If you missed Carolyn Brown’s reading and signing last month, don’t despair! We have it recorded for you:
Carolyn J. Brown reading from A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty at Lemuria Books from University Press of Mississippi on Vimeo.
I know that Simon has already written a blog about Triburbia but I’m here to reiterate just how amazing this book is.
Triburbia transplanted me, a 27 year old, bookseller, college drop out, tattooed, jeans and t-shirt wearing Mississippian into the oh so high class (yet tastefully artsy) lifestyles of those New Yorkers living in Tribeca. This is a neighborhood where status and wealth are essential but what matters most is that you are different from other New Yorkers, more “artistic”.
“We are a prosperous community. Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better that that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on our iTunes playlists, our children in the secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.
Our neighborhood was settled by artists so long ago the story feels apocryphal. For almost as soon as the larger world became aware of Tribeca, in rushed developers and syndicators and builders and realtors and the name turned into a synonym for a kind of urban living: a little edgy, perhaps, but ultimately safer and richer even than Scarsdale. A certain type of family arrived, drawn by that safety and the faux-bohemianism of Downtown, driving out the actual bohemians. And now, we faux-bohemians find ourselves facing the onslaught of those who don’t even pretend to give a shit about books or theater.”
Now take these residents and add a healthy dose of Triburbia author, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s amazing repartee and what you’ve got is an amazing novel. Just trust me, it’s really good.
by Zita
Charlie Brenner kindly shared this humorous story with us.
Here is my true Welty story: Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, I was enjoying some oysters alone at the Mayflower when Miss Welty came in with an attractive middle-aged lady friend who I had seen before but did not know. They sat in the booth next to me and began to talk. I continued eating my dinner until I had finished and they were finished ordering theirs. I greeted Miss Welty and her friend. I might have said something like, “I enjoy your literature like I enjoy oysters, Miss Welty” and she seemed very pleased.
I pointed to their pint bottle of bourbon and asked if they would mind pouring a swallow for me before I left. Miss Welty’s face frowned up immediately, but her friend said, “How much would you like?” as she picked up the bottle. I made a mark on the small water glass that would be barely a fourth of the glass and she smiled as she poured up that amount. I knocked it back, thanked them, and promptly left the scene. It was pure drama.
Written by Charlie Brenner
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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.
Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty
Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series
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Magnificent, Masterful, Stunning: I remember reading the praise on the front of Wilderness. I also remember finishing it and thinking that it lived up to every bit of it.
Our bookstore friend and author Jeffrey Lent is responsible for some of the praise. Jeffrey, author of In the Fall, Lost Nation, A Peculiar Grace and After You’ve Gone, shares his thoughts on Lance Weller’s Wilderness.
After reading a bound manuscript copy of Wilderness, I used the word ‘magnificent’ to describe it. But in the several months that have passed since that reading, another more potent word has come to mind. Majestic. Majesty settles over this novel following patient but inevitable contemplation. Such meditations aren’t thrust upon you, it’s simply part of the novel’s stark beauty that returns to your mind over and over. Unbidden, scenes flash in memory, narrative threads tangle and clarify, only to re-tangle again, as other clarities press in. And it occurs to you that you have been changed, perhaps profoundly so, by reading this lovely, heartbreaking novel.
The usual places in print and electronic media will soon enough fill up with myriad plot descriptions and analyses debating textual choices and Lance Weller’s prose. Such is the nature of modern life. I’d interject only to offer a quote from Thoreau: A critic is a navigator who has never sailed from sight of land. And Weller takes us out onto wild and choppy seas with the calm assurance of one who has charted a careful thoughtful course and then masterfully pilots us through the voyage.
For this is a novel of a voyage; of several journeys that ultimately become the single journey of a lifetime. Of an old man, who many years after losing the war in the battle that gives the novel its name, sets out from the coast of Washington to make his way east over the winter mountains, on a quest he suspects he’ll fail at but must nevertheless attempt, to the much younger man who found his way from his home in upstate New York to a life in the south, where, even before the dreadfulness of the war descends, has been visited by the depths of horror in the destruction of a daughter, and then his wife. With the war, he fights because he must, and learns also that he can; the warrior emerges. In the most terrible of ways, the war restores his humanity, and then strips it away again, from comrades standing and fallen, from the slaves who save his life but at the cost of their own, from the wounds he sustains, and that remain, daily, during his long years of self-exile on the north Pacific coast, where in the weeks we travel with him he takes one last stab at life. It stabs back. Hard. This is not a man who is healed, he simply hasn’t yet died.
