink and write. There’s a fast dulling effect that comes after that quick spark, at least for me.

TR: When will you let your children read your work?

JK: I’ve thought about preparing a redacted manuscript, with certain words and lines crossed-out CIA style. My legion of young fans is dying to read it, but I tell them, it’s about adult problems and you’ll just be bored.

TR: There are internet rumors that Simon & Schuster is planning to release a limited edition 'Scratch-n-Sniff' SOIL, for true fans. Did you actually approve this?

JK: I didn’t approve it, per se, but I certainly approve of it. I could even help wrangle the scents.

TR: If Larry Brown were alive today, what would you want to hear him say about SOIL?

JK: “Damn, dude, that was pretty cool.”

TR: If Eudora Welty were alive today, what would you want to hear her say about SOIL?

JK: “Damn, dude, that was pretty cool.”

TR: Which stop on your whirlwind tour are you most looking forward to?

JK: I’m anxious to hit them all, but at this moment in my day, Greenwood is looking pretty nice.

Preview: Skip Horack & Michael Kardos

On March 26 at 5:30 we'll be hosting two of our favorite Southern authors working today. Skip Horack and Michael Kardos will return to Turnrow for a spring doubleheader, and both writers will sign and speak about their new books out this month. Skip's The Other Joseph (HarperCollins) has been earning rave reviews from loyal customers who have been enthralled with his work ever since The Southern Cross in 2009. Michael's Before He Finds Her (Perseus) is surging in popularity here in Greenwood, where our customers are steeped in the rich background of brilliant Mississippi mystery writers: Grisham and Iles fans have been loving it.

Roy Joseph splits time between an Airstream trailer in Grand Isle, Louisiana and an oil rig in the Gulf. But his inner existence is punctured with unspeakable grief and the consequences of impulsive mistakes. His older brother Tommy jumped off a chopper into the Persian Gulf in 1991 and disappeared. The Navy presumed him dead. Still grappling with the unknown fate of their son, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph are killed in a car accident shortly afterward. Teenaged Roy is left alone in the shadow of these dual tragedies, and he deals with it about as successfully as you'd expect. Now Roy receives an email from a 15-year-old girl in San Francisco claiming to be Tommy's daughter. Attempting to answer the lingering questions of his cursed family and seeking a future in which he can drop anchor, Roy sets out for the West Coast. His encounters and misadventures along the way (which include backyard llama-raising, hunting endangered fowl in the Rockies, and shopping for a Russian bride) reminded us why we fell in love with Skip's writing in the first place.

And when others speak of Louisiana as a backwater or third-world they usually mean places like these, places that are falling, sinking, eroding into the suck of slinking salt waters, and nowhere as badly or as quickly as this fading fifteen crow-fly miles between my island and the harder ground that finally appeared after the Bayou Lafourche lift bridge. All that was behind me would one day be gone. But I was safe now.... Homes and businesses and solid ground, yes, but now that dark bayou to follow as well. Diesel rainbows, eddies of foamed trash. Ahead: Golden Meadow, Galliano, Cut Off, Larose, then another big bridge. The crossing of the Intracoastal. Agriculture, sugarcane. The backwater becoming a banana republic here. Some of the farmers burning their fields preharvest. The land all around me on fire and smoking.

***

In Before He Finds Her, Kardos crafts a classic Hitchcockian thriller. One beautiful September day on the Jersey Shore, Ramsey Miller throws a massive block party and invites all the neighbors. After the bash he apparently snaps, strangling his wife to death and fleeing into the Atlantic with his 3-year-old daughter. Police and the FBI never find him and the daughter is presumed dead. But everyone's wrong. The daughter was whisked away into witness protection and has been raised for fifteen years with an aunt and uncle in West Virginia. Now new evidence indicates that Ramsey is back -- and he's coming for the daughter he left behind that fateful night. Kardos skillfully weaves between dual narratives: what was Ramsey thinking the night he ended his world? And will his daughter uncover the truth before her father tracks her down?  Every customer we've teased with that synopsis hasn't been able to resist this book, and we're sure you'll enjoy it too.

Standing over her -- she was so, so pretty -- he wanted to wake her, to lie wordlessly beside her at the beginning of their last day together. But the curtains were open, and the light would wake her soon enough. How incredible, he thought, moving toward the window and looking out above the rooftops across the way, that this morning look exactly like every other. There was no way to see those eight other planets dragging themselves mindlessly into position. But they were. He could already feel it, the inevitability.

 

So drop in with us tomorrow night for a reception and book signing with these two greats at 5:30. Afterward we'll ask them to read a bit and speak on their craft. We'll also ask them about the eerie connection between their two new books: characters presumed dead who nevertheless survived. If that's our theme, you never know who might walk through the door. Don't miss it.

Turnrow 20 Spotlight: Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers / Ernst Haffner, tr. by Michael Hofmann / Other Press

Like so many visions from that time, the nightmarish spectacle of Nazi public book burnings is hard to forget. It's not just the sight of thousands of books in flames -- it's the thunder of the brass and drums, the pageantry of the uniforms and flags, the maniacal glee on the faces of the young men hurling books into the inferno. But a question continues to worm away: which books are they burning? What texts are so incendiary (no pun intended) that they need to be not just banned or redacted, but ceremoniously destroyed? An answer of sorts arrives in Blood Brothers, Ernst Haffner's 1932 novel now being republished in a translation by Michael Hofmann (who also gave us 2013 favorite Every Man Dies Alone) for Other Press. In fact, we know this to be a book that the Nazis banned and burned. But it also answers a more disturbing question about that scene: who are those boys throwing the books? Why are they laughing? And where do they fit in the story of Hitler's Germany?

Blood Brothers is a strange little book, even before Chapter 1 begins. Haffner was a social worker and journalist in the shaky peace of 1920s and 30s Weimar Germany. Blood Brothers was published in 1932 as Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin [Youth on the road to Berlin] and banned by the ascendant National Socialist Party one year later. All traces of Haffner vanish in 1940. As far as we know, this is his only work. (Read more about Haffner and the background of Blood Brothers in this great New York Times piece). And yet there are hundreds of journalists and writers who would have killed to write this book. It is passionately, angrily partisan but avoids the soapbox, promoting plot over pamphleteering. It's hyper-realistic and somehow anti-cynical. Even 80 years later, it remains fresh and startling to read, maybe because of its unique prose style, or because its lessons still need to be learned. It's decidedly of its time and place and yet shockingly relevant to urban America in 2015.

It's telling that a book so swift -- constantly moving, running, shaking, catching fire -- begins with its title characters waiting in line. The Blood Brothers are a loosely associated gang of Berlin boys between 10 and 20 who are orphaned and homeless, drifting from odd job to petty theft to bar to brothel to warehouse floor. In these opening lines they are among the thousands standing in the welfare queue. But watch how Haffner illustrates this scene of societal ennui:

"Eight Blood Brothers -- tiny individual links of an exhausted human chain stretching across the factory yard and winding up two flights of stairs -- stand and wait among hundreds of others to be admitted from the awful damp cold into the warm waiting rooms. Just three or four minutes to go now. Then, on the dot of eight, the heavy iron door on the second floor will be unlocked...the coiled line jerks into life."

It is with this restless tone that Haffner unspools the entire tale. For the Blood Brothers, life is tedious, uncertain, gray, cold, and hungry. The only comfort is from each other and the only excitement comes from bursts of feverish activity. Thus, even when they are waiting in line, sleeping on the floor of an abandoned train station, or grinding their teeth in an institutional cot, Haffner keeps the language recklessly brisk. In this book there are no recollections, no scene-setting, no lengthy descriptions, no meditations on motive, character, purpose, or the greater world. It's all action all the time, and the effect on the reader is intense and dizzying.

