Eleven Brand New Books Not To Be Missed: More New Books by Great Writers

Once I posted New Books By Geat Writers, I realized that there were an entire world of books that I left out. Of course, I can't possibly list them all but here are eleven more. Its a long list so get ready to scroll. And it is comprised of black, white, indie published , mainstream, accomplished, beginning, women and men, poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

Glorious by Bernice L. McFadden (released May 1, 2010 but there are some great recent reviews) "McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth; McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos"--New York Times Books  See this great New York Times Fiction Chronicle review here.




Getting to Happy by Terry McMillan (release date September 7, 2010) McMillan's Waiting to Exhale was more than just a bestselling novel-its publication was a watershed moment in literary history. McMillan's sassy and vibrant story about four African American women struggling to find love and their place in the world touched a cultural nerve, inspired a blockbuster film, and generated a devoted audience. Now, McMillan revisits Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin fifteen years later. Each is at her own midlife crossroads: Savannah has awakened to the fact that she's made too many concessions in her marriage, and decides to face life single again-at fifty-one. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle, been swindled by her husband number two, and conned herself into thinking that a few pills will help distract her from her pain. Robin has an all-American case of shopaholism, while the big dream of her life-to wear a wedding dress- has gone unrealized. And for years, Gloria has taken happiness and security for granted. But being at the wrong place at the wrong time can change everything. All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They've exhaled: now they are learning to breathe. --From the product details on Amazon.com

This is probably the Terry McMillan book we've all been waiting for since Waiting to Exhale. Go to the grand Ms. Terry's website for tours, commentary on writing, etc.

Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story-graphic novel by Mat Johnson, Simone Gane (illustrator) (released August 24, 2010) Dark Rain is more than the story of two ex-cons and their New Orleans bank heist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Johnson draws both the good and bad of the post-Katrina landscape in his characters, while illustrator Simon Gane's pen and ink artwork enhances the story without ever overpowering it.--From Largehearted Boy

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin edited and introduced by Randall Kenan (Let the Dead Bury the Dead, The Fire This Time and Visitation of Spirits:) (released August 24, 2010) recently featured on NPR's Morning Edition. and Newsweek. )“These pieces, previously uncollected,” says the LA Times, “not only give us a sense of the physical distances he traveled to ‘bear witness’ but the intellectual latitude he stretched.” --LA Times

Adam & Eve: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund (author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, Abundance and other, also director of Spalding University's brief residency MFA in Creative Writing Program)
(release date September 28, 2010) What happened to Eden?  The New York Times bestselling author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance returns with an audacious and provocative novel that envisions a world where science and faith contend for the allegiance of a new Adam & Eve. --product information Amazon.com

Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride by Frank X Walker. (Release party at at Morris Book Shop at 7 p.m. on September 17.)  In these poems, Frank X Walker immerses himself in the story of legendary African-American jockey Isaac Murphy (1861-1896). The son of a slave, Murphy rose to the top of thoroughbred racing in a brilliant career that brought him wealth and fame. In Murphy’s time, thoroughbred racing was dominated by African-American jockeys. In the poems imagined/spoken here by Frank X Walker we hear the voices of Murphy and his wife Lucy, his trainer Eli Jordan, and his parents James and America Burns. The poems shine a light on the life of America’s most celebrated black jockey, his family and community, and the historical canvas on which his extraordinary life played out. --product information from publisher. Click here for a link to Old Cove Press where you can purchase the book. Or go to Morris Books for more information about the releae party.




Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication) by Natasha Tretheway (release date September 1, 2010)  Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina. Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. And more.She recently appeared in a great interview on NPR's FreshAir and this past Sunday's New York Times.





