Lady Banks' Commonplace Book

"So good, it will make you late for dinner!"

Dearest Readers,

It is a fact few can dispute that fall is the most exciting time of year for publishing.  But while that may indeed be true, her ladyship, the editor,  must admit to herself that spring is perhaps the most exciting time of year for reading.  In the fall, her ladyship prefers to curl up quietly with her books and her coffee and escape the dreariness of inclement weather.  In the spring, however, she finds herself venturing out of doors to read among the blossoming trees filled with the suddenly lively birds. No longer confined to her living room armchair, she is apt to be found sitting on the front porch stoop with her dog (and still, her cup of coffee) or stretched out upon the back deck, or down at the water, sitting upon the newly warmed weather-grey boards of the neighborhood boat dock, reading, whilst her saltier neighbors put in their small fishing boats for a day on the water.  As she is more adventurous in where she chooses to read, so her ladyship is more adventurous in what she chooses to read, finding all sorts of novels more intriguing to her awakening tastes in the warm spring sun than they were during the short winter days.  Her traveling may still be of the armchair variety, but her ladyship has pulled her armchair out of the living room and into the back yard.

Many of the books her ladyship is currently reading may be found here, upon the SIBA Book Award long list.  This is the unfiltered, unculled list of every book that southern independent booksellers have nominated for “best southern book of the year” and as always, the list is full of both familiar delights and unexpected surprises.  Her ladyship is most amused by the comments these earnest advocates have made in support of their favorites. “So good it will make you late for dinner” exclaimed one enthusiastic bookseller.  Her ladyship advises reading at the table.

Her ladyship, the editor

Authors 'Round the South

Authors Round the South is the home of one of the most extensive listings of literary events in the South, including author readings & appearances, book club meetings, book & literary festivals, open mics, poetry slams and writing groups. No matter what part of the South you live in, you can find a bookstore and author appearance near you!

If You Lived Here Dana Sachs Pomegranate Books
Defying Dixie Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore Wordsmiths Books


The Great Awakening Jim Wallis Wordsmiths Books


What Are You Wearing to Die? / The Serpent's Daughter Patricia Sprinkle & Suzanne Arruda Wordsmiths Books
Staked Jeremy Lewis This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it


Dreamers of the Day Mary Doria Russell Wordsmiths Books


Death Walked In Carolyn Hart Litchfield Books


Searching For Virginia Dare Marjorie Hudson McIntyre's Fine Books
Labor of the Heart Karen Whitten Wordsmiths Books
The Dish Carolyn O'Neil Wordsmiths Books
Cooking Jewish Judy Bart Kancigor Wordsmiths Books
The Last Presidency? Lewis Jarrell Windows a bookshop
Shooting the Pistol Danny Brown Windows a bookshop


Best New Poets 2007 / Native Guard Natasha Trethewey Wordsmiths Books
Landscape: Fear & Love Louise Morgan Runyon & Rupert Fike Wordsmiths Books


A Conversation with Dorothea Benton Frank Dorothea Benton Frank Litchfield Books
Any Blonde Can Cook Debbie Thornton Windows a bookshop
Santi: Lives of Modern Saints Luca Dipierro, N. Frank Daniels, Rachel Bradley & Danni IoselloWordsmiths Books
The Cure for Modern Life Lisa Tucker Wordsmiths Books
The Memory of Water Karen White Litchfield Books

 
Pilgrims Upon the Earth Brad Land Pomegranate Books
The One Minute Assassin Troy Cook Windows a bookshop
Crux Tamara Madison Wordsmiths Books  
Shreveport Sounds in Black and White Kip Lornell Windows a bookshop  
Girls in Trucks Katie Crouch Wordsmiths Books
Your Child's Strengths Jenifer Fox Wordsmiths Books

Book Festivals & Special Events:

March 26-30: Virginia Festival of the Book 2008
VaBook is coming! The Virginia Festival of the Book 2008 will be March 26-30 and it looks like a great lineup. The preliminary schedule is already online and a quick look through the participant list tells me that a number of people I know from various conferences will be there. Looking forward to it!