In the early chapters, Haffner follows the gang's misadventures with a detached, objective eye that nevertheless provokes empathy. Soon, however (nothing in this book happens slowly), it becomes the story of two boys in particular: Ludwig and Willi. Ludwig is a younger member of the gang who follows Jonny, the de facto leader, with the same dogged loyalty as the other boys. We first meet Willi as he's scheming to break out of the juvenile detention center where he's been imprisoned for several months. His escape is breathtakingly suspenseful, and he hops a freight train hoping to make it back to his comrades in Berlin. Realizing to his horror that he's heading in the wrong direction, he heeds the advice of another tramp in the boxcar. Obviously, Willi is on the lam and can't buy a ticket or be seen by the guards, so the tramp urges him to ride a passenger express line hundreds of miles back to the capital - by clinging to the axles underneath the carriage. What follows is the most unforgettable sequence you've read in a long time:

"The icy wind drills deeper and deeper into his clothes, bites under the strips of material wound round his trunk. The body hanging there, stock still, loses its flexibility, becomes numb. Willi can no longer feel his hands cramping in their handholds, he can no longer move his fingers. He can't even feel himself hanging on the axle. All he feels is his body hurtling along at incredible speed, as though shot from a gun. He feels the occasional dull thump of a stone hitting him, but it's not a pain as such. He is released from his physical self, from time and space. How long has he been hanging like this? Is it one hour, is it four?"

Does it need to be restated? The whole book is like this! The only reason to stop reading before you finish it is to take a breath.

This stylistic feat would be enough to recommend the book, but its greater implications are what push it over the top. It seems like this period - 1930s Germany - is repeatedly invoked to warn people about the insidious evil they are blindly submitting to, as if comparing anything to the advent of World War II has ever been accurate or appropriate. The work that comes quickly to mind is Tony Kushner's 1985 A Bright Room Called Day. Also set in Berlin in 1932, Kushner's play centers on an upper class coterie of artists and actors who feebly attempt to maintain their way of life in the gathering storm of the Weimar Republic. By switching between 1932 and then-present-day America, Kushner (not very subtly) suggests that the Reagan administration is an echo of that chaotic time of misplaced idealism. Where Bright Room falters is in attempting the comparison.

Blood Brothers, in contrast, never tries to make itself bigger than the boys themselves, and this is exactly what makes it so frighteningly relevant. The Brothers are not so much cogs in a system as the clods of dirt that are crushed by its gears. There are no adults in the book. Indeed, there are welfare workers, cops, guards, and citizens, but they are only the faceless, inhuman tools of bureaucracy. When Willi and Ludwig are finally reunited, they make one last desperate attempt at the straight-and-narrow life. Since they're under 21 and without documentation or guardians, it's nearly impossible. And near the end, the smallest slip-up spells disaster for them. The horrifying similarity to today's America is not in the suggestion that we are living in some new dawn of evil Fascism, but that our own dispassionate bureaucracy is the same machine that threatens to crush the Blood Brothers. Who knows -- Haffner himself may have been one of its victims.

And so it is obvious now why the Nazis destroyed this book. It completely upended their assertion that organizations like the Hitler Youth and Labor Service eradicated inner city crime and gave purpose to shiftless young men. But the Blood Brothers were swallowed up by these groups -- the same institutions they knew but covered in a different shade of cheap paint. They were still there as the machine rumbled toward a new kind of war. And they are the same boys whose laughing faces seem so haunting in those scenes of public burning. We'd be wrong to think their exhilarated grins come from the gleeful destruction of literature. Rather, their gleaming eyes in those mountains of flame reflect the same elation they once chased in the streets of Berlin.

Who Lives Here? And Why? - Carson Ellis Brings Us 'Home'

The February selection for our Child's First Book Club has been sparking conversation and imagination since we unveiled it on Tuesday. The book is Home by Carson Ellis. Ellis is best known as the illustrator for the Wildwood series and for the band The Decemberists, which is led by her husband Colin Meloy. But perhaps Home will establish her more prominently in the minds of children and their parents. After all, this book is anything but ordinary.

The premise is simple: these are the places where people (or creatures) live. It begins as an exploration of the usual comparisons. Country house, city house. Tall house, short house. Clean house, messy house. We've all read children's books that start exactly like this. But something about Ellis' illustrations suggests an atmosphere of whimsy and mystery below the surface. Her watercolors are heavy on browns, grays, and shades of reddish pink, and they remind you of the palettes of classic kid's books, or of wintry greeting cards from a century ago. And the longer you gaze at each page, you notice something just a little quirky in the corner. When you and your child reach the halfway point, Home explodes beyond the boundaries of our normal concepts of that word.

