Rhythm and Books

Turnrow 20 ... Destiny of the Republic

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty. –James A. Garfield

The extraordinary story of President James Garfield is told beautifully by Candice Millard (The River of Doubt) in her latest work of narrative history, Destiny of the Republic. It’s probably not a stretch to assume that most people know very little about President Garfield. He was the 20th president of the United States, hailing from what one Turnrow associate considers to be the greatest state in the union, Ohio, a place "known for brilliant men," we're told, including many U.S. presidents. Most would remember Garfield as the second U.S. president who was assassinated. (And let’s be honest, if you remember the assassin's name, Charles J. Guiteau, it's because of this.)

It was refreshing to read such an enthralling account of one of our lesser known presidents. Millard brilliantly recounts Garfield’s early days as a congressman and his unique rise to the presidency — unique because, in an act unheard of today, Garfield was elected to the presidency not because of wild ambition or influence or that he spent loads of money but because he was actually the best man for the job, and the people anointed him.

Garfield’s short presidency resonates because he faced many of the same problems affecting our country today. During his presidency he encountered mass political corruption and public discontent. Amazingly, in the short time he was president, he was able to rectify many of these issues with common sense and a high moral standing. 

The most fascinating part of Destiny of the Republic focuses on the aftermath of President Garfield’s assassination, only 16 years after Lincoln's murder and just four months into his presidency. Garfield did not immediately die as a result of his gunshot wounds and suffered for 80 days after. His wounds were not fatal and his injuries today would have likely detained him for only a couple of weeks. Even in his time, his wounds would not have been fatal had it not been for the ignorance of his doctors. (And you think you have problems with healthcare!)

This book is perfect for history readers but it is so well written that even the most casual non-fiction reader will find it fascinating. It is a fast-paced thrilling account of Garfield’s life which includes many accessory, yet equally fascinating characters like Robert Todd Lincoln and Alexander Graham Bell. Moreover, with the hope of not sounding trite, it is an inspiring reminder of how great America can be and how important the struggle for democracy is for our country.

Turnrow 20 ... Blueprints for Building Better Girls

We love a good story collection, something to savor, maybe one story a night when things get quiet, like a good sipping whiskey. Occasionally we'll find a book of stories that we can't help but gulp down, one story after the next in a frenzy. Such is the laidback, easy appeal of Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls.

This collection was recommended to us by a friend/author/customer. It had come second- or third-hand already, each reader getting lost in these simply told tales of young women from varying walks of life and times, from the 1970s onward. Schappell's women aren't caught up in outrageous situations but instead are put in the position to discuss their everyday problems and concerns without being dull. She tells their lives with familiar ease, like a shared confidence between close friends. She has a wry comic gift, even in the bleakest of situations. Here's a sample from "A Dog Story," in which a couple adopt a dog after their miscarriage. They're eating in their favorite restaurant, where they'd celebrated news of their conception months earlier:

I know neither of us imagined we'd see that waiter — the one who'd toasted our future, who'd shown us his kids — again. Douglas was poring over the wine list when I saw him across the room, waiting on another table. He recognized us. His face lit up, and he waved. Perhaps, his expression said, we had pictures? He mimed rocking a baby. I shook my head no. He was perplexed. Perhaps we'd left the baby at home? I made an exaggerated frowny face. He looked at me blankly. I gave him the thumbs-down. He still didn't get it. I drew my finger across my throat. This time I saw it reigster in his eyes just before he turned away.

Another waiter came to take our order...

The collection is filled with characters, lines of dialogue and gestures that glow with authenticity and truth. There is humor and sadness, awkwardness and bliss. It's a special kind of book you'll love passing to a friend as much as reading it yourself.

Turnrow 20 ... The Happy Table of Eugene Walter

Much of this week will be spent in the kitchen, and if you haven't planned your menu and want to throw a twist into your Thanksgiving festivities, take a look at The Happy Table of Eugene Walter, a collection of stories and recipes edited by Don Goodman and Thomas Head that showcases the talent and wit of a great, overlooked Southern bon vivant. 