Saturday 29th, Mar 2008: The Edible Books Festival
Cook a book and eat your words! Literacy Volunteers of Atlanta and the Southeast Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers invite you to unleash your imagination as you cook up a culinary creation with literary inspiration. The 5th annual Edible Books Festival will be held at Wordsmiths Books in our new location on the Decatur Square. To participate in the event, make edible art that has something to do with book shapes or content. All proceeds will benefit Literacy Volunteers of Atlanta in its effort to increase adult literacy. Set-up begins at 2:30 p.m., and entries will be displayed from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Judging and tasting will be at 4 p.m. The Amateur Division costs $5.00 per entry, and the Professional Division costs $25.00 per entry. To register, visit www.lvama.org or send a check with your registration form to Literacy Volunteers of Atlanta, 246 Sycamore Street, Suite 110, Decatur, GA 30030. Registration fees are tax deductible. Download the registration form at www.wordsmithsbooks.com/edible.pdf. Wordsmiths Books, 545 N. McDonough Street, Decatur. Saturday, March 29 at 2:30 p.m. Call 404-378-7166 for information.

April 2-5: The Stories of Flannery and Faulkner: A Conference and Celebration
The Stories of Flannery and Faulkner: A Conference and Celebration will be hosted by Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, on 2-5 April 2008. Presenters will analyze the short stories of Flannery O'Connor and contrast them to those of William Faulkner. Keynote speakers are Anne Goodwyn Jones and Jay Watson. The conference will also feature readings by Allan Gurganus, Mary Hood, Sean Hill, Alice Friman, Martin Lammon, and Sandra Worsham; 40+ paper presentations; a panel discussion on teaching the stories of O'Connor; screenings of film adaptations of stories by O'Connor and Faulkner; and tours of O'Connor's farm home (Andalusia), the Old Governor's Mansion, the Old State Capitol, Central State Hospital, and Milledgeville's Historic District. The conference website is http://www.gcsu.edu/FlanneryandFaulkner . Questions may be directed to Bruce Gentry at (478) 445-6928 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

April 24-26: The 21st Annual Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society Conference
The 21st Annual Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society Conference featuring at least two days of lectures and demonstrations of literary or historic interest will be held APRIL 24 - 26, 2008 in Asheville, North Carolina.  Although usually identified with Florida Cracker country in the scrub woods near Gainesville Marjorie did spend time away from the Florida heat in the mountains around Asheville.
The featured speaker for this year's conference will be award winning Ron Rash. 
 For more information on the Conference and the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society go to www.marjoriekinnanrawlings.udf.edu. 

Southern Author Blogs

A Good Blog is Hard to Find: Kristy Kiernan has a moving piece  called “The Storyteller is dead, long live the Story” and Lynn York contemplates the recent and dreadful murder of Eve Carson, and the role of the writer who “trades on the sorrow of the world” in a fascinating post called “Ambulance Chaser”

Hide County, NC: Her ladyship, the editor, has also noticed that another mythical southern county seems to have appeared—if not on the maps then perhaps, like faerie, in the indistinct spaces between other borders.  Mr Faulkner  gave us Yoknapatawpha, MS, Ms. Maron introduced us to Colleton County, NC.   Welcome now to Hide County—a place that Mr. Ed Southern, current president of the North Carolina Writers’ Network (and a fine short story author) calls “North Carolina’s 101st County."  Here is a brief excerpt:

This is how it was, you see -

Mahaliel Hide liked to ride his ATV around his property every morning. What he really liked was to go vroom, vroom, vroom, real loud, and the ATV did that for him as well as anything, and since he owned a lot of land he could get a lot of vroom, vroom, vroom out of riding around it all once.