It turns on the provocative question "But whose home is this?" The illustration depicts a tiny mountain fortress, and no residents are visible. From then on the reader is asked to answer similar questions about the progressively more imaginative homes on display. The locales stretch from Slovakia to Kenya, from Atlantis to the Moon. But on the final pages, Ellis (dare we say?) brings it all back home.

We're confident our kids club members and their folks will return to this book again and again, and we're excited about the buzz around it. Members of the Child's First Book Club receive a brand new, signed children's book at the start of each month, and it costs nothing except the price of the book. Sign up today and we'll send you Home before we run out!

 

Turnrow 20 Spotlight: God'll Cut You Down

God'll Cut You Down / John Safran / Riverhead Books (US)

John Safran is a specialist in offensiveness, especially when it comes to things like race, religion, and gender. As the host of Race Relations in his native Australia, Safran managed to switch Palestinian and Israeli sperm samples, walk around Chicago in blackface, and get himself crucified in the Philippines. For one such stunt, he appeared at a white supremacist's young athletes rally here in Mississippi, where he announced to a puzzled audience that the event's organizer, Richard Barrett, tested positive for African DNA. After Barrett and his lawyers threatened legal action over the prank, the video footage got cut from the show. And that was that.

Until one year later.

Back in Melbourne, someone tipped off Safran about a bizarre murder in Rankin County, MS. Richard Barrett—the white supremacist whom he spoofed on his show—had been brutally stabbed to death and set on fire inside his rural home. The accused killer was 23-year-old Vincent McGee, an African American man who had been doing yard work for Barrett. Unable to resist the potential of a sensational trial (he of course proclaims himself a "race trekkie"), Safran strapped on his best Truman Capote hat and flew back to Mississippi. What he found was even more disturbing and complex than he could have imagined.

Safran's book chronicles every twist, turn, trap, and rabbit hole that he fell into during the ensuing months he spent around Jackson, MS. As a Jewish Australian, Safran is the ultimate outsider. He claims to know very little of Mississippi or its reputation elsewhere in the U.S., which makes him the perfect investigator and author on the case. This sets him up for moments that are hilarious, awkward, and sometimes poignant. Cozying up to the host of a white nationalist radio show, he ends up counseling the middle aged man on his love life:

"'My problem is,' he says, 'it's hard to get the kind of girl I want when they see that trailer and they know I am unemployed.' 'I'd spin it around,' I tell him. It seems like you're self-employed.'"

Mis-hearing McGee’s mother recalling the death of her other child from "crib death," he prods, "Crip death? Is that gang-related?" He even gets duped into buying flowers and transcribing love letters for Vincent McGee during his incarceration. Via his own buffoonish ignorance, Safran successfully portrays himself as a naive journalist. And no one he covers looks squeaky clean, either.

By the time you reach the closing chapters, you'll come to the same conclusion that Safran did: everyone is lying to some degree, and nothing is even as remotely simple as it seems. Was Barrett actually an FBI informant? Were he and McGee engaged in a sexual arrangement? Does the Mississippi Dept. of Corrections routinely deny black families visitation rights? Why did Barrett include the Government of Iran in his will? And most tantalizingly elusive of all: what on earth actually happened that night in Barrett’s house? When you read about the only item hanging in Barrett’s closet, all assumptions vanish out the window.

Fans of The Fall of the House of Zeus and the film Zodiac (in which the investigators also bite off more than they can chew) will love this book, as long as they have a sense of humor. Since Safran apparently videotaped and recorded so much of his experience, perhaps the story would've been more successful as one of his documentaries. It would've at least cut down on most chapters opening with some variant of “Turning on my Flip cam, I entered the Rankin Co. Judicial Building….” But for a strange adventure down the darkest alleys of Mississippi’s cursed history of racial tension, God’ll Cut You Down is a new classic from the unlikeliest of sources.