For those who are unfamiliar, Eugene Water hailed from Mobile, Alabama. Like fictional Alabamian Forrest Gump, he was always in the right place at the right time, touring the world, befriending the famous and influential, and in turn leaving his mark on everyone he met. He was a boyhood friend of Truman Capote and after moving away from the South was a neighbor to Andy Warhol in Greenwich Village. He moved to France and had a short story published in first issue of The Paris Review and later became an assistant to Federico Fellini, even appearing in a couple of his films. No matter how far he traveled and how glamorous the company he kept, Walter retained a love for the food and culture of his native South and years later, after returning home to Alabama, published the best-selling American Cooking: Southern Style, a volume in the Time-Life series on regional cooking. 

After the writer's death in 1998, Walter's literary executor, Donald Goodman (in foreground at right), found a large collection of notes, recipes, drawings and various creations. Among the trove was a manuscript entitled "Dixie Drinks: And Sometimes We're Right Moderate. A History of Southern Beverages, and How to Prepare Such, with Forgotten Formulas for Home-Made Wines and Cordials and a Grand Selection of Southern Dishes Employing Spiritous Flavorings." With the help of travel and food writer Thomas Head, Goodman set about reconstructing this book. The result is The Happy Table of Eugene Walter, a collection of stories, illustrations and colorful recipes that Walter gathered from small towns all over Alabama, many of them pre-Prohibition, which accounts for the well-stocked liquor cabinet required to attempt these delights.  

We delved into the book in earnest about a month ago when Goodman and Head stopped by for a book signing. We like to prepare a few recipes when we host cookbook events, and we had no trouble selecting several dishes for this reception. 

In honor of the book's theme — "Southern spirits in food and drink" — we first selected a beverage, the delightful Summer Punch ("a good punch to serve to a crowd that needs livening up") which suffered none being served in October. A selection of cocktail snacks were set out: an olive-based Mock Caviar (vodka), a nice old-style Cheese Spread (sherry and cognac), and most outrageous, Goober Bread, which involved toasting buttered whole wheat bread smeared with Dijon mustard and peanut butter, then adorned with ice-cold dill slices right out of the oven. If it sounds like a vile conflagration, something Walter would toss together when he lived in Rome, just try it and you'll be as surprised and delighted as we all were.

While featuring many of the cornerstones of Southern cuisine, this book is distinguished by the plethora of unique and rare dishes (Nip and Snip Soup, Porcupine Pudding, Chicken Custard, English Monkey), and the convivial nature of Walter's prose makes these recipes uncommonly fun to prepare. It's as if he is there with you in the kitchen, offering anecdotes, memorable turns of phrase and hilarious asides while you cook. (The recipe for Monkey Pudding advises to bake spiced, wine- and milk-soaked stale bread "in the oven with a slow fire until it looks like an old monkey.")

A reader is left wanting to know more, and we'll point you to his currently out-of-print memoir, Milking the Moon, or, for a short taste, try this sample of his poetry, featured on the CD Rare Bird and read by the author in his unmistakable voice:

SocratesMonkey

 

 

 

Turnrow 20 ... Those Across the River

Welcome to Whitbrow!

Whitbrow is a beautiful place for a young couple to begin a family. A couple such as Frank and Eudora Nichols. They had a run of trouble back in Chicago. It could happen to anyone, you know. Their scandalous love affair forced them to flee the academic life and seek refuge down South in this quiet hamlet. Frank returned from World War I with scars deeper than those marking his body and decided his recently inherited Georgia homestead would be the ideal place for him and his wife to begin their life together. It is also the perfect place for him to write a book about his family. 

Frank’s not-so distant relatives were interesting. During another time and another war, Frank's relatives ran into a little trouble. It seems not all was genteel on the Savoyard Plantation. Some horrible atrocities occurred here and ... well, that was another time. Frank believes the story would make a good book. His wife is not so sure it's worth digging into the past. The people of Whitbrow are happy to let the horrors of the past be forgotten. Although, some of them still send their pigs off into the woods….