Like I said, he owned a lot of land, and he owned all of the best land in Hide County, all of the bottom land on the Hide County side of the Hide River, and all of the bottom land along the three biggest creeks (the Muddy, the Bloody, and the Fuddy) that drained into the Hide River, and the big forest (called Surewood - just a coincidence, I swear) with the most and the biggest game, and the second-highest hill (called Headsup) with the second-best view in Hide County. But he also owned the single poorest piece of land in Hide County. It was in the smack-dab middle of Surewood Forest, and it was a circle so geometrically perfect that Euclid would have wet himself, and nary a nothing grew inside it. The soil, should you somehow find some on your tongue, tasted kind of like ashes and salt. What you’d really be tasting, though, was brimstone and sulfur. . .Read on

Literary Gossip & News

Her ladyship is somewhat nonplussed to report that Market Street Books of Chapel Hill, NC, in what she believes may be an entirely original notion, is honoring the town square’s annual Easter ‘Peepfest’ with a peep-jousting tournament, thus proving, her ladyship must suppose, that there is some use on earth for these bright yellow, pink and blue marshmallow confections since no person can bear to actually eat them.

The recent tornados have caused much devastation and havoc in Atlanta, GA, but her ladyship is pleased and relieved to note that one bookseller, Bound to be Read Books, has come through the storm intact. Elsewhere, Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA is getting ready to move into the old SunTrust building on Decatur Square, where they will be front and center for the Decatur Book Festival.   

Thanks to an impassioned and creative essay written by Ms. Emily Hinley of Newnan, GA on the subject  “What Makes Your Main Street Special”, Scott’s Bookstore will play host to the popular children’s author Ann Martin.

Recommended by Your Neighborhood Southern Booksellers

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, $25, 9780307265739 / 0307265730) "Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of stories overflows with insights about the secrets we can hide. While these stories examine the crossing and commingling of Indian and Western cultures, the feelings of pride, love, and loneliness ring true in any society. They are jewels." --Rosemary Pugliese, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC

THE OUTCAST, by Sadie Jones (HarperCollins, $24.95, 9780061374036 / 0061374032) "Sadie Jones displays rare skills in her debut novel. The story of a troubled young man in post-WWII suburban London is heartbreaking and wonderful. The book evokes both the best emotions of Catcher in the Rye and the spirit of quiet rebellion of The Razor's Edge, with characters who are well written and real. I love this book." --Brooke Raby, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington, KY

KNOCKEMSTIFF, by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday, $22.95, 9780385523820 / 0385523823) "Knockemstiff is one of the best short story collections I've read in years, and, possibly, ever. Pollock somehow manages to portray some of the most damaged characters imaginable in a style that reads at a fast clip while maintaining strong literary skill throughout. Knockemstiff does for dark small-town America what Didion's Play it As it Lays did for 1960s Hollywood." --Katherine Whitfield, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Memphis, TN

TWENTY CHICKENS FOR A SADDLE: The Story of an African Childhood, by Robyn Scott (Penguin Press, $24.95, 9781594201592 / 1594201595) "An astonishingly written story of growing up in modern-day Africa with loving, eccentric, and adventure-loving parents. Every character in this book could fill a novel." --Lillian Kinsey, Bohannons' Books With A Past, Georgetown, KY

THE BAUM PLAN FOR FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE: And Other Stories, by John Kessel (Small Beer Press, $16 paper, 9781931520508 / 193152050X) "John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek." --Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC

Bookseller Blogs

100 Books in 2008: Second book I read this year was Stephen King’s new Duma Key. I guess I’m going to keep reading King as long as he keeps publishing (though I’ve never been able to get into his Dark Tower series, and I had very little interest in the recent “unearthed Bachman” Blaze), but this one was no classic. Yes, it was entertaining, he almost always is, and yes, he didn’t make fun of Southern accents for twenty pages the way he did in last year’s Lisey’s Story, but somehow I connected better with both of his last two books (the other one being Cell) than this one. Cell was good stupid fun, a kickass zombie movie, albeit one with a weird mystical conceit; Lisey’s Story, despite my irritation with King’s stylistic quirks (which he’s been nursing for decades), was an amazing, mature novel that dealt skillfully and insightfully with relationships both familial and marital. Duma Key tries for both and fails. . .read more

Fiction Addiction: Something Rotten by Alan Gratz is a young adult mystery novel that has been nominated for the 2008 SIBA Children’s Book Award. I was given a copy at the 2007 SIBA trade show, but it got lost in my stacks and stacks of reading material and I just got arround to reading it last night.