 

Turnrow 20 Spotlight: Black River

Black River / S. M. Hulse / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Black River could have been many different things. About five times you'll think it's going to be one way and then another. But it's always becoming something else - and this is a very good thing.

When you pick it up and look at the orange mountains and vintage typeface on the cover, you're positive it's a Western. You'll read the flap about Wes Carver returning to his Montana hometown to face his demons, and you're convinced you're about to open another Cormac McCarthy imitation. Then you read the first chapter and find that it's not just a bizarre way to begin a Western, but a perplexingly strange way to start a book. In just a few pages, you follow Wes and his wife out of the hospital with the bad news that her radiation treatments were ineffective and that she has been given weeks to live. In a stunning moment, she lays in bed asking Wes to play her a song on his fiddle. He can't. And when he looks up from his instrument she's already gone. And that's page 14.

It's devastating and undeniably powerful. So your next thought is that this trick is way too bold for a debut author. There's no way she can maintain this for the next 200 pages, and if she tries to, it'll be so maudlin you won't want to make it. But then Wes is already driving back to Montana with Claire's ashes in his truck, and he's forced to at least attempt reconciliation with his estranged stepson. Hours after getting back into town, we learn he has another reason to go back: Bobby Williams has a parole hearing coming up, and for some reason Wes is determined to keep this man in jail. And so it's almost like you've started another novel, but like Wes, you can't escape the deep shadow of that first chapter. Claire's benevolent, ghostly memory haunts the rest of the book.

Masterfully, Hulse reveals the darkness in Wes' past mere glimpses at a time. Most of this is done through the characterization of Wes himself, who is stubbornly stoic in ways both humorous and tragic.

Wes didn't do well with sympathy. Never had. There would be cards piling up back at home, well-meaning but trite condolences, and he'd toss them all unopened. "Well." He took another step down to the gravel, rocked a stone against the sole of his boot. "Known for a long time she might not make it."

As Wes and his stepson Dennis prepare to cast Claire's ashes into a mountaintop wind, this laconic grief reaches its apex:

"Should we say something?" Wes walked to the edge of the ridge, felt a clump of damp soil give way under his feet. "Can if you want to." But neither of them did. Didn't move, either, and they stood together for a long moment, Wes noticing Dennis's eyes getting a sheen to them. His own eyes were dry, but his heart beat hard in his chest, drumming against his breastbone in irregular bursts of impossible speed.

At times Wes' tendency to skip articles and pronouns in his speech slips into caricature, but by then you've already grown empathetic for the profound sorrow and regret that never peeks out between his terse phrases.

And so by now you're convinced that you're knee-deep in a poignant family drama in the style of Marilynne Robinson. But even then you're wrong, because just when you think the 'climax' of this book will involve tearful hugging in view of pensive wild horses, another tragedy rears up out of nowhere and radically changes the tone once more. Now Wes races toward his moment of destiny with Bobby Williams and his bulging knuckles around the cold steering wheel might as well be your own.

Of course, all of these delightfully unexpected turns shouldn't distract you from the language, which is as gorgeous and sparse as the wide open landscapes of the West. Hulse's unique specialty might just be her ability to convey the beauty of lonesome fiddle music. Before his violent meeting with Williams, Wes was a naturally gifted fiddler in a sometime-touring bluegrass band. "Black River" is the town, the river, and the name of Wes' signature song:

Every day it was the last tune he played before his fiddle went back in its case, and every day it changed. Just a bit. The changes became smaller and subtler over the years: adding a grace note, dropping a double-stop, digging his bow more deeply into a string. Each time he played it, Claire knew she was one day closer to hearing a masterpiece. And then the riot. Bobby Williams. Dust on a chipboard case.

And in the end this is the greatest thing about Wes (and Black River itself): he is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, but they never consume him. And when he must finally face his encounter with Bobby Williams, you'll be surprised at what you're rooting for. Then Black River will pull its final trick, and the ending will both satisfy and leave you hoping for more, just like the last lingering notes of an old mountain melody.

The Winter 2015 Turnrow 20!

