Hardbacks
Sex In The South by Suzi Parker (Justin, Charles & Co.). Arkansas writer Parker takes an eye-opening and hilarious look behind the veil of Southern straight-laced sanctimony and finds a whole other world of Dixie women experimenting with sex to their, uh, hearts’ content. Parker mainly deals with hetero white women — the traditional Southern guarantors of purity — who’ve dropped their pretense along with their drawers and are busy liberating their libidos via a variety of “specialty” clubs, the internet, and Passion Parties where Sunday School teachers let their hair down and stock up on dildos. Parker laces the book with big doses of outrageous humor and at one point even winds up at Gennifer Flowers’ bar. — Pat Hiller
Over The Edge of the World by Laurence Bergreen (William Morrow). Bergreen brings to life the exhilarating story of what was possibly the ultimate “adventure story,” the 16th century journey around the world led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan. Politics, mystery, greed, mutiny, orgies, suffering and raw courage wind through this story, providing a richness of detail and presence that put Bergreen’s book head and shoulders above others in the popular “true tales at sea” genre. — Pat Hiller
There Are Jews In My House: Stories by Lara Vapnyar (Pantheon). Vapnyar, who only learned English in 1994 when she emigrated from Russia, has turned herself into a very compelling new voice. These six delicately crafted stories, simple but emotionally complex, take place in both Russia and among Russian emigres in America, but are universal in their themes and appeal. An affinity for a child’s view of adult mysteries and a gift for swift, knowing observations of character make Vapnyar’s lucid tales refreshing. — Dana Renaldi
Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcìa Márquez (Knopf). The first volume in a projected autobiographical trilogy by Nobel laureate Márquez is as lyrical and enthralling as much of his fiction. It’s obvious that the author’s “magical realism” draws as much from his own life growing up in Colombia as from imagination, albeit an imagination that was heavily stoked by his grandmother’s tales. These early years in Márquez’s life provide a compelling look at his budding literary passion as well as scenes that would reappear years later in his wonderful fiction. — Erik Spanberg
Pompeii by Robert Harris (Random House). Harris turns from his usual World War II settings to tell the story of a young aqueduct engineer in Pompeii. Powered by the rumblings of the soon-to-blow Mount Vesuvius, Harris’ novel delightfully examines Roman culture while disaster looms. Throw in well-crafted characters, the writings of Pliny the Elder, and more insight into Roman politics and plumbing than you thought you ever needed, and you have a very good historical read. — Erik Spanberg
Paperbacks
Jennifer Government by Max Barry (Vintage). This over-the-top satirical crime novel about the takeover of everything by multi-national corporations is oddly delightful. People’s last names are now the same as the name of the company they work for and government is a for-profit business. When Jennifer Government investigates a murder that implicates Nike in a homicidal conspiracy, all hell breaks loose between the two “superpowers.” This is hilariously creative satire that, like all good satire, is uncomfortably close to where we stand today. — John Grooms
Hell At The Breech by Tom Franklin (Perennial). This harrowing, gripping novel based on real incidents in 1890s Alabama was one of 2003’s biggest surprises. An accidental death’s aftermath grows into a violent, full-scale uprising of mostly white sharecroppers against the land-owning elite, and the aging sheriff walks a sociopolitical tightrope while trying to do the right thing. The bloodshed approaches Sam Peckinpah levels but it’s in the service of a taut story filled with rich characters whose lives evince the human and moral costs of rebellion. — Ken Harmon
Any Human Heart by William Boyd (Vintage). Boyd fashions this novel through a series of biographical “journal entries” that purport to catalog the life of one Logan Mountstuart. Mountstuart, a bit of a writing prodigy, starts out covering the Spanish Civil War. Soon enough, he’s pals with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is sketched by Picasso and . . . well, you get the picture. Mountstuart, it seems, lived the kind of life that’s stranger than fiction. Except, of course, for the fact that it is fiction, despite the reviewer-friendly index, afterword, and fictional “Works by Logan Mountstuart” page at the end of the book. Ultimately, the novel works best as a biography of us all: Everyman as seen through the eyes of Superman. — Timothy C. Davis
Saints of Big Harbor by Lynn Coady (Mariner). One of my favorite debut novels from 2003 (actually, a US debut from a Canadian author with two published books in Maple Leaf country), this intimate, funny look at a teenage boy growing up in a small rural Nova Scotia town in the 1980s depicts the eternal teenaged tugging against a small town’s various social leashes. Through Guy Boucher and his attempts to understand how he became the subject of a nasty rumor, Coady balances various viewpoints with a lyrical ease and confident voice. This small novel is filled with humor and a kind of gritty compassion. — Dana Renaldi
Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson (Vintage). Starting with one famous photograph from the civil rights era — seven Mississippi sheriffs preparing to try to stop James Meredith from becoming the first black to attend Ole Miss — Hendrickson traces the lives of the seven men in the years since that notorious 1962 battle. Rather than a George Wallace-like tale of racists redeemed, which has become a popular narrative of the South’s changes, the author sees little other than a continuing bitterness, passed down to present generations. Not the feel-good ending many people want and apparently need when they consider our region’s racial struggles, but a real, wrenching view of the lingering effects of racism’s poisons running through the country’s veins. — David A. Moore
From The Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Twee (Perennial). A beautifully written memoir, subtitled “A Burmese Odyssey,” offering loving descriptions of life growing up with 10 siblings in the pre-modern world of rural Burma, in passages that at times seem like dreams. When Khoo Thwe went off to school, he became involved in government reform efforts, and in 1988, at age 19, was forced to flee to the jungles bordering Thailand. While working as a waiter, Khoo Thwe was “discovered” by a Cambridge don who brought him to England, where he now lives. — John Grooms
Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (Scribner). The best battle memoir since Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Swofford was a Marine sniper in the Gulf War and he makes no bones about the fact that most of the time he and his mates were scared, bored or drunk. Frank prose and a wonderful dark humor permeate Swofford’s exuberant narrative. This is a needed, straightforward look at modern combat, those who fight it, and those who are under the impression they’re leading the battle, all told with a razor sharp wit and an eye for the telling detail. — John Grooms
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King (Penguin USA). A masterful and very accessible look at the immortal artist’s struggles to paint what turned out to be one of the great masterpieces of human history. Michelangelo emerges here as a fully three-dimensional flesh-and-blood man, not the quirky myth that’s been handed down to us. — Bruce Nims
This article appears in Jan 14-20, 2004.
