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#2–Heavy: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir, Heavy, made many best book lists last year. I got to it this year, partly because I understood that it was about Laymon’s struggles with his weight. It’s about a lot more than that. And Laymon’s struggles as a young, African-American man growing up in Mississippi are different than mine. With sparkling →
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#3–Salvage the Bones: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
This is where making this list gets hard. Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, was, by far the best book I read this year. It is way too reductive to call this a Katrina novel, even though the 2005 hurricane broods over the whole story. It is a book about family, mothers, violence, →
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The Not-So-Calm Before the Storm: Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina Story
Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#4 Wolf Whistle
If I told you there was a laugh-out-loud book about the murder of Emmett Till, the black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, you’d call such a thing, at the least, in poor taste. Yet the late Lewis Nordan, who lived through that episode as a teenager →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #6 Sing, Unburied, Sing
Mississippi has many layers. William Faulkner knew this and crafted his intricate tales of Yoknapatawpha County with characters haunted by the past, spurred by subterranean passions, and trapped in violent, tragic relationships. Jesmyn Ward claims Faulkner as an literary influence and it shows in her rich novels of Bois Sauvage, like Yoknapatawpha, a fictional rendering →
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A Tear for Bois Sauvage: A Review of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
It’s not often that the ending of a book makes me moist-eyed. And I can’t ever recall when the acknowledgements did that. But there it was in the final sentences on page 289 of Sing, Unburied, Sing, the 2017 National Book Award-winning novel by Jesmyn Ward: “In closing, I’d like to thank everyone in my →
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Dreaming Something Real: A Review of Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan
“Probably the real self is in fact the invented self fully accepted.” That’s Lewis Nordan’s justification for declaring that his outrageous, out-sized fiction is actually memoir. He created himself through imagining a different past, different circumstances, and a different father than the disappointing realities he knew as a child growing up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. →
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What I Learned From a Day with Emmett Till
In the video, Johnny B. Thomas, mayor of Glendora, Mississippi, looks out over Black Bayou. This is where the body of Emmett Till was dumped following his brutalization and murder in 1955. In a voiceover, Thomas says, in effect, “Things haven’t changed here. A lot of the problems that were here then are here now.” →
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