IT'S HERE! We've been previewing and reading the best books coming out over the next few months, and this is our take on the twenty best. In our list you'll find the best and worst of human nature, from Etta's transcontinental walk for love (in Etta and Otto and Russell and James) to the cannibalism of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea (in Savage Harvest). We're also excited to feature signed copies and author events this spring. Skip Horack (The Other Joseph) and Michael Kardos (Before He Finds Her) will appear on a twinbill on 3/26. The other is the one we've all been waiting for: Jamie Kornegay launches his debut novel Soil with a huge bash here at the store on 3/10. Start reading!

After Birth by Elisa Albert

Ari, a recent transplant to a small college town, gave birth to her son a year ago. When former rock musician Mina moves to town, the two team up to make the task of new motherhood navigable. Ari offers a bitterly funny feminist view of being a mom and of female friendships. A must-read for those who can appreciate and enjoy a sarcastically hilarious, bravely honest take on modern motherhood and the complex, often contradictory emotions that come with it. 

Aquarium by David Vann

In this stunning family drama, the legacy of a tragic childhood haunts the next generation. A single mother runs into a figure from her past and takes drastic measures to teach her 12-year-old daughter how to be a survivor. Vann has the ability to entrance the reader with quiet, lucid prose, only to deliver an emotional gut-punch when his characters react in true and unexpected ways. An unforgettable, confrontational novel, balanced with beauty and redemption.

Before He Finds Her by Michael Kardos

Rising thriller writer Michael Kardos, a Mississippi State writer-in-resident, has given us a smart, twisty, character-driven mystery about a small-town New Jersey cold crime that is reignited when an eighteen-year-old girl, presumed to have been killed, comes out of hiding to learn more about the top suspect in her mother’s murder – her own father. Kardos doesn’t set this up like your typical whodunit, but he squeezes out every drop of page-turning surprise and suspense. Reserve your signed copy.

Black River by S.M. Hulse

Despite having all the elements of a modern Western – horses, Montana valleys, lone gunmen, and a stoic protagonist seeking redemption – this debut novel is actually a poignant family drama. Wes Carver returns to Black River hoping to reconcile with his estranged stepson and to exorcise the demons that have haunted him since a prison riot twenty years before. A masterpiece that signals the arrival of a brilliant new talent, Black River succeeds at spanning genres and inspiring hope in every kind of reader.

Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner

Written in 1932 and banned by the ascendant Nazi party one year later, this lean, lightning-paced novel is the only known work of German social worker Ernst Haffner. The prose is all tight muscle and bone, just like its title characters: a band of teenage boys who skulk the streets of interwar Berlin, committing petty crimes and escaping from police and welfare boards. We’re excited to share this long-lost gem, translated into English for the first time.

Creatures of a Day by Irvin Yalom

A veteran psychiatrist opens his couch and shares some of his most interesting conversations with patients – under respectful disguises – to get at our most basic fear: our own mortality. Each case is deftly related, deeply explored, and satisfyingly resolved. The hypnotic ease and simplicity of Yalom’s prose and his hard-earned revelations make this book not only good reading but a psychological comfort.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson

Erik Larson has done it again. This time, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts tackles the doomed last voyage of the Lusitania. As we approach the hundredth anniversary of the tragedy that shoved Americans into the Great War, Larson masterfully weaves together the storylines that converged with a torpedo blast heard round the world. Reserve your signed copy.

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper

You’ve never read a road trip novel like this one. Leaving her husband a note and taking a backpack and gun, 82-year-old Etta walks out and begins a thousand mile trek to the ocean. Hooper switches deftly between the steps of Etta’s journey and the event from sixty years earlier that prompted it. A powerfully moving tale of dreams deferred and redeemed. Signed copies available.

The First Bad Man by Miranda July

The life of an eccentric middle-aged woman turns chaotic when the twentysomething child of her boss moves into her apartment. Mere synopsis alone cannot account for the distinct narrative voice, numerous perverse turns, and outright hilarity that July brings to this relentless story of the unimagined choices we make to find a home.

Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder

An elderly Olympic athlete from the 1928 Games is kidnapped from her nursing home and taken by two supposed strangers. The initial mystery kept us riveted, but the girl runner’s story, and Snyder’s agile shifts in time, made this a clever and compelling novel.

