Culture
DECEMBER 2020
42 OUR
2020
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
// 4 6
HOLIDAYS
IN
THE VEGA
HOLIDAY TRAPPINGS
W
WINTER READING LIST
To Add to Your Bookshelf OUR 2020 BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS, TO GIFT OR TO GRAB By Chris Turner-Neal Closing out a year of unprecedented time at home, which has in many ways redefined the way we think about escapism, we gladly offer our end-of-year recommendations for locally written and published titles. Embrace new characters, drown in drawings of coastal wilderness, find out what Faulkner’s family was really like, and learn to make the fanciest grilled cheese you’ve ever attempted. Wishing you the best and safest of holidays this year. We’ll see you on the other side.
The Fear of Everything: Stories
I
John McNally, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press ’m not too proud (or too prudish) to admit that I ordered this book because it was cited as being by the author of The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid. This snickering whim served me well; this is one of the best collections of stories I’ve read this year. McNally’s stories skate on the edge of magic realism—the best ones stop just short of the brink, leaving the reader with the same half-startle they might have to a barely-heard noise. The central characters are all lonely and most of them are strange: bereaved, divorced, lost, they run into situations they couldn’t control even if they understood them. The best and longest story, “The Devil in the Details,”
explores problems of evil and guilt in an old-West setting. The final scene, a Flannery O’Connor-level shocker, leads one character to muse “…whatever it was that women were made of, it sure wasn’t the rib of man. She had never met a man who would give so much of himself for a woman.” If that doesn’t sell you: a lady gets her hand stuck in a garbage disposal, an old-time gangster inveigles a child into one last heist, and a failed one-night stand turns into an agoraphobic exploration of the root of fear. Read it with a friend and pick your favorites: you’ll learn something about each other. h
ulpress.org
Cover image courtesy of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.
In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir Lawrence Wells, University Press of Mississippi
F
ew will be surprised that William Faulkner’s family was (and presumably is) as batty as one would expect, as Lawrence Wells learned when he married the Nobel Laureate’s niece. By page thirteen of this memoir-literary biographyanthropological study, two hot-air balloons have crashed. As the pages turn, we meet “the family nymphomaniac,” two ghosts, and the worst mother this side of Medea. The result is less a narrative than a collection of weapons-grade eccentricity: every time you find yourself saying “well, every family has one” will be matched by “I can’t believe it—and in front of the children!” This story couldn’t have been told by a Faulkner— and presumably had to wait until some of the family members were dead. The gigantic personalities and even larger senses of entitlement the family produced crash into each other like stegosauruses—leading to feuds, estrangements, exacerbated alcoholism, and hissed Cover image courtesy of the University Press of Mississippi. 42
D E C 2 0 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
admonitions from the sidelines: “You can’t tell a Faulkner what to do!” Even Dean, the late wife of the author and the calmest Faulkner—certainly the only nice one— managed to break a Confederate flag over a stranger’s head on her honeymoon. As time goes by, Wells becomes more and more involved in the Faulkner legacy, working for Yoknapatawpha Press and running a Faulkner parody contest. As he’s slowly encased in Faulkneria like a fly sinking into amber, the lunatics keep coming—Barry Hannah steals Dean’s inscribed copy of her uncle’s Big Woods, and Wells has to go get it back—but the narrator maintains his endearingly bemused everyman status. He was in the Faulkner world, but not of it, and reports back like a researcher embedded with an uncontacted tribe. Buy this for a Faulkner fan or for the relative with whom you complain about the rest of your family. h
upress.state.ms.us
