Lemuria would like to invite Mississippians, friends, family and/or admirers to write personal remembrances and observations about former Mississippi Governor William Winter.  The blog series is in honor of the University Press of Mississippi’s publication of the biography William F. Winter and the New Mississippi by Charles C. Bolton. 

We would love you to share any personal anecdotes or reflections on how the Governor’s advocacy for public education and racial reconciliation has influenced you.   Photos are welcome as well.

Please keep your entries to no longer than 500 words and we reserve the right to edit if needed.

Email entries to Maggie at maggiel@lemuriabooks.com

Charles C. Bolton and Governor William Winter will be signing at Lemuria on October 9 at 5 pm and reading at 6 pm

Woodrell’s latest expands his fictional universe with dance hall blast and mystery

In 2010 success of the movie Winter’s Bone finally and fully awakned all the reading world to the Tom Sauk Mountain of literature Ozarker Daniel Woodrell has created. Now with his latest, The Maid’s Version: A Novel, the count is nine novels and a short story collection, five of them New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and almost all of them set in the Missouri Ozarks.

No better way to unpack the totality of his fabled and invented Ozarks town of West Table than to explode a dance hall in the midst of it. The Arbor Dance Hall blast of 1929 is the big bang central to a whole universe that is surely and supplely, inclusively and beautifully Woodrell’s best novel yet.

His previous novels have arisen from an instinct he coined, “Country Noir.” His main characters, mostly rural poor or impoverished denizens of Ozarks towns rarely keep steady employment unless it is illicit, and, true to much Ozarks living, frequently lack options or even the impulse control to make choices aside from the very worst. Few current writers can touch Woodrell for making abject poverty and forlorn crime compelling on the page without pandering, condescending, or ennobling what is just dirty, raw economic hardship.

In The Maid’s Version, though, Woodrell brings to life high and low alike. In many previous novels, such as the great Tomato Red, the country club set of West Table, the elite who call the shots, are a snobby klatch of meanies who destroy lives and hope but rarely rate a speaking part. Meanwhile rakish ne’er do wells, drug abusers, prostitutes, and Robin Hoods take center stage. The Maid’s Version sidelines the hardened criminals and brings the low but mostly honorable Dunahews—a house maid, her free-spirited sister (mistress often to the wealthy), sons, and grandson narrator—into close and profound contact with bankers and landowners, whose lives are morally complex, filled with good and evil and even some humane if guilt-driven charitable gestures.

Woodrell’s unforgettable glimpses of the many who gathered and died at the Dance Hall seem to pay, in style, a kind of hillbilly homage to another towering Missouri writer, the late Evan S. Connell of Kansas City. Woodrell detonates brief explosions of life, such as the birdshot vignette of Dimple Powell, beautiful like all the Powells, and off to her first and last dance under watch of her nervous and soon-to-be bereaved father. In The Maid’s Version, the breadth of Woodrell’s universe is expanded so beyond the bounds of the mystery that propels the plot, readers will find themselves aggrieved and longing in the red-shift passage of sailing blast victims and guilt-ridden, grief stricken, and damaged survivors of its fiery bang. And readers will emerge instantly desirous to return to his corner of the Ozarks, now broadened and starry as a galaxy.

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Steve Yates, a native of the Missouri Ozarks, is the author of Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel and Some Kinds of Love: Stories.

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Daniel Woodrell will sign The Maid’s Version: A Novel at Lemuria Books, Thursday, September 19 at 5 p.m. with a reading at 5:30 p.m. The Maid’s Version is Lemuria’s September First Editions Club Selection.

The Maid’s Version: A Novel Daniel Woodrell, Little, Brown and Company, Hardback $25.00, 176 pages

You may have heard that Lemuria Books is publishing a photographic coffee table book called Jackson: Crossroads of the South by Ken Murphy. Needless to say, we’re thrilled. The goal of this project is to capture what Jacksonians value, enjoy and find beautiful about our city. Ken has spent the last six months on a photo shoot in Jackson. The book will go on sale in May/June of 2014 and will contain approximately 160 photos of Jackson.

We thought this book was so special that we didn’t want to keep it all to ourselves. So John Evans, owner of Lemuria, came up with the idea to allow Jackson businesses to sell the book as well. We think of this book as more than just a book. It is a product for Jackson about Jackson. We hope everybody will be proud of it. We encourage all local retailers to have this Jackson product/book for sale on their counters. We feel small business is an overlooked yet key component to preserving Jackson’s vitality.

There are two ways you can sell Jackson: Crossroads of the South at your business.

1. You can buy one or more boxes—with 10 books in each box—with the standard dust jacket. The above dust jacket is our standard “working” dust jacket.