Gratz’s book takes place in Denmark, TN, where our hero, 17-year-old Horatio Wiles, is visiting his friend Hamilton Prince for the summer. The visit was set up months ago, before Hamilton’s father died of cancer and his mother remarried his father’s brother, Claude. Their first day in Denmark, Horatio & Hamilton visit the family’s paper mill and discover a videotape of Hamilton’s dad claiming that he was murdered. The two friends immediately begin to investigate, but will they be able to close in on the killer before the killer closes in on them?

Something Rotten is a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a likeable, wisecracking hero in Horatio Wilkes. . .read more

Consuming Books: From Forrest Church, comes a history of politics and religion.  Subtitled The Founding Fathers and The First Great Battle Over Church and State, So Help Me God (Harcourt Books) traces the most divisive issue of our founding fathers.  Beginning with the election of George Washington, Church traces the birth of the American body politic—a tumultuous yet nearly forgotten conflict, on one side of the battle, the proponents of order—Federalists, Congregationalists, New Englanders—believed that the only legitimate ruler of men is God. On the other side, the defenders of liberty—republicans, Baptists, Virginians—cheered the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and believed that only the separation of church and state would preserve man’s freedom. Would we be a nation under God, or with liberty for all?. . .read more

Little Shop of Stories: Want to know how much Golden Books rock?

You remember Golden Books, don't you? They made those classics from childhood: The Saggy Baggy Elephant, The Pokey Little Puppy, and so many more, including my favorite, I Can Fly, by the classic designer/animator Mary Blair. Recently I discovered that if you buy one of their collections of Golden Books, included in the pack is a blank Little Golden Book! When I discovered this, I immediately schemed to buy way too many of the packs just to get my hands on a few of these things. . .read more

A Reading Life: Once upon a time, a long, long (looooong) time ago, when I was still young even if the world was not, I was spending an afternoon exploring the dusty shelves of an old used bookstore when I came across a postcard of a laughing black woman in a floppy straw hat and dusty dress. The caption under her photo said “I love myself when I am laughing . . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” The woman’s smile, and the sentiment, appealed to me greatly. I became suddenly enamored of Zora Neale Hurston. . .read more

Lady Banks’ Commonplace Book

Aunt Lily’s daughter died so early after they returned to New Orleans that I do not even remember what she looked like. It was said officially that she died of consumption, supposedly caused by her insistence on sleeping on the lawn, but when anybody in my mother’s family died there was always the rumor of syphilis. In any case, after her daughter’s death, Aunt Lily never again appeared in a “color”—all her clothes, for the rest of her life, were white, black, gray and purple and, I believed in the early days, another testament to her world of sensibility and the heart.

The son was called Honey and to this day I do not know any other name for him. (He died about fifteen years ago in a loony bin in Mobile and there’s nobody left to ask his real name.) Honey looked like his mother, thin-boned, yellowish, and always sat at dinner between Lily and Uncle Willy, to “interpret” for them…Uncle Willy, his pug , good-looking, jolly face, drawn by nature to contrast with my aunt’s sour delicacy, would say to Honey such things as, “Ask your mother if I may borrow the car, deprive her of Peters for a few hours, to go to the station. I will be away for a few weeks, at the Boston office.” Honey would repeat the message word for word to his mother on the other side of him and, always after a long silence, Aunt Lily would shrug and say, “Tell your father he does not need to ask for his car. His money bought it. I would have been happier with something more modest.”

--Lillian Helman, Pentimento

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