A favorite REK song.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Monday, November 18, 2013
Amy Greene is back!
I've pre-ordered and I am anxiously awaiting the February 25, 2014 release of this, her second novel. I first came across Amy Greene's writing as I chased my passion, short stories, in literary magazines.
Amy and her husband, Adam, live in Eastern Tennessee with their two children.
Amy and her husband, Adam, live in Eastern Tennessee with their two children.
Buy her book. You won't be disappointed.
"From the critically acclaimed author of Bloodroot, a gripping, wondrously evocative novel drawn from real-life historical events: the story of three days in the summer of 1936, as a government-built dam is about to flood an Appalachian town-and a little girl goes missing.
- Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on February 25, 2014.
- Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on February 25, 2014.
- Other Formats: Audio CD
Like a classical myth or a painting by Thomas Hart Benton, Greene’s second novel (after Bloodroot), set in the summer of 1936, transforms a period of cataclysmic history into a gorgeous, tragic tale filled with heroes and heroines. After the Tennessee Valley Authority builds a dam to electrify rural Appalachia, the river that folks have always called Long Man rises a little more with every turn of the page, and most of the families in the town of Yuneetah, Tenn., are long gone, scattered to other cities to take up factory jobs. In days, the hardscrabble farm fields they abandoned will be overcome by water, and Annie Clyde Dodson’s family farm, too, will end up at the bottom of the lake. Only Annie Clydewon’t leave; she’s determined to hold out so that her three-year-old daughter Gracie can inherit her ancestral land. But Gracie disappears with her dog Rusty during a terrible storm, the floodwaters rising by the hour. Only a few—the sheriff, Annie Clyde’s aunt Silver, and the mysterious drifter Amos, among them—are left to help Annie Clyde and Gracie’s dad, James, search through the tangle of sodden woods and fields already knee high in muck. Greene’s enormous talent animates the voices and landscape of East Tennessee so vividly, and creates such exquisite tension, that the reader is left as exhausted and devastated as the characters in this unforgettable story. (Feb.)
Reviewed on: 11/11/2013
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Old, Old Print Ads
This Lard one's a spoof:
He said he once briefly dated a girl from Mississippi whose father thought she wasn't eating properly in the big city. So he came up here and loaded a nice bucket of bacon fat into her freezer. I'm not sure it made her any happier, but it did help him retain his position as Regional Secretary of the Lard Information Council.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
A Compelling Tribute.
by Barry Basden
RAY'S PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SOLDIERS
Shiloh
Ray's great granddaddy, a Tennessee Volunteer, lies wounded between the lines all night, thirsty, crying, moaning in the darkness. At daybreak, he's carried under a flag of truce to a field hospital where his right arm is added to the other arms, hands, feet, and legs piled in a wagon near blood-spattered surgeons. Feverish in a Nashville ward, he composes a letter to his anxious parents with the help of one of the Sisters and a laudanum haze.
Chateau-Thierry
Ray's uncle is eating salt pork in his rifle pit when he smells something funny. He puts on his mask and climbs out to find a gas shell not fifty feet away. He is halfway up an apple tree to hang it as a warning to the rest of the company when something knocks the shell out of his right hand. He stares at blood spurting from where his trigger finger should be. It is just gone, and he will be called Trig for the rest of his life.
Bushido
Ray's older brother won't talk about the string of ears he brought back from the Pacific. He doesn't eat much and keeps mostly to himself back in the woods, sitting on a cane bottom chair in front of his little trailer, smoking hand-rolled Prince Albert's, guarded by mean dogs and a Japanese sword.
Yalu
Ray cracks the ice, drinks a cupful of halazone-laced water, and washes up for the first time in two months. He puts on socks kept dry in his helmet, then pries open a can and eats cold beans. No fires allowed. He curls up, shivering on the frozen ground, and stares into darkness, watching for lights on the opposite shore, wishing he could smoke.
NVA
Ray's boy sets up the Claymores. Then, with the rest of the patrol, he lies and waits. The moonless night is alive. Wings whir near his face and something slithers off to his left. In the distance a big cat roars, followed by a monkey's scream. A rank smell rises from the damp earth and wetness soaks through his fatigues. His raw crotch and rotted feet burn, long past itching. He could use a doob. Toward dawn the patrol humps back up the hill, grateful nobody came along the trail this time.
Tikrit
Raylene sees a flash. When she comes to, she's on her back, strapped to a litter in a medivac chopper. Rotors beat the air. Doc puts a canteen to her parched lips, squeezes her arm, and says something she can't hear. She can't feel her legs either, can't move them. The price of a ticket home. Maybe one day she will play softball on fancy new ones, bounding around the base paths like other robo-vets.
Fort Sam
The young man with a tape recorder visits Ray again in the hospice wing. In his hand is a genealogy note he found online today: Ray's great grandfather, wounded in the frontal assault on Grant's army, moved to Texas with his young bride after the war. The man turns on the machine and Ray labors to tell more about his warrior family. A half hour later he stops talking and nods toward a letter that sits framed on the bedside table. The lined paper is yellow, its pencil scrawl faded. "That was written right after Shiloh," he says. "You can take it with you." Ray turns toward the window and stares out at bare trees lining the far side of the driveway. They stand in precise formation, straight and tall against the evening sky.
Previously appeared in LitnImage magazine
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