Southern Regional Roundup

Hot Doings in the South

Three from the Civil Rights Era
The turbulent years of the civil rights movement are the focus of three titles from the University of Alabama Press. Mobile native Roy Hoffman spent 20 years in New York City as a journalist, editor and teacher before returning home as writer-in-residence on the Mobile Register. Almost Family (Mar.), his fictional portrait of the complex friendship between black housekeeper Nebraska Waters and Vivian Gold, her Jewish employer, has won praise from the Washington Post for its depiction of "the incredibly complicated web of intimacies and evasions that wove through the lives of blacks and whites."

In This Article: Three from the Civil Rights Era Floridiana How Green Was My Village Georgia (and More) on His Mind Two Morrow More Novel Approaches Happy Haunting Rebels with a Cause All in Good Taste at UNC

Paul Hemphill, a former columnist for the Atlanta Journal, spent 30 years away from his home town of Birmingham before returning to explore how the city had changed in the years since "Bull" Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on black demonstrators. Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son interweaves Hemphill's story and that of Birmingham in the last four decades with the lives of two very different current residents--a wealthy white matron and the pastor of the city's largest black church. Both authors will be autographing at SEBA--Hoffman on Saturday afternoon and Hemphill on Sunday morning.

When civil rights activist Sara Mitchell Parsons was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education in 1961, she became one of the South's first white elected officials to advocate racial equality. It was an unlikely and dangerous stand for a privileged upper-class woman expected to confine her interests to family, church and bridge games at the country club. Her compelling memoir, From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights (May), spans 60 years in the life of one of Atlanta's most distinguished and honored citizens.

FloridianaThe University of Florida Press (their booth will be the one sporting a palm tree) will be on hand to showcase a wide range of regional titles. Castles in the Sand (Dec.) by Mark Foster chronicles the life of Carl Graham Fisher, Florida's first entrepreneur and the man we can all thank for Miami Beach. Orange Pulp: Stories of Mayhem, Murder, and Mystery (Nov.) presents Florida noir at its best with contributions by such diverse authors as Brett Halliday, Jonathan Latimer, John D. MacDonald and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Miami's Parrot Jungle and Gardens (Nov.) by Cory Gittner traces the history of this tourist attraction from its humble beginnings in 1936 as a mom-and-pop roadside attraction to the current park that now houses over 1,000 tropical birds. And 89-year-old Helen Muir has updated Miami U.S.A. (Oct.), her much-beloved history of her adopted home (she came to Miami in 1934) that was first published in 1953, and the current expanded edition follows Miami from its days as a sultry frontier outpost through the 1990s.

How Green Was My VillageBonnie Ramsey, communications director for the Georgia Museum of Art and contributing editor at Veranda magazine, sought out The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of the South (Oct.) for the 10th volume of Thames & Hudson's Most Beautiful Villages series. Along with photographer Dennis O'Kain, she traveled from Camden, S.C., to Athens, Ga.; Natchez, Miss.; and St. Francisville, La., to lavishly document the people and places that give the American South its unique style.

Georgia (and More) on His MindPhotographer Jack Leigh, best known for his evocative shot of a Savannah, Ga., cemetery that graced the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, pays tribute to the people and landscape of the Southeastern coast--from the oystermen working the South Carolina salt marshes to the swamps along Georgia's Ogeechee River--in Norton's The Land I'm Bound To (Sept.).

Two MorrowTerry Kay, a speaker at Friday's SEBA lunch, grew up the 11th of 12 children on a farm in Georgia. A former film and theater critic for the Atlanta Constitution, she has also directed Emory University's Summer Institute for Creative Writing, hosted the PBS-affiliate series The Southern Voice, and written for TV's In the Heat of the Night. Georgia in 1904 is the setting for her Taking Lottie Home (Morrow, Oct.), a story of love both requited and unrequited. Floridian Tim Dorsey, billed by Morrow as the author "who out-Hiaasens Hiaasen," will take a break from his multicity tour for a Sunday SEBA autographing. In Hammerhead Ranch Hotel, Dorsey's deranged antihero Serge A. Storms is still on the track of $5 million in stolen drug money but the trail's becoming littered with bad guys who meet some extraordinary ends (e.g., strapped into a lawn chair and launched into the air by 100 balloons).

More Novel ApproachesMysterious Press author J Lansdale will kick off a four-city tour after his SEBA appearances--Friday's Crime and Punishment panel followed by a signing. Lansdale has set The Bottoms,

Of matters avian, epicurean and urban (U. of Florida, UNC, Thames &Hudson)

a Depression-era tale of serial murder seen through the eyes of a young boy, in his native East Texas. Warner author and Atlanta resident Pat Cunningham Devoto won't have to travel far for her appearance at Saturday's SEBA Supper. Her Out of the Night That Covers Me (Jan.) looks at the unlikely friendship of an orphaned white boy and an eccentric black man in 1950s Alabama. Novelist Deborah Smith, a sixth-generation Georgia native, will be doing double duty at SEBA--at Friday's Big Buzz in Small Towns panel and as a speaker at Sunday's Winter Books Breakfast. Smith's On Bear Mountain (Little, Brown; Feb.), tracks the peculiar fate that links an abstract iron sculpture of a bear, an Italian-American family from New York and a dirt-poor family from the Georgia mountains.
Happy HauntingJust in time for Halloween, the University Press of Kentucky will publish folklorist William Lynwood Montell's Ghosts Across Kentucky (Sept.), a follow-up to Kentucky Ghosts. A professor of folk studies at Western Kentucky University, Montell has investigated ghosts for more than 40 years and admits to two personal ghostly encounters--one as a six-year-old and the other in 1989. For his newest chronicle, Montell has collected 280 stories from across the Bluegrass State--reports of phantom workmen, fallen soldiers, young lovers and executed criminals as well as tales of graveyards, haunted dormitories and vanishing hitchhikers.