In the end Lance Weller has given us not simply another Civil War novel but a deeply and profoundly American novel. In the years after that conflict the country was filled up with tens of thousands of broken men, with rudimentary prostheses, or none at all. Look at the photographs of those veterans in old age, at the hard staring eyes, and know it’s not the camera, the photographer, their glare lies upon. Consider our own grandfathers and fathers, veterans of the First and Second World Wars, of Korea. Of the heartbreak that was Vietnam, a war that divided and broke the nation in ways not seen since the Civil War, and that I’m far from alone in thinking led in ways both dire and stunningly obscene to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And of the years that now lie ahead for those damaged service men and women, our sisters, brothers, children, neighbors.
It is them, finally, all of them, that inhabit Wilderness.
And yes, the man, while struggling with humanity, does maintain an ongoing link with love, creation, and life, through the shared devotion and dependence with dogs, from the war to the mountain trek at the end of his life. I hesitate to belabor a point but can’t help but be reminded of the strong bonds between our present military personnel and their service animals- see the Wounded Warrior Project website or related ones.
I know I intimated I’d leave comments about Lance Weller’s prose to all those who’ll otherwise chime in, but can’t let myself sign off without a comment of my own. Weller writes a graceful seemingly effortless but lyric and thoughtful line. Followed by another and yet another. In his hands the ordinary appears extraordinary, the extraordinary nothing beyond what is called for. A stylist of the highest mark, bringing subtle but tactile delight to the page, to the work entire. And thus, rarely but time to time, we’re offered a gift. With Wilderness, you face such a moment.
Reach out your hands and take it up.
-Jeffrey Lent
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Lance Weller will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 5th at 5:00 and 5:30.
Wilderness our September selection for First Editions Club and is published by Bloomsbury We’ll have signed copies available for $25.
Click here for another take on Wilderness.
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Wilderness by Lance Weller is Lemuria’s September First Editions Club choice. In April Wilderness caught my attention when my pal Jeffrey Lent sent me an e-mail proclamation about this novel.
It was many years ago when Jeff became a Lemurian. Over the years Lemuria has chosen three of his titles as First Edition Club selections. Jeffrey was our first reader to suggest two other authors for us to read which then became First Edtions choices: Edward P. Jones and David Anthony Durham.
Jeffrey has traveled to Dixie, stayed with me, and we have talked books over much beverage while sharing our joys of reading. Jeff has not been shy about offering reading suggestions. Over the years he has shared many of his favorites with Lemuria.
Jeff, our fine author and friend, has another trait he likes to help other writers he admires. He is a champion in trying to get authors a bookstore home. He understands the sense of bookstore place and what that means. He can match tastes so well. I cannot figure out how he evaded becoming a bookseller.
With all that said, you can see why I took note when I received an e-mail about Lance Weller’s Wilderness. When I got my advance reading copy with his quotation on the front–“Magnificent!”–that meant something to me.
I agree Wilderness is an astonishing first novel with a large scope, conveying fictional reality. By large, I mean this beautifully written novel is set in 1965, 1899 and during the Civil War. Expert writing keeps the reader from being jerked by time.
I’m not really interested in talking about the fine plot or the journey of this story. However, I will mention the humanity of these characters, about how well they seem to convey something hidden about life. Wilderness lets the substance of man unfold. An evolution of the human core is expressed as souls travel through physical action. The reader experiences relationships in hard, trying times. Somehow Lance lets Abel, the main character, and others convey a heart essence of living experiences while experiencing turmoil and extremes.
Lance captures the human side of brutality without giving into the neurosis of fear and revenge. Writing with softness, Lance lets the reader thrive within his characters’ actions and especially their feelings. However, this writing is not emotionally driven and somehow the reader fills in the gaps with their own emotions.
Heminway’s old standard of looking between the lines for what is not said doesn’t fit for me, but it’s real close and different. Wilderness does not offer up what the characters are feeling so the reader must dig deeper. For me, this writer’s skill and touch makes Wilderness unique and extraordinary.
Nature plays a huge role in Wilderness. It’s almost like a character. Man’s fate interweaves the human heart with the soul of nature. Nature seems to offer a God-likeness for life, within life and when life no longer exists.
Complexities within the simple, bigness and smallness all at once. Cosmically, Abel’s story weaved with a universal essence inside the reader’s mind. What’s amazing to me is that Lance achieves all these elements without becoming mythologically influenced or overly symbolized.
Wilderness is a beautiful novel, harsh and loving. A “magnificent” reading experience there is no doubt to quote Lent. I’ve been moved by many writers who have touched my spirit and help guide my path. Wilderness is now a guide so to stand with those other fine works who have touched me the most.
I also want to mention Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, both First Edition Club choices, as they have a similar essence. Wilderness is no less of an accomplishment.
Please consider reading this book. With that said, I acknowledge so many fine contributions members of our First Editions Club have been able to enjoy, collect and talk about with other readers.
Study our past selections, if you like our choices, join our club and don’t miss the future. We have our choices. These books are chosen with reason and judgement and we work hard selecting our prize titles.
Lance Weller will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 5th at 5:00 and 5:30.
Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and is available at Lemuria for $25.
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