What's out??

Here's another roundup of recent Southern books being published. We've got an eclectic mix, as usual!

Wiley Cash's first novel A Land More Kind Than Home is set in the mountains of North Carolina. Here's what the Library Journal has to say:
"The River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following is a secretive place, with newspapers taped over the windows so you can’t see in, and the minister, Carson Chambliss, is often seen on a Sunday morning carrying cages made of wood and chicken-wire into the building. Still, the neighbors pay little attention until an autistic child becomes the victim of a special healing service, and the local sheriff launches an investigation."

Mississippi author Jonathan Odell sets his second novel The Healing during plantation-era slavery slave-era. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the book "transcends any cliches of the genre with its captivating, at times almost lyrical, prose; its firm grasp of history; vivid scenes; and vital, fully realized people, particularly the slaves with their many shades of color and modes of survival — none more so than Polly Shine and Granada."

 New Orleans resident Michael Jeffrey Lee recently published Something In My Eye, a collection of short stories that won the 2010 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Says Sarabande Books, who published Lee's collection, Lee's stories are "bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit."