by Brandi Herrera Pfrehm
April 9, 2008
Laura Kasischke is in love with the idea of a prophetic beauty, with pageant queens and women destined to be categorized by their hair, the shoes on their diminutive feet and the lipstick they wear. She’s fascinated by women who sport their feminine wiles like a sash across their chest. Brevity, congeniality, estrogen and emotional damages are all physical and psychological traits she gives voice to. They arrive in pretty, nervy bundles, charging many of the poems found in her seventh book of verse, “Lilies Without” (Ausable Press, 2007, $14.00).
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by James L. Dickerson
April 2, 2008
Twenty-five years ago, I walked into Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s office at The Commercial Appeal, where we both worked as editorial writers, and found a drop-dead gorgeous, ebony-haired, blue-eyed woman in a red dress—and all I could think to say was: “Wow! You look great today!”
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by Lindsey Maddox
March 26, 2008
Daniel Wallace’s “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician” (Doubleday, 2007, $21.95) is a luminously descriptive, wild journey of a novel. It begins in the South in the 1950s, a time when protagonist Henry Walker is the resident “negro magician” at Jeremiah Musgrove’s Chinese Circus. Once a masterful magician, now all of his tricks fail, and he flubs each with the sad comedy of a minstrel show.
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by Greg Williamson
March 19, 2008
In her first novel, “Mudbound” (Algonquin Books, 2008, $22.95), author Hillary Jordan unwinds a story set on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s. World War II is ending, and Jim Crow laws are firmly in place.
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by Ward Schaefer and Kelly Bryan Smith
Photo by Roy Adkins
March 5, 2008
Ken Wells, journalist and author of “Crawfish Mountain,” grew up in Bayou Black, La., where he first became concerned about coastal wetlands. His novel alludes to many serious issues, but in a comedic fashion so that folks will actually read and enjoy it. Wells has worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald, and is currently a senior editor at Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine.
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by James L. Dickerson
February 3, 2008
During the 1950s and 1960s, one of the things that made the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan look like raving lunatics was their strident insistence that the Civil Rights Movement was somehow affiliated with the Russian Communist Party.
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by Ronni Mott
January 30, 2008
Charles Marsh is a Mississippi boy from Laurel. He’s also a Harvard-educated theologian, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “Wayward Christian Solders: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity” (Oxford University Press, 2007, $25).
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by James L. Dickerson
January 16, 2008
Is Mississippi on a roll? Or is it being rolled?
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by Bailee Grissom
January 9, 2008
What makes you feel powerful? Your job? Your car? How about your clothes? In “Trappings: Stories of Women, Power & Clothing” (Rutgers University Press, 2007, $29.95), Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki conducted interviews with women across the country over the course of six years, asking them what clothes made them feel powerful, culminating in a collection of real-life tales by women from all walks of life. Ludwig and Piechocki chose 61 of the 500 women they spoke with, and created a multi-platform media project, consisting of their Web site, exhibitions and now a book.
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by James L. Dickerson
January 2, 2008
Unlike fine wine, Robert Novak has not improved with age.
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