We should warn you, if you choose to spend time in Whitbrow, the woods across the river are best left unexplored. No resident dares enter them and frankly there’s no need. We bet Frank will have a hard time staying out of the woods though. The Savoyard Plantation used to be situated in those woods. Of course, we hear tell of other, much darker things in those woods.

But never mind all that! Welcome to Whitbrow, a quiet, unusual little place, deep in the Georgia pines.

If you get the itch to know more about Whitbrow or the Nichols or Savoyard, check out Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman. Don't forget to lock up the pigs.

Congratulations, Jesmyn!

Congrats to Jesmyn Ward, the Mississippi writer who won the National Book Award for Fiction last night for her novel Salvage the Bones. We've written here about our admiration for the novel and named it one of our Turnrow 20 spotlight titles for the holiday season, but that's small potatoes next to the National Book Award. We're proud to have a Mississippi story capture this coveted prize, especially in a competitive year like this one. The last time a Mississippi author won the National Book Award was Eudora Welty's 1991 citation for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Other Mississippi winners include Ellen Gilchrist, Walker Percy and William Faulkner.

For a list of other winners and videos the acceptance speech (if you get a chance, watch our fellow bookseller Mitchell Kaplan's eloquent endorsement of independent bookshops), visit the National Book Awards website.

 

 

Turnrow 20 ... Ranchero

We received a phone call a few days ago from a new writer, Rick Gavin, who was driving up from Louisiana and wondered if we'd like him to stop by and sign copies of his debut novel, Ranchero. It just so happened we had a big stack of his books because a.) the novel is set in the Mississippi Delta, b.) we thought it was hilarious and irreverent and full of colorful reprobates we knew, and c.) it's one of our current Turnrow 20 titles.

We encouraged him to stop at Turnrow, expecting to see him pull up out front in a Ranchero or El Camino or something other cool car from the 1960s/70s. We'd heard Mr. Gavin — or "Gavo," as his small coterie of followers have dubbed him — was reclusive and not given to book signings and literary discussions. He framed houses and hung sheetrock in north Louisiana and didn't fraternize with bookish sorts. Or so we supposed. When he arrived (in a Nissan), we found him to be quite affable and willing to discuss his work. He was pleased that we'd ordered so many copies of Ranchero and thanked us for reading and selling it. (He wasn't terribly keen on having his picture made, hence the obscure photo above.)

There was even a small group of fans of the book who'd caught wind of his visit and showed up to say hello and get their books signed. We all had a nice lunch on the Turnrow backporch, where he informed us that he'd written most of the book sitting in a parked car and that there was another book featuring the main character, Nick Reid, due out next year. 

In Ranchero, Rick is the repo man who pays a visit to an Indianola deadbeat named Percy Dwayne Dubois (pronounced "Dew-boys — front-loaded and hick specific"), only to take a lick on the head with a fireplace shovel and have his car stolen for his trouble. Not just any car, Nick's 1969 Calypso Coral Ranchero was a gift from his sweet, doting landlady and, while impractical, is precious enough to warrant a mayhem-filled chase up one side of the Delta and down the other.

Along the way Rick and his colleague Desmond ("huge and eggplant black and had a way of looking feral") track down the deadbeat Dubois, who has passed the car along to a series of ever slimier thugs. Each accomplice they discover joins their motley search team, all leading to the back swamp hideout of a menacing coon-ass meth lord named Guy.

Imagine Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiassen down a Mississippi skid row and you'll know what sort of hilarity and mayhem awaits you in Ranchero. This novel stands out for its biting comedy and its (barely) exaggerated setting, from one Delta town and Sonic Drive-In to the next — Greenwood, Greenville, Yazoo City, Indianola and beyond. Everyone gets a dose of satire. Keep in mind, this is not the bucolic Delta of tourist brochures but the dead-end Delta of "antibiotics and midnight sutures," a Delta known but never captured with such terrible and fun-loving glee:

Life in the Delta demands sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness. Heat and mosquitoes in summer. Scouring wind in winter. Anaemic prospects lingering through the year. People steal and drink. They work when they can, get along as best they're able, and the mood of the place extends to the local police as well. ...(N)o law man in the Delta ever gets terribly worked up. Such a wealth of civilians about are given to rampant shiftlessness that a cop with his gun out would find himself faced with too damn many people to shoot.

