Short Takes: Brims with Lip-Smacking Life

Welcome, new short fiction: The Chicago Tribune on PLEASE COME BACK TO ME: "Like most of the women in the collection, Elizabeth is a beautifully realized character, made real by the compilation of the right detail at precisely the right moment. The stories in Treadway’s second collection are memorable, affecting tales of modern domestic life."

More notice in the Boston Globe, Albany Times-Union and The Rumpus.

THE DANCE BOOTS in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press; also Indian Country Today and Dark Sky Magazine.

ForeWord Reviews notes: "Grover knows how to end a story--and manages to achieve both circularity and closure in each in every one. This is an impressive feat in and of itself, but for a collection of linked stories like THE DANCE BOOTS, which twist and tie and loop back on one another, the achievement is even more remarkable."

Natasha Trethewey reading in New Orleans yesterday and Biloxi/Gulfport today; coverage on WWNO New Orleans and in the Biloxi Sun-Herald ("Storm's Victims", "Back to Mine," Tuesday's editorial page). Also ForeWord Reviews, Publishers Weekly blog, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Creative Loafing Atlanta.

SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE COMMUNITY COOKBOOK in the Houston Chronicle: "The cookbook, which will be published in October, may look plain: it's unfussily spiral bound in the best tradition of community cookbooks; it has no photos. But it brims with lip-smacking life. Anyone who ever hungered for definitive recipes for Collard Greens with Ham Hock Broth, Mississippi Hot Tamales or Persimmon Pudding will appreciate the care that editors Sarah Roahen and John T. Edge and the Southern Foodways Alliance members put into this, the SFA's first published collection of recipes."

CROSSROADS OF CONFLICT, a guide to Civil War sites in Georgia, now available in time for the 150th anniversary of the conflict. Review in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and notice of author signings in Rome, Cedartown and Dalton.

HERE BE MONSTERS by Colin Cheney an Oxford American editors' book pick: "Few writers can traverse such extensive territory as beautifully and seamlessly as he does in this debut collection."

CHARLOTTE NC: THE GLOBAL EVOLUTION OF A NEW SOUTH CITY featured in Ron Stodghill's column in the Charlotte Observer.

CHOICE Reviews for Academic Libraries recommends THE ART OF MANAGING LONGLEAF ("gives readers new eyes with which to see the ecological impacts of human actions"), MARCHING IN STEP ("A must read for any student of the modern South or civil-military relations"), TRANSFORMING SCRIPTURES, THE CULTURE OF PROPERTY, REBECCA HARDING DAVIS'S STORIES OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA and LEGBA'S CROSSING( "A welcome addition to the project of reinserting Africa into black diaspora writing in the Caribbean and the US.")