The identity of the Sharpshooter becomes a central theme in a story that introduces such characters as the owner of the local funeral parlor, an avid comic-book reader, a man who shoots refrigerators, and a boy who never grew up. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

The identity of the Sharpshooter becomes a central theme in a story that introduces such prospective characters as the owner of the local funeral parlor, an avid comic-book reader, a man who shoots refrigerators, and a boy who never grew up

Leroy Dearman is twelve, and he lives on a llama farm in Mississippi. Life is perfect. It's true that his grandfather just died in the attic and that wild dogs kill a baby llama now and then, and it's true that one little sister curses him and the other one wets her pants. But up to the day Uncle Harris moves in, life looks like it's right out of a Walt Disney movie. No wonder the llamas greet each morning with a song. Uncle Harris arrives in a sports car, full of funny stories and new ideas. He manages to persuade Leroy's straitlaced parents to join him for cocktails in the evening. He sets up a pretty grand bachelor pad in the Dearman attic, with a telephone, a TV set, and a stack of Playboy magazines. He is, you might say, Romance itself. Once Uncle Harris moves in, life on the llama farm takes on an entirely different flavor. Leroy discovers those magazines. Electricity fills the Dearman house. Equilibrium tilts, conversation trails off, the atmospheric pressure twists--and lightning strikes. Leroy starts seeing things he's never seen before, like the very gifted baton-twirling teacher, and his world changes forever. Not since PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT has a novel looked so directly, hilariously, and bittersweetly at the heartbreak of puberty.

Introduction by Richard Howorth and foreword by the author. The incomparable Lewis Nordan's first two collections of short fiction--WELCOME TO THE ARROW-CATCHER FAIR and THE ALL-GIRL FOOTBALL TEAM--originally published in 1983 and 1986, have long been out of print in all editions. Collectors' items, these two books are now almost impossible for Nordan fans to find anywhere.To rectify that, Algonquin is delighted to announce a selection of fifteen of the best stories from the two books, newly arranged and introduced by fellow Mississippian, bookseller Richard Howorth, and with a foreword by the author. Critics have called Lewis Nordan's fiction "extraordinary" and "marvelous" and "stunning" and "scorching" and "story-telling genius." The selected stories show that genius in the making. "Characters that people the South hobble and dance across the pages of his short stories."--United Press International; "Delightfully eccentric situations and colorful language add up to a work that is even stronger than WOLF WHISTLE."--Library Journal.

"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction

“This is not merely a stellar book. It is absolute ballad put to page.” —Southern Living Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world--always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father--a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope. An ALA Notable Book Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award

Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope examines and celebrates the work of southern writer Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, whose stories reveal his own pain and humanity and in their honesty force us to recognize ourselves within them. Written by scholars and fiction writers who represent a fascinating range of experience—from a Shakespearean scholar to English professors to a former student of Nordan’s—this is a rich array of essays, poems, and visual arts in tribute to this increasingly important writer. The collection deepens the base of scholarship on Nordan, and contextualizes his work in relation to other important southern writers such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Nordan was born and raised in Mississippi before moving to Alabama to pursue his Ph.D. at Auburn University. He taught for several years at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and retired from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a professor of English. Nordan has written four novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir entitled Boy with Loaded Gun. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, won the Southern Book Award, and his subsequent novel, The Sharpshooter Blues, won the Notable Book Award from the American Library Association and the Fiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Nordan is renowned for his distinctive comic writing style, even while addressing more serious personal and cultural issues such as heartbreak, loss, violence, and racism. He transforms tragic characters and events into moments of artistic transcendence, illuminating what he calls the “history of all human beings.”

Few if any are better endowed than George Garrett to comment on the general and the particular, the long and the short, of southern letters in our time. Garrett— a prolific and internationally renowned author of fiction, poetry, drama, and biography as well as a teacher, editor, critic, and frequent jurist for literary competitions—has been immersed in the writers and literature of his native region for almost a half century. Southern Excursions contains more than fifty of the best essays, reviews, and other short pieces of his career. For the connoisseur of good writing, this book is a depository, a treasure, a veritable time capsule of southern, literary, and American culture. Without sacrificing reverence for modern masters such as Faulkner, O’Connor, and Welty, Garrett has consistently embraced worthy new artists through the years, deftly and judiciously drawing the line between critical acclaim and popular success. Payton Davis, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, William HoVman, Madison Jones, Reynolds Price, Robert Morgan, R. H. W. Dillard, Wendell Berry, Doris Betts, William Goyen, Mary Lee Settle, Randall Kenan, David Huddle, Allan Gurganus, Dorothy Allison—these are a few of the writers Garrett has championed. If some names sound less familiar, Garrett, in these pages, will inspire readers to swift investigation. The author’s charm, wit, and anecdotal style make reading Southern Excursions a delight, and yet there’s no mistaking his erudition. Wise like a prophet, with a talent scout’s enthusiasm, Garrett is not afraid to tell unwelcome truths, covering topics that include southern publishing houses and literary quarterlies, the alliance between writers and academia, the state of criticism and theory, and, most eloquently, the persistence of place, memory, and the Civil War as themes in southern letters. Southern Excursions is a book for the ages, stowing as it does the sage views of one as learned, respected— and modest—in his time as George Garrett. “My strong suggestion [to readers],” he states, “is to plunge in and fare forward. Experience the story before turning to or trusting the opinions and judgments of others, myself included.”

ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In WOLF WHISTLE, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. "An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. WOLF WHISTLE will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters."--Randall Kenan, The Nation.

“If you call yourself a serious reader but still haven’t discovered Lewis Nordan, shame on you.” —The Seattle Times Lewis Nordan’s cult following began in 1991 when Algonquin published his first novel, Music of the Swamp. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, was inspired by one of the nation’s most volatile and notorious racial incidents. Nordan was fifteen years old at the time, and living in Mississippi, just down the road from where young Emmet Till was murdered for daring to whistle at a white woman. Wolf Whistle was hailed by Randall Kenan in The Nation as “an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” It was Nordan’s most acclaimed work and winner of the Southern Book Award. He published four more books with Algonquin, including Lightning Song, The Sharpshooter Blues, Sugar Among the Freaks, and a memoir, Boy with Loaded Gun. His fictional works, all set in the American South, have the ability to break your heart and keep you laughing at the same time. The Los Angeles Times review got it exactly right: “Lordy, Lordy, can Lewis Nordan write!Horrible things happen, and horribly funny things, too, in the Delta town of Arrow Catcher, Miss.” When Lewis Nordan died in 2012, he was working on a collection of stories. This story, Would You Shut Up, Please, is the tale of a man who investigates a disturbance at his elderly neighbors’ home and discovers more about their lives than he cares to know. Algonquin is committed to keeping all of Lewis Nordan’s remarkable work available in print and as e-books, to ensure that new generations of readers will continue to discover his wild imagination, his boundless talent, and his singular voice. We hope you’ll enjoy Would You Shut Up, Please and will want to read more from this legendary storyteller.