The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel (P.S.) by Katrina Kittle (author of Traveling Light, Two Truths and a Lie, and the Kindness of Strangers) (released August 3, 2010)Veterinarian Cami Anderson has hit a rough patch. Stymied by her recent divorce, she wonders if there are secret ingredients to a happy, long-lasting marriage or if the entire institution is outdated and obsolete. Couples all around her are approaching important milestones. Her parents are preparing to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. Her brother and his partner find their marriage dreams legally blocked. Her former sister-in-law—still her best friend—is newly engaged. The youthfully exuberant romance of her teenage daughter is developing complications. And three separate men—including her ex-husband—are becoming entangled in Cami's messy post-marital love life. But as she struggles to come to terms with her own doubts amid this chaotic circus of relationships, Cami finds strange comfort in an unexpected confidant: an angry, unpredictable horse in her care. With the help of her equine soul mate, she begins to make sense of marriage's great mysteries—and its disconnects. See all of Katrina's wonderful book tours, interviews and reviews here.




Billie Girl (LeapLit)  by Vickie Weaver (release date September 1, 2010) Abandoned as in infant because of her incessant crying, Billie Girl is raised by two women who are brothers. Her life, a gender-bending puzzle filled with dark humor, is a series of encounters with strangers who struggle along with what they are given: a bigamist husband, a long-lost daughter named after a car, a lesbian preacher's wife, a platonic second husband who loved her adoptive father. Twin themes of sexuality and euthanasia run throughout. In a journey from hard-dirt Georgia farm to end-of-life nursing home, Billie Girl comes to understand the mercy of killing. For more information on Vickie see her website here.
 




Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans (release date September 23, 2010) Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is a collection of eight short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories From the South. Read her interview with the wonderful Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench at SheWrites. She's 26 years old and a writer to watch.



Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel by Ntozake Shange, Ifa Bayez (release date September 14, 2010) award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister, award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at Sweet Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina's coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey through the watershed events of America's troubled, vibrant history—from Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead. See an interview with the sisters on PW.

Ok folks, we have a lot of reading to do!

Little Boxes in the Bookstore, Little Boxes Filled With Stereotypes

Disclaimer: Of course this issue has been discussed elsewhere (much more completely and perhaps more eloquently) but this is my personal connection to the issue.

I have always been plagued by categories and boxes. My family was the only black family in the holler where I grew up in Kentucky. My tongue knows the hills. My skin knows Africa. My traditions belong to both cultures. My mind and heart belong to both. My pen belongs to both. The characters in my books often live in rural worlds. They are always African American and they are often fully contemporary.This is who I am. These are the people I write about. It's just that simple.  Right? No. Someone has always tried to fit my work squarely into one box or the other.

My first book Blackberries,Blackberries was published by Toby Press in London, England. When it was available in American bookstores, I ran into every bookstore d hoping to see it there in the new releases or at least in general fiction. I imagined myself there in the W's: Wharton, Wideman, Wilder, Wilkinson. (Not in talent of course just alphabetically.)

In Kentucky my  book was ONLY in the local section. In the southern states it was ONLY in southern fiction. And in everywhere in between it was ONLY in the African American section,. It was almost always wedged in between what I call the Who's-Zooming-Who books. I most often felt like a doting mother trying to rescue the innocent looking model on the front of Blackberries, Blackberries (Debbie Rigaud) from the oiled up (we-are-about-to-get-it-on) models on the covers of the other books. And don't get me wrong those naked model books make a hell of a lot of money and they have their place. There is certainly room for all kinds of writers. But I've found that more than any other category, Black books are ghettoized, usually a wall (a couple of shelves at best). It never matters if it's popular fiction, mystery, erotica, literary, etc. And yes, I'll admit it's getting better but not as quickly as it should. (And I won't even begin to go into the book cover issue. That's another blog! Just GOOGLE and you'll find lots of discussions of this particularly around the Bloomsbury controversy. Also check this blog for an interesting take on UK vs US book covers. )

Some years back, I had the great fortune to be a part of a collective of book warriors when they were starting out. We called ourselves The Kentucky Book Mafia (KaBooM). Aside from sharing and critiquing each other's work, we made it our duty to be subversive in our bookstore approach. We would enter a bookstore, usually alone ,and if a book we knew and admired  had been placed in only one section, we would take a stack of the author's books and place them in: Southern, Local, Women's, African-American, New Releases...wherever we thought readers would best find and purchase the book. Most likely all we did was drive the book store associates crazy. At the end of the night I'm sure all of those books released from their categories were placed back into their respective places.

Of course if we, as writers, are doing the best job we can then our categories will meld away and our books will reach out to others. Crossing boundaries is the magic of good literature. We read to be taken places we've never been. We all want to read something we've never read before.

But if anyone is game, I'm still all for taking over the bookstores across the country and mixing it up a bit. We don't care what the  Book-Powers-That-Be say. Do we? Join me?

My inspiration: (though it has nothing to do with the blog) LITTLE BOXES

New Books By Great Writers

I had resolved to only blog on Sundays. But after completing a round of edits on The Birds of Opulence, a composite novel that I have been working on for years, I have been craving words. Not my own, they are still coming, bursting toward the new novel and new stories, but words by writers I can't resist. Books that would make me run to the bookstore the moment the ink was dry just to read the first page.



Neela Vaswani and I (who I mention below) had this experience once. We were teaching together at Spalding's brief residency in Creative Writing Program in Louisville. Before the workshop that we were co-teaching began, we ran down the street to a local Barnes and Noble. Out of breath we asked for Divisideroby Michael Ondaatje. The clerk looked at us like we were crazy (no Harry Potter line in sight) yet we walked back to the Brown Hotel giggling like school girls who had just seen their favorite pop icon holding our latest Ondaatje find.

Of course there have been Paula Dean and a Darrius Rucker (Hootie and the Blow Fish) sightings during previous residencies at Spalding but that is another blog.

Like most of you, I love, love words and love, love those who write words. I have my favorites Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones and Michael Ondaatje among them. But I also have friends who have recently published books (or recently forthcoming) who thrill me.

These are the books by three word warriors. Their works make my heart stop just a little in delight each time I read them.:


Head Off and Split: Poems by Nikky Finney-- I have read every poem in this book as Nikky worked each poem as though she was tending flowers in a garden--cleaning off the petals, giving them water, cutting them back so they'd bloom again and again. Bad flower metaphor. Corny perhaps, but these are the best poems that Nikky Finney has ever written. This is the best book that Nikky Finney has ever written. Those of you who know her work and her power know that everything she writes is stunning but this one rides a new wave and encompasses an ocean of truth. It's a distilled power. These poems have been boiled down the essence. We have never seen the likes of this from Nikky before. Get ready!



You Have Given Me a Country: Memoir by Neela Vaswani-- My friend novelist Silas House says this is the best book that Neela has ever written. I loved Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories and I carried one of the essays from this book called "Hands" as though it was a page from the bible for at least a year. Neela is someone who has no agenda, no pomp, no academic swagger, no fiber of being a malcontent. But she is someone who brings light and breath into a room. In the academic realm where often the head is foremost and heart and soul are lacking. Neela brings both and lots of both—heart and soul. Her prose has the richness of poetry.


The Name of the Nearest River: Stories (Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature) by Alex Taylor. It's hard to know how to begin with Alex. Poet Kelly Norman Ellis and I had the privilege of teaching him one summer when he was in high school as part of the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts, which nurtures the talents of many young artists. I remember that when we read one of Alex's pieces, Kelly and I were shouting almost. I saw Alex last fall. He's a man now with a grizzly beard and a deep voice. He was teaching writing. He walked up to me and said "You don't remember me. Do you?" As soon as he said it and smiled, I screamed "ALEX! I still remember the piece you wrote on jazz and New Orleans that summer." He was stunned. After all, he had been in high school when he wrote that piece. An insider at Sarabande told me that this book was one of the most amazing they had ever seen that it came to them nearly flawless but I wasn't surprised. That talent, that original voice, that beauty was in Alex then and it's here now. Refined. Pure. Raw.



