“‘There’s one other thing that I’ve heard about over the years, that when a substantial amount of cash is withdrawn, you have to sign . . .'”

“‘This money didn’t come from a bank,’ Balducci said. ‘Judge, I’ve been around long enough to know–and I’ve been involved in enough to know over time–that you always gotta have a slush fund.'”

“‘You can’t have gotten where I’ve gotten in my life at this point and not know that sooner or later things come up that you gotta take care of, and you need a slush fund.'”

“Lackey asked to see a copy of the order that would send the Jones case to arbitration. Balducci produced the document, which he described as ‘pretty straight.’ Then he laid an envelope containing $20,000 in cash on Lackey’s desk.” (187-188)

“Lackey had another entry for the journal prosecutors wanted him to keep.”

“‘As Tim walked out of the office,’ he wrote, ‘I felt so forlorn and sad that our profession had come to this, that a young man of Tim’s ability would be this cowardly and stoop this low at the behest of scum he is trying to help just so he can add another dollar to his pile.'” (189)

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie goes on sale October 19th.

We hope to see you at the signing/reading event with Curtis Wilkie on Thursday, October 21st, but if you cannot attend, you can reserve a signed copy online.

Click here to open an account on our website and we can save your information for future visits to LemuriaBooks.com.

You can also call the bookstore at 601/800.366.7619 and we can put your name on our reserve list.

Read other excerpts from The Fall of the House of Zeus.

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Beth Ann and Tom were with me on one of the most important days of my life – the birth of my little girl Harper. Well, not really there in the hospital… let me explain.

In the fall of 2005 my wife Wendy became pregnant with our first child – my reaction was varied – freaked out, scared, happy… you know, the normal stuff. I also started reading parenting books as fast as I could. I read “how to” books and I also read daddy and mommy memoirs. Then came the announcement that Mississippi’s favorite poet Beth Ann Fennelly was publishing a parenting book of sorts. Great With Child is a book of letters that Beth Ann wrote to a pregnant friend about being an expecting mother. Beth Ann’s book signing was on May 25th of 2006 – the very next morning we were due in the hospital for a scheduled induction – around 5:00 in the afternoon of the 26th Harper was born.

So Beth Ann was an interesting part of that very special event, but Tom was there as well – Tom’s third book Smonk was due out later in 2006 and I had just gotten my advance copy before that trip to the Hospital. So there I am reading Smonk on May 26 of 2006 waiting for Harper. Poor Wendy had to endure me reading key passages out loud from Smonk during that part of the day when contractions are far apart and not much is happening.

You get the idea, one of the most important days of your life and you have to endure your husband reading stuff like: “She gazed at her belly and wondered how a girl got knocked up. She was as skinny as a skeleton and no matter how much she ate she couldn’t put on no fat. But you got fat when you got knocked up. Maybe it was a pill you bought or something you shot. She bet a doctor could tell her.” On second thought, reading that passage on that particular day may not have been such a great idea.

At any rate – Beth Ann and Tom are two of the finest writers we have and, I think, the only married couple in Neil White’s Mississippians.

Click here to see all of “Lemuria Reads Mississippians.”

Editor Neil White will be signing at Lemuria on  Thursday, October 28th.

Reserve your copy online or call the bookstore 601/800.366.7619.

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Since Lemuria has selected all four of Tom Franklin’s published works for our First Editions Club, I asked John how this all came about.

John first met Tom Franklin in the early 90s when he was traveling from his hometown in Alabama to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he was working on an MFA in fiction at the University of  Arkansas. Tom would always stop at Lemuria and talk to John about books and reading.

Before you know it, school was finished, it was 1999, and Tom’s first book Poachers was on the shelf. Not only did the staff at Lemuria admire this collection of short stories and the title novella, “Poachers,” so did Richard Ford, Rick Bass, and Barry Hannah. Comparisons were made to James Dickey and soon the Edgar Allen Poe Award for the Best Mystery Story was awarded to the title novella, “Poachers.”

By 2003, readers were enjoying the grizzly tale of Hell at the Breech which is based on the events surrounding an 1897 murder near Franklin’s hometown. After reading the gun-slinging tale of Smonk in 2006, John remarked: “Not since Hannah’s Tennis Handsome has Southern fiction been so shocked. Nasty, bloody, violent, and just damn good–lean, mean writing with missiles flying off the pages.”

