“This Day In Civil Rights History”

Last week, The Rap Sheet published my reflections on Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing as part of its regular Friday blog series, and editor J. Kingston Pierce was kind enough to schedule that essay on September 25, the anniversary of the day the Little Rock Nine finally entered Central High School in 1957, the same year the book itself was published.

While I wish I could say I had such dates on instant recall in my mind, the truth is that I don’t and I just happened to come across the anniversary when I was flipping through a new book I’d like to recommend here: This Day In Civil Rights History by Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard. As the title promises, the book offers daily mini-essays on major historical events. Just for a quick sampling: April 16, 1963 was the day that Martin Luther King Jr. released his famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” and  June 21, 1964 was the day that civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner was murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Milestone dates, of course, and well known, but the book also offers less obvious choices, such as November 9, 1968, when James Brown first performed his song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” There are 366 essays in all, when you take into account leap-year, and not incidentally, February 29 was the day in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind — as the book emphasizes, “the first African American not only win an Oscar but also to attend the ceremony as a guest instead of a servant.”

While most of the events commemorated here fall during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s — what we traditionally think of as the Civil Rights Era — the book importantly stretches outside of that narrowest of definitions. On September 20, for example, you’ll learn that Maryland passed the nation’s first miscegenation laws on that date in 1664 — and that Alabama was the last state to hang on to such laws, right up into the 21st century. And the span of that entry is important, because the book stresses that civil rights news and issues persist up to to very recent history, whether the Confederate flag controversy in 1998 (October 14) or the reopening of the Emmett Till murder case in 2004 (May 10).

As for today, September 30, it’s an important anniversary as well, with an entry looking back to 1962:

On this day in civil rights history, a deal was struck between segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow the enrollment at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) of its first African American student, James Meredith….

Needless to say, This Day In Civil Rights History is a rich and fascinating book — enough to keep you reading it (dare I say it?) all year round.

Marianne Gingher On “Long Story Short”

Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers offers a concise, comprehensive, and compulsively readable collection of short-short stories. Concise on two counts: In total, the stories number less than 200 pages, and the longest of the stories is less than 1,700 words (the shortest is a mere 95). Comprehensive: The authors featured here make up a who’s who of writers with ties to the Old North State, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Will Blythe, Wendy Brenner, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Angela Davis-Gardner, Sarah Dessen, Pamela Duncan, Pam Durban, Clyde Edgerton, Philip Gerard, Gail Godwin, Randall Kenan, John Kessel, Michael Malone, Doug Marlette, Margaret Maron, Jill McCorkle, Lydia Millet, Robert Morgan, Michael Parker, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, June Spence, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace, just to sample the list of contributors. And as for compulsively readable: Despite the pile of books I should have read first, as soon as Long Story Short arrived in the mail, I couldn’t resist reading at least one of the stories. Since that one was so short, I tried another. And then a third. And, as with a box of bon-bons, before I knew it….

The anthology, edited by Marianne Gingher (who also contributes a story) and published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a timely one. While Gingher points out in her introduction that short-shorts are as old as Aesop, there seems to be a growing trend toward the popularity of very short fiction in all of its forms: flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, even twitter fiction and hint fiction. While many of the stories in this collection tend toward the traditional, to my mind, the book as a whole offers an array of different storytelling strategies and narrative structures, and they’re short enough that you’re able to re-read them easily to figure out how they work. Pam Durban’s “Island,” for example, struck me as so marvelous when I read it the first time that I turned around and read it again, aloud, to my wife. (And the stories are ripe for discussion too: Tara (a flash fiction writer herself) and I disagreed about whether Durban’s piece was as effective as it could be — where the heart of it was, where it might have been cut further, how it all played out.)

Today (Sunday, September 13), Gingher debuted the new collection on the closing day of the North Carolina Literary Festival, and tonight the book will be the focus of the Chapel Hill Public Library Foundation’s 50th anniversary, but even if you miss those events, there are plenty more opportunities to catch readings by the contributors. (See a full list at the bottom of this post.) In advance of the NCLF, Gingher and I talked about the book via email, and I’m grateful for her time (especially in the midst of all the festival’s busy-ness!) and glad to share our interview here.

