Thanks to HarperCollins, we have a great letter from Greg Iles about the struggles of writing Natchez Burning.  We look forward to his new book, which publishes on Tuesday, April 29th, and don’t forget, you can order a signed copy here! Greg Iles will sign at Lemuria Tuesday, April 29th from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Dear Readers,

All my life I heard, “It’s the journey, not the goal.” I never believed it. I believed the obsessive pursuit of dreams was worth any sacrifice—even time. Most of us go through life with our eyes averted from mortality. Where death is concerned, ignorance is truly bliss. Illness forces some to face loss early, yet when I had a health scare in my thirties, it only pushed me harder to sacrifice the present to provide for the future. Then, two years ago, as I pulled onto Highway 61 near Natchez, a truck slammed into my car door at 70 m.p.h. Shattered bones make a hell of a wake-up call, but when you tear your aorta, as I did, you truly shake hands with death. After eight days in a coma, I learned that I would lose my right leg but not my life. More important, my brain was unhurt, my mind intact.

I could still write.

But what now? Should I abandon all commerciality and try a purely literary novel? Or should I stop writing altogether and start living in the present? For a few days I considered both. Then I realized that throughout my career. I’ve written novels dealing with the most traumatic events human face: murder, war, sexual abuse, kidnapping, racial strife, even the Holocaust. I’ve explored the “old verities” Faulkner talked about—love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice. Reading the flood of reader mail that came in after my accident, I realized that the best thing I could do was to accept the past, forget the future, and keeping writing about “the only thing worth writing about—the human heart in conflict with itself.” As my fellow Mississippian Morgan Freeman said as Red in Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”

Sincerely,

Greg Iles

We are so excited to have two amazing authors coming to the store on March 27 at 5:00!

Lorrie Moore, winner of the O’Henry award and an old favorite of ours, will be here to read from and sign her new collection of short stories, Bark.

Joining her will be Susan Minot (also an O’Henry award winner!) for her new novel, Thirty Girls. Both of these talented women are old friends of the bookstore and we think so highly of their work that we have chosen these two books to be our February and March First Editions Club picks.

We want to make this event a real party, so if you chose any event to attend this season, let this be the one! Keep your eyes peeled for more posts and updates about the event, because I have a feeling it’s only going to get more exciting. We’d love for you to join us in a giant hangout session with these two amazing ladies. Mark it on your calendars!

Four years ago (and before my bookselling days) I realized I had a problem: every time I stopped by Lemuria I left with a book (or several).

I was steep in book debt.             book debt = unread books > read books

And so, when I heard about the First Editions Club, it sounded like a marvelous idea. One book each month, chosen for me by book-reading experts. The chances of me stumbling upon a dud of a book were dramatically decreased when someone else chose the book for me.

And thus began several years of good reading: Lauren Groff, Jim Shepherd, Kevin Wilson, Karen Russell. The list goes on.

My one regret was that I signed up too late to have Amy Greene’s Bloodroot arrive in a brown box on my doorstep. I don’t know why I wanted to read Bloodroot; maybe it was the possibility of magic and mystery and family secrets all hanging out together. Maybe it was just the cover. The book was a debut novel with a smallish first printing, and by the time of the book signing, Lemuria wasn’t reserving any first editions for anyone who wasn’t in the First Editions Club. Needless to say, I missed it — the book, the signing, everything. And that’s why I signed up.

Ironically, now I am part of the team that ships out the First Editions Club (FEC) book each month. After the author visits the store and signs your first edition, we protect the jacket in a mylar cover, wrap the book in brown paper and then newspaper, box and ship it.

This March, Amy Greene will be back to read and sign her new book, Long Man, which just came out this week. While we’re not picking her new one for First Editions Club, those of you who are in the club should definitely pick one up. I’m not going to miss her this time. Come and join us Wednesday, March 5^th at 5 PM.

If you like
— Latin American Communists
— plants with big, leafy palms
— volcanoes
— wide and unruly rivers
— natural disasters
— cypress swamps
— things in jars on shelves

then you should read Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia.

I first met Richard Boada at a Millsaps Arts and Lecture event. I use the word “met” lightly — he was standing in front of me in line. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but through careful observation (i.e. eavesdropping), I learned that he was a poet. And not only was he a poet, but he was finishing up his first book.

The first night I took Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia home, I read it in one sitting. And then reread it. The collection is other-worldy in its globe-spanning scope. The poems have a bit of magic in them (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez in verse). They are as vibrant as insects pinned to the page: iridescent images shift with each reading like rare beetles, intricate narratives pattern like butterfly wings, lines caterpillar twist.

LOUISIANA FUGUE

The barber has been bankrupt
since the flood. The town’s bald,

men and women, no longer visit
since the lakes rose and stunned.

Combs prostrate in disinfecting jars,
once mitochondrial in his hands.

Dozens of tonics on shelves
multiply in lipid mirrors,

refracting electric lights.
The jilted shaving brush and razors

foul rust. The barber can only trim
his bougainvillea’s viscous petals.

There has never been winter,
and now red January sludge

anoints, lathers and steams.
Lathers and steams.

Richard Boada will be at Lemuria Wednesday, February 26th, signing at 5, reading at 5:30.

We’re so excited to welcome Wiley Cash back to Lemuria tomorrow, Thursday the 20th, at 11:00 a.m. His first book, A Land More Kind Than Home, was hailed by readers and booksellers alike, with its blend of dark, religious fanaticism balanced by the innocence of a young boy who would do anything to protect his older, disadvantaged brother.

His new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is just as riveting. The story is told through the eyes, once again, of a child. Easter and her sister Ruby have been in the foster care system since their mother died of a drug overdose. Now their father has come back looking for them, and Easter suspects his fatherly concern is masking darker motivations. Easter has had to grow up too fast; with all she has witnessed and because of her desire to protect her sister, she has learned that sometimes hard decisions must be made by her alone — that adults can’t always help her.

Brady is Easter and Ruby’s guardian, and when the girls go missing, he is determined to find them himself. What he doesn’t know as he sets out is just how much trouble their father, a former minor league baseball player, is in. He is being tracked by someone ruthless, someone who is driven by revenge for something that happened long ago and has been fueling his single-minded rage ever since. What the reader discovers as the novel progresses is that everyone has secrets, dark spots in their history that might drive them to behave desperately.

Set during the baseball season when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire competed to break Roger Maris’s home run record, This Dark Road to Mercy is a fantastic sophomore effort by one of our favorite Southern authors.

This is an excerpt from Wiley’s blog entry about his visit to Lemuria in 2012:

I drove across town to the famous Lemuria Books, where I met some incredibly kind and knowledgeable booksellers. I’d met the manager Kelly a few months ago at a convention in New Orleans, and she showed me the galley that I signed then; it said, “I hope I get to visit your store one day.” I resigned it and wrote, “I’m at your store right now.” I also met two fellow writers: Ellis, a short story writer who will soon be pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing, and Adie, a poet who will enter the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific this fall. They’re proud of their store, and they should be; it has an entire room dedicated to fiction, one whole corner of which is dedicated to Southern fiction! Photographs of well-known authors who have visited the store adorn the walls. I gave a reading and signed books under the watchful eyes of Eudora Welty, John Grisham, Larry Brown, and Richard Ford. See a connection here? Mississippians love their home-grown writers almost as much as they love their barbeque.

We hope his second visit to Lemuria is as memorable as the first. Come out to the bookstore tomorrow morning at 11:00 to meet him!