Tom Franklin now lives with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, in Oxford, Mississippi, teaching for the University of Mississippi’s creative writing program. Although Tom is an Alabama native, he has taken a key role in carrying on the tradition of great Mississippi writers. We’d like to say he is one of our own.

Tom and his wife have two children, but John remembers when there was just the first baby, memorable because Tom and Beth Anne brought a baby bed and placed it in our fine first editions room. I guess that’s one of the beautiful places you get to sleep when both of your parents are writers!

Crooked Letter Crooked Letter is published by William Morrow and Company with an initial print run of 35,000.

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie (Crown, October 19, 2010)

“If Dick Scruggs’s name was essential to the success of the superfirm that Tim Balducci and Steve Patterson envisioned, so was the name Biden . . . The Biden connection went back more than twenty years, to the time when Patterson signed on as the southern coordinator for the young Delaware senator in his first, quixotic campaign for the party’s presidential nomination. In the intervening years, Patterson stayed in touch with Biden and became acquainted with members of Biden’s family . . .” (195)

“Patterson and Balducci were both supporting Biden’s quest for the 2008 nomination, and co-sponsored with Scruggs and three others a fund-raiser when the candidate came to Mississippi in August 2007. On that visit, Biden was accompanied by his brother Jim, who used the trip to cement plans with the Mississippians to open a Washington office that would capitalize on the name Biden.”(195-196)

“While senator [Joe Biden] charmed the Mississippi guests at the party, his brother was busy talking with the hosts. It was determined that Jim’s wife Sara, an attorney, could credibly bring the family name to the firm they planned.”

“Though purportedly a ‘law group’ with a base in Washington, the firm would specialize in lobbying. No law degree was necessary for any of the firm’s associates in the District of Columbia, freeing Patterson and others to operate under the banner of an office engaged with legal work . . .”

“A month later, the idea had become a reality. On September 27, the same day Balducci handed over the first $20,000 payment to Judge Lackey, Balducci also visited Scruggs’s office to tell him of a more savory initiative. Enthusiastically, he described plans for the firm of Patterson, Balducci and Biden.”

“‘We formalized our relationship with the Bidens,’ he told Scruggs. ‘It’s not going to be some bullshit shingle hung somewhere in a window. This is the real deal.'” (196)

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie goes on sale October 19th.

We hope to see you at the signing/reading event with Curtis Wilkie on Thursday, October 21st, but if you cannot attend, you can reserve a signed copy online.

Click here to open an account on our website and we can save your information for future visits to LemuriaBooks.com.

You can also call the bookstore at 601/800.366.7619 and we can put your name on our reserve list.

Read other excerpts from The Fall of the House of Zeus.

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Attention all you readers out there who love a good story, I have one for you. I’m talking no fancy-shmancy writing techniques; nothing experimental. I mean a good yarn. A story that can transport you to a different place even if you have no frame of reference to this place.

A few years ago Kate Morton released her first American book The House at Riverton. I was immediately sucked into this tale of an English country estate house with a history and a mystery. Well this seems to be a recurring theme that Kate can’t quite get away from, and that is fine by me. Her second book The Forgotten Garden was even better than the first. You absolutely fall in love with her female protagonists in every story she writes.

Well Kate Morton is giving us a new great story this year, The Distant Hours. I am about 265 pages into my advanced reader copy and I can’t put it down. The story starts out with a long lost letter written decades ago being delivered to the addressee. And this begins a whole world of memories and secrets flooding back into the narrator’s mother’s life and into the narrator’s life for the first time. Edie, our main character, is at once curious about this letter from the past. It is a letter from the woman who took Edie’s mother in as an evacuee during part of WWII. Edie’s mother stayed with this woman, Juniper Blythe, and her two significantly older twin sisters for over a year. Did I mention that the sister’s lived in an old family castle named Milderhurst? Well they do and the house is just overflowing with secrets.

Although Ms. Morton has already written two books focused around old English country estates the stories couldn’t be more different. All three of these books are absolute gems in themselves and all deserve to be read.

In the meantime, there’s an unusual video to make you even more curious about Kate’s next book. -Ellen

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton from Pan Macmillan on Vimeo.

The Distant Hours was released in November of 2010.