God’ll Cut You Down by John Safran

Australian comedian and filmmaker John Safran bit off more than he could chew when he came to Mississippi. His madcap misadventures are chronicled in this true crime account, which quickly turns into a hall of mirrors of Mississippi’s darker secrets. Fans of The Fall of the House of Zeus will love this – as long as they have a sense of humor.

I Am Radar by Reif Larssen

An epic tale that follows the unusual life of Radar Radmanovic, beginning with his strange birth and throughout his lifelong struggles with love, his parents, and a terrible medical affliction. With Larssen’s characteristic quirks, we also meet a secret society of Norwegian schoolteachers who use radioactive material stolen from the Nazis to create surrealist performance art, an avant-garde puppeteer, a disfigured literature professor who assembles the largest library in the world, and a strange cast of other misfits who intersect with Radar. Fans of rich, generous epics like The Goldfinch should tune in to this one. Reserve your signed copy.

I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell

The latest in a wave of exciting new talents in the art of non-fiction essays, Kent Russell takes us into volatile situations with oddball participants, faithfully portrayed through his own unique lens. Fresh prose, strange humor, and broad range. If you liked Pulphead or David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction, you should definitely dip into this.

My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh

An exceptional debut novel about young people growing up in Baton Rouge in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. On page three, the narrator confesses that he’s one of four suspected in a violent crime that occurred one summer in his neighborhood, and you’ll rip through the next 300 hoping he’s exonerated, unable to put this story down, always just one more chapter, one more, one more.  The prose goes down smooth, but the story may choke you up. Pat Conroy fans take note. Reserve your signed copy.

Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers

Alphabet books are a dime a dozen, but none are quite like this one from the artist of The Day the Crayons Quit. The stories for each letter of the alphabet are clever and funny and slightly off, and they sometimes swing back around and surprise us again. Think Where the Sidewalk Ends or Harold and the Purple Crayon. It’s that good—the kind of book a kid will keep and take with them to college.

The Other Joseph by Skip Horack

Roy Joseph is in self-exile on a Louisiana oil rig after his brother goes missing in the Gulf War. Then his parents die and he is convicted of a felony. All seems lost when he receives an email from a teenage girl claiming to be his lost brother’s daughter. This strange encounter may be his last chance to get to know his lost brother and to find redemption. More top-shelf fiction from one of our favorite young writers. Signing March 26; reserve your signed copy.

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

If you read spy novels regularly, then consider this required. If you enjoy one every now and then, then read this one now. Matthews, a former CIA operative himself, brings a fresh, authentic look at post-Cold War U.S.-Russian spy games. The memorable heroine, a sidelined ballet dancer, is bullied into the Russian intelligence service and trained in the art of seduction (“sexpionage”). She is tasked with luring the identity of a Russian mole out of a young American agent, and their tangled passions and allegiances make for irresistible cat-and-mouse drama.

Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman

Michael Rockefeller (son of famed politician and philanthropist Nelson D.) traveled to New Guinea on a primitive art-gathering expedition in 1961. He never returned, and his ultimate demise -- whether by drowning or murder by a local tribe of warrior cannibals -- has always been a point of debate. Adventure writer Hoffman returns to the jungle to speak with tribal leaders who remember Rockefeller, and he presents the full, fascinating story of what happened when a young idealist wandered into a society of alien beliefs and traditions. A riveting tale of deadly culture clash.

Soil by Jamie Kornegay 

A modern-day Mississippi-based novel about a farmer who plunges into a series of bad decisions when he finds a dead man washed up in his flooded field. Okay, so we may be biased in our support of this debut novel by one of Turnrow’s own. But don’t take our word alone. Early readers have described it as “twisty and volatile,” “darkly droll” and “atmospheric as all get-out.” Signing March 10; reserve your signed copy.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett

From fertile literary Ireland comes one of the most exciting young voices we’ve heard in a long time. The stories in this debut collection are remarkable, making us feel deeply for the misfits and drunkards of Barrett’s present-day, small-town Ireland, and all the more so for the rich, beautiful, black-eyed gutter poetry in which he spins these classically steeped tales