What new books by great writers do you recommend?



Shout Outs:

I have Honoree Jeffers to thank for this post. She knows why.

Ms. Tananarive Due for her support for being the first person to forward my blog to others.

Writing for Money, Glory or Satisfaction?

Today, I've been thinking about that annoying question that most writers are asked at some point in their lives: Why do you write? And I ask myself this all the time. Some days it's an emphatic, though cliche: Because I have to! On other days it's: I don't know why in the hell I do. What I know more than anything else, even on the days that I feel as though I'm fledgling and not sure I can write another word, is I don't write for money or glory.

A few years ago, I was invited to teach and read at a fairly known Midwest writing conference. I was excited as a low-list, mid-list, no-list writer to be asked to present among the literati. We, as a faculty, ranged from the who-in-the-world-is-that range to national best seller from days gone by to a Pulitzer Prize winner (though she hadn't been chosen yet).

We all packed into a large auditorium to hear the keynote who was the national best seller from days gone by who everyone knew from his many novels to the films that had been adapted from those novels. There was standing room only unless you wanted to make your way up the steps to the balcony.

I was seated while the famous gentleman read a famous passage from his famous book. Members of the audience were on the edges of their seats mostly because this was a writing conference after all and many of them were there to glean a bit of magic from the famous ones coattails, hoping a little word glitter would be sprinkled on them and they too would be on a stage like the famous gentleman who read from the famous book which would be made into a famous movie.

I was hot, trying to be professional when a woman (I believe it was a woman) stepped up to the microphone and asked with a certain sparkle in her eye "When do you know that it is time to write another book?" A hush (and I'm only exaggerating slightly) came over the room. The famous gentleman rubbed his chin the way famous men do as though he was thinking the most famous thoughts in all the world, looked toward the ceiling as though God himself were there to help him, and said "When my wife wants a new fur coat or a new tennis bracelet." I gasped so loudly that everyone turned toward the balcony where I was seated for a few seconds before they gazed back into the eyes of the magic man.

It bothered me all night. I didn't stay for the reception but slunk out the side door and went back to my room. Of course I had prep for my workshop to do but his answer started swirling through me that has stayed around for years.

I don't gasp (at least not aloud) when someone sees the light of glory and steps on everyone in their way to reach that literary pinnacle of glimmer. Or maybe this glimmer is really (to use vampire terms) that the readers and converters are "glammored" not by the writing necessarily but the light that blinds them from the writer's inflated ego.

And I don't gasp when a writer with only dollar signs in his eyes bangs out a book every six months to keep the gravy train humping whether the books are good or not. I most often just shake my head and take a deep breath before I go on to the next task. But it does make me linger over my keyboard a little longer before I begin clicking the keys toward the next scene, chapter, story.

I guess one good point that somebody out there could make is "Well these books are published." Yes, they are but if you have sat on the front row of any local pageant or church service then you know that there are many people in our own lives and neighborhoods who could out sing any Billboard diva on the charts. Same thing with writers. Not everyone who writes really well becomes a bestseller or reaches icon status.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't desire a little glitter and enough money to keep the creditors from garnishing my check (Which of course is really happening. No joke!) But where is the dignity? Don't get me wrong, I have a table full of absolutely wonderful books that have been released recently by writers who have written with both their heads and their hearts. But it seems to me that more and more clunkers are being published and slipping into the cracks everywhere. It's getting so now that you have to sift through the bad ones to find that gem.

I'm all for new ways to deliver words to readers. But have we stooped so low (in today's print-on-demand, anything-goes, she'll-look -good-beside-Matt-Lauer, let's-rub-a-few-pennies-together-and-say-we-are-a-publishing-house-ink-stained world of books) that quality doesn't matter? Has writing been reduced to a popularity contest? Or does quality still matter? And does it matter to the reader or the writer or the agent or the publisher or the reviewer? I'm not sure anymore. What do you think?