Holiday Book Gift Guide

One of the very few disappointments in reviewing books for Country Roads is that I can’t review everything I’ve read or liked: there aren’t enough hours in the day or issues in the year. So for this month’s column, I’ve decided to present a few books that, for whatever reason, didn’t fit into a regular column but are worthwhile gift suggestions (or personal escapes from the holiday grind).

You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories, 
by James Nolan 
(Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2014)

James Nolan, where have you been all my brief book-reviewing life? Every single story in this book had at least one line that made me yelp with laughter, and the deftly executed farces hit as hard as the zingers. The humor alone is well worth the price of admission, but this collection of intimate, heartfelt stories also packs a serious wallop. Rape, loss, madness, drunkenness, old age: these crushing misfortunes are not made light of, but are held up to the glare of a ferocious comic vision that reveals their full, devastating absurdity. To paraphrase one character, “We can’t move while Euphémie is alive; where else is big enough that the neighbors won’t hear her scream?” If you’ve ever wished there was such a creature as a bawdy Flannery O’Connor, congratulations— it’s Christmas.

Flying Shoes, 
by Lisa Howorth 
(Bloomsbury USA, 2014)

We meet Mary Byrd during a stressful week: she decides not to have an affair, feels intimidated by her housekeeper, and must go to Virginia to deal with the reinvestigation of her brother’s long-ago murder. Because a coming ice storm is expected to ground flights, her best friend (a gay chicken magnate) arranges for her to ride to Richmond on a poultry truck. (Some people have all the fun.) Meanwhile, Mary Byrd’s homeless handyman/sidekick injures his foot and goes to a day-labor camp to be treated with folk medicine and hallucinogens; and her redoubtable housekeeper deals with a murder striking at the heart of her own family. The junk-drawer plot is more than saved by the witty, irritable frankness of Mary Byrd’s narrative voice; Lisa Howorth has painted the inner life of a character so convincingly and thoroughly that her readers will miss Mary Byrd for days after closing the book.

Huey “Piano” Smith & the Rocking Pneumonia Blues, 
by John Wirt (LSU Press, 2014)

I ruined my copy of this book dog-earing pages with good quotes and anecdotes, like the traveling musician whose mother mailed him red beans in a sealed jar, the use of “cockroach tea” as a cure for asthma, or this rare spot of fair play from the Jim Crow era: “The officer who escorted Huey to a communal cell asked him if he had a knife. ‘Oh, no sir,’ Huey replied. ‘Well, here, you better take this then…’” The book’s a who’s-who of the New Orleans music scene of the Fifties and Sixties, thick with quotes from dozens of musicians and giving a sympathetic and surprisingly interesting summation of Smith’s later legal troubles stemming from the confusing and unfair way royalties were assigned for hits like “High Blood Pressure” and “Sea Cruise.” Music lovers will devour this book; music likers will read a few pages at a time before running to Pandora or Spotify to catch up. (More about this book here.)

Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, 
edited by Gerald Kelly (Fantagraphics, 2011)

Somewhere in Georgia, there’s an archivist whose job it is to find anything Flannery O’Connor ever did so it can be published. With the recent publication of the prayer journal O’Connor kept in graduate school, we’re veering perilously close to grocery-list territory: watch for Everything That Ripens Gets Preserved: Flannery O’Connor, Canned Goods, and the Christian Imagination in 2017. Snark aside, this collection of the linoleum-print cartoons O’Connor contributed to her college newspaper is a treat for her fans. Readers of her letters have seen a Flannery that is both homey and sagacious, who tended her poultry between producing writing that, at its best, has the force and clarity of Scripture. The cartoons round out this idea of the Oracle of Milledgeville and show us the writer as a very young woman, using her amazing creativity in the service of silliness. Thank God she gave up cartooning to write, but thank a minor saint she delayed writing to cartoon.

The Cottoncrest Curse,

by Michael H. Rubin (LSU Press, 2014)

Sometimes, you need a good old-fashioned Southern gothic. If you’re tired of modern novels with no terrible secrets, no mounting dread, and no one screaming into the sultry Louisiana night, pick up The Cottoncrest Curse. This book has it all: a character named Colonel Judge, a dim sheriff’s deputy with dreams of becoming an actor on a riverboat, daring escapes, Cajun and Yiddish proverbs, the Underground Railroad, and a fistfight in a brothel. Like all gothics, the complicated plot takes its time revealing various tangled threads; like the somewhat smaller number of good gothics, the threads all snap tight at the end. So as not to ruin the fun, I’ll leave you with this: the scene where the clumsy deputy drops a severed head is neither the goriest, nor the most shocking, nor the funniest part of the book.