One of the great thrills of my life is being able to interview Mississippi high school seniors who have applied to Duke University. The conversations are usually thoughtful and reflective, but there is always one question that I like to ask to get the student’s thoughts flowing. That question is:

“If you could bring back three people from the dead to have a conversation with, who would they be and why?”

Some of the people who have been brought back from the dead are Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louisa May Alcott, Cleopatra, Ernest Hemingway, and Gandhi; just to name a few.

After the student tells me who and why, I always ask a follow up question. “In your conversation with Dead Person A, he or she asks you for a book recommendation. What book would you recommend that person read?” This is where the conversation gets fun! From recommendations like, Cleopatra reading Kelly Oxford’s Everything’s Perfect When You are a Liar, to Martin Luther King, Jr. reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy. I love this question, but I’ve never answered it myself. So, I am going to indulge all you fine folks with my answers.

The first person I would bring back from the dead would be the Apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul. This is where I must admit that I am a theological and biblical nerd. Not a biblical nerd in “the bible is the literal truth of God written by the Holy Spirit in men who were awesome and unflawed” kind of nerd, but the kind of nerd that looks at theology and the Bible through a critical (maybe too much sometimes) and suspicious lens. I would love to bring Paul back because I have a huge problem with him. I really don’t like him, and I think some of his writings (or writings attributed to him) are sexist, anti-body, anti-agency, crap. But on the reverse side, some of his letters are beautiful, poetic, and full of grace. There is a paradox in his writing, and in his life. As far as what book I would want him to read? Well, I’m gonna be cliché and a cheater here, but I’d love to sit down and get him to read the book of Romans, particularly Romans 1 and 2. Why? Well, in Romans 1, Paul condemns everyone to hell. Like literally, everyone. It has been a scripture that people have used to oppress and deny people their basic human rights (I’m thinking LGBTQ people here…) and yet he starts Romans 2 with this:

“Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

It is the paradox. He judges a long list of people, condemns them to hell, and then says, “DON’T JUDGE!”  I just think it would be interesting to talk about.

My second person I’d bring back from the dead is Jane Austen. Unlike Paul formerly known as Saul, I freaking love Jane Austen. I never read her until I was in a class at Duke where my favorite teacher ever, Dr. Amy Laura Hall, made us read her work. I love Jane Austen because I think she was a badass feminist before feminism was a thing. Her biting comedic social commentary always gets me going. I would love to talk with her about her books, but if she asked me for a book recommendation, I would have to recommend Beloved by Toni Morrison. Beloved is a book that is hard to read because it delves deeply into the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and slavery. It slaps you in the face and makes you say, “damn.” Jane Austen wrote books critiquing the gentry of her time; Toni Morrison wrote Beloved which depicted the horrors of slavery and the treatment and commodification of black bodies. The conversation Jane Austen and I would have would be interesting, deep, and hopefully life-changing.

The last person I would bring back from the dead would be Whitney Houston. Why? Well, I’m a big fan, and even though she has been dead less than 5 years, I will always love her. I would love to talk to her about her life, how she felt when she sang, why she stayed with Bobby Brown, and things like that. As far as a book recommendation: this is the hardest for me to answer. But as I think about it, I would recommend Lamb by Christopher Moore. This is so random, I know. If you don’t know Lamb, let’s just say, it is a satirical look at the childhood of Jesus through the eyes of his best friend, Biff. It is hilarious, yet deeply moving. Whitney had a glamorous life, but it was a life full of addiction and pain. I would recommend Lamb because it is irreverent, and it makes you think while you laugh your ass off at the hilarity of it all. Whitney deserves to laugh her ass off.

So, with that; I am done. But I do have a question for you!

Who would YOU bring back from the dead, and what books would you recommend to them?

Ciao.

Written by Justin 

Something inhabits the summers of childhood that makes our skin itch. It’s not the heat as much as the heavy air of waiting–for school to start, for bicycles left in lawns to be once again stored properly, for long days to become long nights. Summers such as these have launched many coming-of-age novels, as the mistakes of summer haunt the school room halls and dining room tables of autumn and winter. (To Kill a Mockingbird, My Name is Asher Lev, The Virigin Suicides, The Round House, etc.)

Which leads me to my first question:

What were you doing in the summer of 1989? *

If you listened to This American Life’s new podcast, Serial, then you know how important (and damning) questions like this can be.  (If you haven’t listened to Serial yet, that’s okay, you can download it and listen to it for free in between chapters of M. O. Walsh’s debut novel, My Sunshine Away)

Set in Baton Rouge, My Sunshine Away follows the 14 year-old narrator’s love-turned-obsession with Lindy Simpson, the girl next door. The seeming innocence of the year is shattered when Lindy is raped on her way home from track practice. The narrator knows something, but as the novel unravels, along with the mystery and the innocence of childhood/first love, everyone is guilty of something.

Which leads me to my second question:

How much of memory is created in hindsight?

Walsh tugs at the rug under our feet as we read. Unreliable narrators aren’t anything new. We all read Catcher in the Rye. We know what’s coming. But Walsh has nailed his characters: their blindness to the obvious, their self-delusion, their dangerous faults.

My Sunshine Away is a novel as much about Louisiana as a boy’s childhood. It is also a book about growing up in the late 1980s, of the shift from the white-picket fence childhood to the suburban nightmare. (Remember Jeffrey Dahmer?)

If you want to know what Southern writers are writing about, read My Sunshine Away. Walsh has taken an upstanding literary tradition and done good by it.

M.O. Walsh will be at Lemuria signing and reading from My Sunshine Away Thursday, February 19th at 5 PM.

*If you weren’t around in 1989 to remember it, just listen to Taylor Swift’s new album and you’ll know nothing about 1989, but you’ll have a lot of catchy songs stuck in your head.

Written by Adie

A few weeks ago, I introduced the very first Lemuria Book of the Year Award to you.  Over the past few weeks our staff has put together a list of what we think were the best books released during 2014.  If you’re looking to fill your backlog with the best of the best fiction, non-fiction and young literature, here is the place to start.

Fiction:

25 books were submitted for contention in the fiction category!  The standouts are: The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, All The Light We Cannot Sea by Anthony Doerr, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Murakami Haruki, and The Orenda by Joseph Boyden. Here is the complete list:

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

The Martian by Andy Weir

In The Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

The Story of Land and Sea Katy Simpson Smith

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki

Lila by Marilyn Robinson

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

One Kick by Cheksea Cain

The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez

Paper Lanterns by Stuart Dybek

Thirty Girls by Susan Minot

Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle

Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

The Future for Curious People by Greg Sherl

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter

End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

The Painter by Peter Heller

Consumed by David Crorenberg

The Weirdness by Jeremy Bushnell

Non-Fiction:

22 books were submitted for contention in the non-fiction category.  The standouts include Empire of Sin by Gary Krist, The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast, and What If? by Randall Munroe.

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier

What We See When We Read by Pete Mendelsund

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

Notes To Boys by Pamela Ribbon

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

Ed King’s Mississippi by Ed King

The Queer South by Douglas Ray

Strange Glory by Charles Marsh

The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport

The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distance by The Oatmeal

In The Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Empire of Sin by Gary Krist

What If? by Randall Munroe

The Emphathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills

So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan

The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

Jackson: Photographs by Ken Murphy

Congratulations to all the nominees!  Check back tomorrow when we announce the Oz Long-list!

Written by Andre

I love bundling up in tights and scarves and sweaters, drinking hot tea, and reading by our little fireplace in the cold months. Winter seems to be my most bookish season, the time of the year when nature tucks me inside to read the most. But these last few days of sunshine have given me an early case of spring fever, and all I want to do is be outside in the glow. Today as I ate lunch in my backyard, I noticed tiny baby mushrooms sprouting up all over the place, and I was struck by their unassuming beauty. I studied our shriveled brown Muscadine vines and remembered how full and green they had been last August. I could barely believe it was the same plant that had sagged heavy with fruit back in its glory days…and that somehow it’s going to bear fruit again in a few months.

Looking around at all the life in my yard—and all the space for more plants to grow—made me really want to adopt gardening as a hobby.  We just revamped our whole gardening section at Lemuria, jogging my memory about how many amazing books we have. If you are a novice or an old pro, or if you just know someone else who loves to grow things, you should come in and check out the shelves of green.

If you’re just starting out (can I say green?)…

Check out the how-to books on growing practically anything, as well as our shelves for landscape design and outdoor space planning. If you haven’t had the best luck with plants and want to start somewhere easy, read up on succulents and cacti! (Aloe plants are incredibly forgiving…I once forgot mine for a year and it still soothed my sunburned shoulders.)

If you have dirt under your fingernails already…

Look at the A-Z plant section, gardening journals, books with pruning tips, and your favorite books on Southern gardening (with all the best from Felder Rushing and Norman Winter, of course).

If you’re short on space but need a little more oxygen in your life…

Take heart! We have tons of tomes on container/small space/square foot gardening.

If you want to make your yard more kid-friendly…

Peruse our books on gardening projects for the whole family…and the TREE HOUSE section. Even if you don’t have kids.

If you’re buying a gift for your green-thumbed friend…

We have a whole shelf devoted to the most beautiful gardens of the world and another shelf full of writing about gardening—these are great gifts.

If you enjoy time in the kitchen as well as time outdoors…

Read our extensive selection on herbs, organic vegetable gardening, and urban farming.

If you want to show Mother Nature some love…

Read about composting! We have some pretty cool books to steer you in the right direction.

Eager beavers who want to dive in right now:  it’s a great time to start some cabbage, lettuce, and beets, and you can go ahead and get your zinnias and poppies germinating. I’ll probably wait until it warms up a little more. Until then, I’ll cozy up with some gardening books and savor last year’s Muscadine jelly from my backyard.

Written by Marianna 

Special to the Clarion-Ledger

Barry Gifford explains in the beginning of his new novel that in ancient cultures, it was believed that there were five directions: North, South, East, West and Up-Down, which represented the navel or center. It’s an inward direction that his protagonist, Pace Ripley, intended to go in order to explain his life, which at this point had extended six decades.

It’s a good thing Gifford provides this road map because without it, one might be lost as to what to make of the rapid twists and turns of Pace’s life — or, rather, this series of bizarre incidents that form an amoral (from the standpoint of organized religion) morality tale.

The lessons can be as obvious as the necessity to face one’s own fears and let go of old demons to the inexplicable which also serves up the point that life often just is inexplicable. Or, as Pace is told when awakened from a dream by a voice in the darkness: “God is a disappointment to everyone.”

Pace is the son of Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune whose tales titillated readers for decades. He was a minor character, noted for the predicaments life seemed to offer him. He wandered out of the S&L tales as a young man by going to Katmandu and then marrying a New Yorker.

Gifford’s Sailor and Lula became popular in the 1990s. Readers might remember the film adaptation of the first S&L book Wild at Heart (1990) starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

In that one, Sailor gets out of prison for time spent protecting Lula that resulted in a manslaughter conviction, while Lula’s mother tries to keep them apart (a thread throughout the books). They meet any number of odd characters and situations that involve quick deaths when the plot gets sticky.

By any other author, such deus ex machina might seem contrived but Gifford pulls it off, mainly because his characters are often so unbelievably believable that when the unbelievable happens, it just becomes as believable as the rest.

While Gifford’s plots are rather languid and often marked by the aforementioned quick deaths, the reader doesn’t suffer, as the observations and interplay between characters are quite juicy (sometimes R-rated).

That continues in Up-Down, which is subtitled “The almost lost, last Sailor and Lula story, in which their son, Pace Roscoe Ripley, finds his way.”

Sailor and Lula fans will love this book and hope more “lost” tales will be found!

Biographies of Gifford state that his father was in in organized crime, and he spent his childhood largely in Chicago and New Orleans living in hotels. If so, that explains much of the richness of his writing, offbeat characters and random violence.

For new fans, the entire series is compiled in Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels (Seven Stories Press, 2010, 618 pages, $19.95).

Gifford obviously knows a great deal about Mississippi, using place names and common characters throughout his S&L books. The stories may be the closest Mississippi has to the equally wacky Serge Storms sagas by Tim Dorsey, who peoples his characters in Florida.

The Up-Down can be seen as a coda to the S&L books, or even a koan of sorts, to underscore the fact that life is not logical or comprehensible and it can only be understood intuitively, experimentally. That, also, may be considered wisdom.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, Spring 2015.

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria January 28th at 5 PM to read and sign from his book, The Up-Down.