Rebels with a CauseSEBA will mark the finish of a nine-city tour for Peter Stevens, author of Taylor Publishing's Rebels in Blue: The Story of Keith and Malinda Blalock. Childhood sweethearts from North Carolina, the Blalocks married on the eve of the Civil War. Keith, although a staunch supporter of the Union, enlisted in the Confederate army to protect Malinda and her family. Malinda, not wanting to be separated from her husband, disguised herself as a man and enlisted in his regiment. The couple went on to fight side-by-side not only for the Confederacy, but later as soldiers in the Union army and finally as members of a band of marauding pro-Union partisans. Stevens will be autographing at the Taylor booth on Saturday afternoon.

All in Good Taste at UNCGourmands would do well to visit the University of North Carolina booth on Saturday afternoon at SEBA. There Ben and Karen Barker, the husband-and-wife chef team that own Durham, N.C.'s Magnolia Grill, will be promoting their November release, Not Afraid of Flavor: Recipes from Magnolia Grill. Karen Barker was the winner of Bon Appetit's 1999 American Food and Entertaining Award for Best Pastry Chef, while her husband has just been named Best Chef: Southeast by no less than the vaunted James Beard Awards.
--Lucinda Dyer

The First Fiction Scene Balancing act (Overlook). The circus represents a metaphor for life, for the struggle to rise higher within it, notes Tracy Carns, publishing director of Overlook Press. The titular hero of The Aerialist (Overlook, Nov.) by Richard Schmitt d s just that. Breaking in with a circus in Venice, Fla., Gary gets his first job mucking out elephant cages and climbs from there to a successful high-wire act. "There's a really strong sense of place," says Carns, "with the circus in Florida and then when it starts traveling across Texas and up into Oklahoma." The Aerialist is the latest in Overlook's Sewanee Writers' Series. Also discovered at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Ivonne Lamazares writes of a perilous mother-and-daughter escape by raft from Cuba in The Sugar Island (Houghton Mifflin, Sept.). But when the two land in Florida, they find the American Dream just out of reach. Lamazares, who was born in Cuba in 1962, now lives in South Miami and will appear at SEBA. Sallie Bissell, who divides her time between Nashville, Tenn., and Asheville, N.C., debuts with a novel about three women stalked through the Smokies by a murderous predator. In the Forests of Harm (Bantam) introduces Mary Crow, assistant D.A. in Atlanta, Ga., who returns home to North Carolina, where she embarks on a hike with two friends, only to be pursued in the wilderness by a mortal enemy. Carroll & Graf evokes the names of James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard when touting a new crime novel, Robbers (Otto Penzler, Dec.) by Christopher Cook. Cook lives in Austin, a town that figures in the action as well when two drifters head out on a larcenous and bloody dash across Texas. Evelyn Palfrey, who also lives in Austin, makes her first trade appearance with The Price of Passion (Pocket Books paper, Oct.), which she originally published herself. In it, a husband of 20 years' standing brings home to his wife in Austin his baby by another woman. J Duckett is a black cavalry scout for the Union forces during the Civil War inWhere I'm Bound (S&S, Oct.) by Allen B. Ballard, who teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives in Clifton Park, N.Y. Duckett's story takes place on the Mississippi Delta while slaves are being freed from the Confederates and vital waterways kept open for the north. After living in Baton Rouge, La., for 27 years (and now living in New Haven, Conn.), Tim Parrish returns home to Louisiana with tough fiction about the working class in Red Stick Men: Stories (Univ. Press of Miss., Sept.). The natives of Baton Rouge call it Red Stick, and Parrish says, "I don't know if I so much made Baton Rouge a character as it is a character inseparable from all the other characters. Although the book isn't by any means strictly regional in its human concerns, Baton Rouge as a place is the double helix around which all the characters are wrapped." Knoxville, Tenn., is where 25-year-old Jason Sayer is on a search for himself in Swimming in Sky (Southern Methodist Univ. Press, Oct.) by Inman Majors, who was raised in Knoxville, but now lives in Tullahoma, southeast of Nashville. Darkening the atmosphere in Memphis, Tenn., a string of women's murders in old movie theaters ech s a similar series that occurred across Virginia and Tennessee 50 years before in Broken Hearts (Sunstone Press, Sept.) by Bob Levy. "This novel has an extremely strong regional connection," says James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone president. "The landmarks are vividly described, and the retired chief of police on the case lives in Memphis"--where Levy also lives and is a retailer with Oak Hall, a specialty clothing store founded by his great-great-grandfather in 1859. --Robert Dahlin Top