The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 2007

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 2007

Breakdown.
September 22, 2007... ONE CRISP BLUE DAY IN THE WORST YEAR OF MY LIFE, I DROVE TO THE MARKET near my home in Pittsburgh and parked and walked across the parking lot and saw a bunch of men standing around the open hood of a piece-of-crap car with the tailpipe wired...

"An arm's length relationship to violence": an interview with Lewis Nordan.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... MARCEL ARBEIT: ONE OF THE TOPICS YOU HAVE BEEN INTERESTED IN FROM the beginning of your career is truth and lies in fiction, as well as the role of fiction in ordinary life. Both fiction and facts in life seem to be of equal importance to you....

Desperate and happy in the disharmonious world: Lewis Nordan and the absurd.
September 22, 2007... IN LEWIS NORDAN'S LIGHTNING SONG, LEROY, ITS TWELVE-YEAR-OLD protagonist, returns home from a grocery, passing the house of The New People, a mysterious couple of newcomers who are recovering in the Deep South from the murder of their only son....

Writing in the Caribbean with a Mississippian accent: Lewis Nordan and the Magical Grotesque.
September 22, 2007... POST-FAULKNERIAN SOUTHERN WRITERS HAVE LONG STRIVED TO FIND THEIR own individual voices within the overpowering presence of the master whose oeuvre in a way exhausted the rich soil of Dixieland, as Cervantes did with La Mancha. Flannery...

Are we all alone? Solitude and agency in Lewis Nordan's The Sharpshooter Blues.
September 22, 2007... HYDRO RANEY, A YOUNG MAN WITH HYDROCEPHALUS, IS CENTRAL AMONG the many richly varied characters in Lewis Nordan's 1995 novel The Sharpshooter Blues. Hydro is certainly central to the novel's plot, for he performs the two most dramatic acts of...

"Not my story to write": indirection, Southern discourse, and the elusive black voice in Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle.
September 22, 2007... They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat --Bob Dylan, "The Death of Emmett Till" (1963) LEWIS NORDAN'S WOLF WHISTLE CENTERS ON THE INFAMOUS 1955 MURDER of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy accused of...

Simulation and civil rights: Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle and the swamp of the real.
September 22, 2007... IN LEWIS NORDAN'S WOLF WHISTLE, THE NATIONAL MEDIA DESCENDS ON Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, in the aftermath of a murder based on the Emmett Till case, described by David Halberstam as "the first great media event of the civil rights movement"...

Shocked into maturity: sex and death as initiation in the fiction of Lewis Nordan.
September 22, 2007... ONE OF LEWIS NORDAN'S MAIN STRENGTHS AS A WRITER IS HIS DELICATE descriptions of boys and men in existential crises, fathers and sons who are alien to one another yet long to be close. When his writing borders on sentimentality humor always...

"Longing for a male love": an interview with Lewis Nordan.(Interview)
September 22, 2007... THOMAS AERVOLD BJERRE: IT'S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE WE MET AND TALKED. In the meantime you've retired and you've moved to this smaller town. What's your "new life" like? Lewis Nordan: Well, so much of our time has been spent dealing with...

James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature.
September 22, 2007... James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature, edited by Ted Olson and Kathy H. Olson. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 260 pp. $35.00 paperback. WHEN JAMES STILL DIED IN 2001 SHORTLY BEFORE HIS NINETY-FIFTH birthday,...

Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction.
September 22, 2007... Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction, by Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 304pp. $47.50 cloth. GARY CIUBA'S BOOK DESIRE, VIOLENCE, AND DIVINITY IN MODERN Southern Fiction successfully...