Nick, an eastern hillboy, is at constant odds to make sense of the place but has a clever sense and always an entertaining turn of phrase. We've been recommending the novel heartily to locals, telling them only to thicken up their skins and come ready to laugh and wince.

We were curious how Gavo had his finger so firmly on the pulse of the Delta, and he alluded to some time running with rough company around these parts in his youth. Whatever happened in those days stuck to him, and we have this riotous novel to show for it.

If you'd like a rare signed copy of Ranchero, order one at our website.

Turnrow 20 ... The Art of Fielding

You might have read something about Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding, when it was released earlier this fall. If you don't remember what it was about, then maybe you recall how much the young author was paid for it. Publishers don't dole out such high advances these days, and who's to say if it's worth the reported $665,000 payday. It's a compelling read, at any rate, one of the year's most memorable, and the best campus novel we've read in a while.

Set on the campus of a small midwestern college, the story follows several members of the school's baseball team and branches out from there, touching on the lives of those who come into contact with these players, both seasoned and new, talented and striving, destined for greatness and fated for worse. The star is a hot-shot rookie, Henry Skrimshander, an infield prodigy who is nearly unaware of just how good he is. The team captain and veteran catcher, Mike Schwartz, takes the freshman under his wing, shows him the ropes and prepares him for the attention he's about to receive. One uncharacteristically sloppy play turns Henry's world upside down and ripples through the network of friends, lovers and teammates.

What Harbach captures best of all is the emotions of college life, the freedom and responsibility and temptation, the exhilaration that comes from becoming your own person, seeing yourself in the reflection of people you only just met but who make up your entire world.

And while there are some great baseball scenes, Harbach is also adept at portraying the pursuit of knowledge, even making it entertaining, never too heavy. One section grabbed our attention, a great description about writing by Guert Affenlight, the college president, pondering his early literary life:

He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.

It makes you think about what it takes to construct a big-hearted epic like The Art of Fielding, peopled with great conflicted characters, rolled out with the kind of ease that makes you take to the bed or barcalounger, soaking it up for hours. Take it for your own or give it to a fan of Jonathan Franzen or John Irving, or anyone who's entering, attending or leaving college. It's an early favorite and one of our current Turnrow 20 titles.

Turnrow 20 ... Salvage the Bones

It used to be Faulkner. Now, if you're a young Mississippi author writing about poor rural characters, you expect comparisons to Larry Brown.

As in Brown's fiction, set in the rural north Mississippi hill country, we have never read about the characters in Jesmyn Ward's new novel, Salvage the Bones. These are poor African-Americans on the Gulf Coast. It is a story about family, poignantly told with heart and humor, told with a hard honesty that stands out among modern Southern fiction.

Set in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, days before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the Coast, this is a different kind of survival story. Truthfully, we weren't looking forward to another Katrina story. But every time we think we've had our fill, along comes something fresh and exhilarating like Skip Horack's The Southern Cross and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun to correct our attitude. And much like the famous storm, Salvage the Bones packed a bigger punch than expected.

Esch, a fourteen-year-old girl, and her three brothers watch as their hard-drinking but loving father prepares for the approaching hurricane and find that they must fend for themselves as his fervor increases daily. Each of the siblings is struggling with their own survival in other ways. Esch's middle brother Skeetah continues to steal food for his prize-fighting pit bull, and her younger brother, Junior, follows Randall, the oldest of the clan, as he tries to step in for his occupied father. Esch harbors her own shocking secret, which colors her perception over the novel's tense course.

The more we read and became entranced by the world that Jesmyn Ward has created, we began to think less Larry Brown and more Faulkner. Could this be a kind of modern-day As I Lay Dying, a story that looks intently at each individual member of a motherless family, but rather than marching toward their destiny, their destiny comes hurtling toward them?

Whatever it is, Ward's Salvage the Bones is powerful and essential reading for anyone who keeps up with the state of Mississippi literature. Or Southern literature for that matter, and even American literature, since we were glad to hear that the novel has been nominated for the National Book Award, which will be announced November 16.

Turnrow 20 ... Pulphead

With the rise of blogs, tweets and short-blip news bytes, not to speak of newspaper closings coast to coast, it's a common assumption that journalism is dying. Who has the time for an article over 20 inches? Could it be the good old days of gonzo are going? We might have believed it once ourselves, but then we read Pulphead, the new collection of essays and article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a writer for Harper's, GQ, The Oxford American, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine.

Pulphead hearkens back to the days of New Journalism, when articles could be as rich and mysterious, as emotionally fulfilling and entertaining as great fiction. Like any good story, it's not the bald-face surface truth the writer is after but some glimmer of deeper truth that shows itself in flickers and traces, off-handed remarks and gestures, a series of events interpreted just shy of outright explanation. Observed from real life, these truths are, as the saying goes, often stranger and more resonant than imagined.

Sullivan finds his raw material on the fringes of pop culture, political movements, disasters both past and future (read "Violence of the Lambs" ... wow), and even, generously, through his own life experiences. He writes about his brother, nearly killed by a shock from a rock-n-roll microphone, and about his mentor, the famous Sewanee writer and intellectual Andrew Lytle. He even writes about his own family's experience renting out their home for the production of a popular TV teen melodrama and all its unexpected consequences. Sullivan imbues each piece with personal detail, insight and wit. He writes beautiful sentences and scenes and chains disparate ideas together that make a greater whole. The essays in Pulphead, happily bound in their dissimilarity, form their own grand portrait, a kind of autobiography through interesting excursions and experiences.

This is a seriously wonderful collection, and we feel honored to host Sullivan on book tour this Wednesday, November 2. We heartily encourage you to come out and hear him read one of these impressive essays.

Introducing the Turnrow 20

As independent booksellers in today's market, we experience a frequent compulsion to remind readers of the virtues of real books, recommended and sold in actual stores at the value-based price as set by publishers and authors. It's a survival ploy, sure, and hopefully not too self-righteous, but it's also our appeal to preserve the humanity of literature as we watch it being divvied up into convenient, byte-size morsels, sold for pennies a pop.

Fundamentally, of course, we're just avid readers and book lovers who enjoy recommending books to fellow readers. We find that our customers, a vast majority of whom prefer the tactile sensation of reading and recognize the value in small shops like ours and thousands more across the country, enjoy this discussion of literature, especially when they're frequently introduced to great books that someone else has read and loved. We don't use computer models to schematize your reading tastes, and we're mostly too disorganized in the back-office to extract payment for pushing publishers' emphasis titles. We're just humans selling stories to other humans.

We found so many books worth shouting about this fall that, inspired by the national independent booksellers' Indie Next list, we decided to launch a new seasonal recommendation plan called the Turnrow 20. Out of piles and piles of newly published books, here are 20 new (and relatively new) titles that we have read and can't stop recommending to our friends and fellow book lovers:

1. The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

2. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

3. Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell

4. Boomerang by Michael Lewis

5. Crazy River by Richard Grant

6. Death in the City of Light by David King

7. Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

8. A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

9. The Happy Table of Eugene Walter by Don Goodman & Thomas Head

10. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

11. Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

12. Pulphead by John Sullivan

13. Ranchero by Rick Gavin

14. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

15. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

16. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

17. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

18. The Stranger You Seek by Amanda Kyle Williams

19. Those Across the River by Chris Buehlman

20. Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

Check back here throughout the month to read reviews of each books, and stop in or write us for our Turnrow 20 flyer which lists and describe the twenty Turnrow-tested titles. As a special bonus, enter the Turnrow 20 Challenge. Read each book on the list and qualify for a $100 Turnrow gift card.