2. You can buy 10 or more boxes of the book and have the opportunity to have your very own customized dust jacket. Ken Murphy will photograph your business for the cover. These orders must be placed by November 1, 2013.

For more details on wholesaling Jackson, click here: Jackson Crossroads of the South Wholesale Information

All retailers are invited to an exclusive sneak peek and talk with Ken Murphy on Monday, September 30 at 6:00 at the LemuriaBooks.com Building (adjacent to Banner Hall).

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. Please join us in celebrating Jackson on August 5th at 5:00 in Banner Hall!

This month marks the release of Robert Khayat’s memoir The Education of a Lifetime. To kick it off, we’re having a little fun with this quiz. Anyone who answers every question correctly will be eligible to win an Advance Reader’s Copy of The Education of a Lifetime, as well as a copy of the brand new photo book, Ole Miss: A Photographic Essay (on sale October 5).

Submit your answers in the comments section below. We’ll notify the winner via e-mail.

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1. What grade did Robert Khayat’s receive in Chemistry (his first class at Ole Miss) in the Summer of 1956?

a)     A+

b)     B-

c)     D-

d)     F

2. After the 1998 President Clinton’s Initiative on Race Town Hall Meeting at Ole Miss, Robert Khayat invited renowned African-American History Scholar John Hope Franklin back to the Chancellor’s home for a late-night snack. What did they eat?

a)     Toast

b)     BLTs

c)     Cereal

d)     Steak

3. What did Coach Johnny Vaught call Robert Khayat?

a)     Bob

b)     Robert

c)     Bobby

d)     Eddie

4. When Chancellor Robert Khayat told Governor Kirk Fordice that Ole Miss had orchestrated a $42 million sale of land to the federal government (land which the government had given Ole Miss), the governor replied —

a)     “Where’s the check?”

b)     “What’s my commission?”

c)     “No wonder our damn government is broke.”

d)     “Any more land left?”

5. What happened the week before the 2008 Presidential Debate at Ole Miss?

a)     John McCain threatened to cancel

b)     3000 journalists descended on campus

c)     A construction crew severed Mississippi’s one high-speed, fiber optic cable.

d)     All of the above

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Submit your answers in the comments section below.

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Robert Khayat will be signing The Education of a Lifetime at Lemuria on Tuesday, September 24 at 3:00. A reading will follow at 5:30.

If you can’t make it to the event, you can call the store and reserve a copy for pick-up. You can also have the book shipped to you by calling the store (601.366.7619) or by placing your order online here.

Introduction to the Cereus Readers Book Club

We call ourselves the Cereus Readers in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” This book club meets in this same spirit of friendship and fellowship.

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A Night-Blooming Cereus Flower at Eudora Welty’s House on August 28, 2013.

The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

We meet at noon in the Dot.Com building adjacent to Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. All books are available at Lemuria, and be sure to ask for the “Cereus Reader” 10% discount when making your purchase for the book club. Please e-mail Lisa if you plan on attending or if you have any questions: lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.

This is a reading group open to all level of readers–anyone interested in learning about Jackson’s most important writer. Eudora Welty considered Lemuria her bookstore, and we want to honor her by discussing her books and authors she loved–meeting in the store where she shopped and signed her books.

After reading many works by Welty, we will read authors and works she herself enjoyed: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Chekhov, and mysteries. Finally, we thought we would read authors who have acknowledged Welty as an influence and inspiration such as Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, and Clyde Edgerton. It’s a bold undertaking, but we plan to be meeting for a while!

Cereus Readers is led by Carolyn Brown (author of A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty), Carla Wall, Freda Spell, Lee Anne Bryan, and Jan Taylor.

Fall Schedule

Thursday, September 26 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building (adjacent to Banner Hall)

We will be listening to an audio recording of Miss Welty reading “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” courtesy of The Welty House and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

(You might be familiar with an audio of Eudora Welty reading that is still for sale. I never knew the history but I recently ran across a neat article on NPR about those Caedmon recordings here.)

Thursday, October 31 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building

Hunter Cole, friend and scholar of Eudora Welty, is our guest speaker.

Saturday, November 16 at 2:00 in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building

This unique event will open with a talk on collecting Eudora Welty’s work. Lemuria will display a special collection of Eudora Welty books—from trade to fine first editions.

As with all of the Cereus Reader events, everyone is welcome.

December

No meeting. We will resume meeting on Thursday, January 23 at Noon. Reading list to be announced.

Please follow this link to see what we’ve been reading since our beginning in January 2013.

Written by Carolyn Brown and Lisa Newman