Is It Shameless Self-Promotion If It’s Your Wife You’re Bragging About?

Looking for some good weekend reading? Let me suggest some recent very short fiction by Tara Laskowski — a completely unbiased recommendation, of course.

Each of these three stories has been published in the last two weeks — the latest (Barrelhouse) having been posted just this afternoon!

• “Only a Number” (in decomP, Sept. 1 (even though it says July 24, for some reason))
• “Like Everyone Else” (in Fiction Weekly, Sept. 8)
• “Ode to the Double-Crossed Lackey in Thunderball“ (in Barrelhouse, Sept. 11)

Congratulations, Tara!

Reviews in Washington Post & The Strand

Today, the Washington Post publishes my reviews of Cara Black’s Murder in the Latin Quarter and Andrea Camilleri’s August Heat. With the recent trend of staycations, these books offer a great way to travel cheaply to some exotic locale and encounter a little adventure in the process — and Camilleri’s book, though released back in March, is now aptly titled for the current heatwave, though I hope our weather affects local readers with less severity than it did the good Inspector Montalbano. 

I also received yesterday my new issue of The Strand, with some timely articles after recent weekend conversations. Both Friday and Saturday night, I ended up in conversations about Denis Johnson — mostly about his National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke but also about his earlier novel Already Dead and his most recent book Nobody Move — and my own review of Nobody Move (the audiobook in this case) appears in the latest issue of The Strand. Additionally, twice over the last week, I’ve gotten into conversations about old John Le Carré books, specifically the George Smiley novels, and so I was pleased to see that The Strand has added a profile of Smiley to their “Great Detectives” series. And of course (burying the lead here), the new issue includes the first part of the much-ballyhooed publication of an unfinished Graham Greene novel, The Empty Chair. That’s one of the next things on my to-read list for sure.

John Hart’s “The Last Child”

Today, the Washington Post runs my review of John Hart’s third — and in my opinion best — novel, The Last Child. While I generally enjoyed Hart’s first two novels, The King of Lies and Down River, those books still struck me as uneven at best, often slipping into melodrama, and their mysteries seemed marred by solutions that most readers probably figured out about eighteen steps ahead of the narrators themselves. I was amazed and even a little disappointed (I’ll admit it) when Down River won the Edgar for best novel a couple of years back. In contrast, however,  The Last Child seems to have put aside any clumsiness and keeps the surprises coming at a furious pace. I rushed through this new novel at a fast clip myself, enjoying every moment, and soon after submitting my review, I had the opportunity to hear some of the audiobook version, read by Scott Sowers, and got pulled in again!

Want a longer assessment of Hart’s novels? Look for my upcoming essay in the North Carolina Literary Review, in which I try to come to terms with why the author’s first two books found such critical and commercial success despite being matched, at the Edgars for example, against far superior mysteries.

Don’t agree with my digs at those first books? Well, even The Last Child has illustrated for me that it’s tough to find consensus among critics. My own review calls it an “early masterpiece” in Hart’s hopefully much longer career; critic Sarah Weinman of the L.A. Times and the Baltimore Sun said that she remained “amazed at how his storytelling ability draws me into his North Carolina gothic tales”; and Rod Cockshutt at the Raleigh News & Observer began his glowing review with the phrase “John Hart had me at ‘I’ve’.” Meanwhile, on the other side, Marilyn Stasio’s New York Times review concluded that “borrowing from Huck Finn doesn’t turn Hart into Mark Twain, and his methodical writing style plods along these Southern roads without kicking up anything but dust,” and my friend and fellow writer Laura Ellen Scott — whose opinions on all matters I greatly trust — admitted to me offline that she couldn’t get past the opening and simply put the book aside. 

A wide range of experiences with this book, to say the least, and a wide range of opinions all Hart’s novels.