A Cast of Characters
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the Edited by: An old friend of mine once said to me, “You oughta go ahead and get the graveyard people to cut your stone now. Have ’em write on there, ‘If this is anything like his life, he won’t be here long.’ ”I’ve thought a dozen times to get a paperweight-size version of that very epitaph. I’ll get around to it someday. Or the graveyard people will. Anyway, with this short attention span I’m blessed with, I sat at my breakfast table on an Alabama springtime morning, ideas sprouting like the green outside my window, and a thought ran by: What could we do differently with the Blue Moon Café anthology? Nothing wrong with it the way it is. But that’s not the point. I thought about that little hardback I bought in the Pensacola airport, which fit so nicely into my sport coat pocket, and which I finished before I completed the loop down and back from the Miami International Book Fair: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. I fell so in love with that small volume that I used a couple precious minutes of my allotted seven on the book fair panel to read from the brief work that extends infinitely in my mind. Aha! Let’s make the next Blue Moon Café book fit into a coat pocket, a purse. Let’s peg the meter with exceptional literary talent. Let’s give readers less on their plates, but more to digest. More provocation. More beauty, horror, and sadness. More loving insight into the comedy and tragedy of the human situation.And readers’ palates, of course, will judge the effort. Here’s betting their decision leads to a long life for this new edition of our book of stories served up from the Blue Moon Café.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the fifth installment of the Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe series is pocket-sized, there is nothing cute about the collection. Editor Brewer gathered 14 stories, essays and poems from a mostly male group of Southern writers, and the result is taut and unflinching. Howard Bahr's tense "Coppers: 1939" hovers between life and death: a dog chews on a man's entrails while he waits to die, pinned between two boxcars. In "A Man" by Pia Z. Ehrhardt, a 25-year-old girl is moved by the angry tears of her rapist. He responds to her forgiveness by fetching an ax to cut off her hand. Other stories are less bloody and bleak, but equally affecting. Frank Turner Hollon runs the New York City Marathon and tests his mental and physical endurance. Chip Livingston's essay about being contacted by a boy whose background and name are identical to the hero of a poem he wrote highlights the power of technology and its ability to connect writers to their most receptive and important audiences. The title story, by Rick Bragg, is about a 45-year-old man who endlessly hunts an elusive fish until he must admit that even catching it cannot change his fishing legacy: "I would just be the bad fisherman who got lucky, once." Each piece offers a unique version of the Southern past and a tantalizing glimpse into the future of Southern literature.