Rooted Book Club: Southern Fiction at the Mississippi Book Festival
Our September 2024 Book Club Selections
It’s hard to believe September is here, which means that the Mississippi Book Festival is just around the corner. This will be my third year moderating a Book Fest panel—this year it’s “Southern Fiction”—and I could not be more excited about the impressive line-up of authors I get to talk to.
I realize not everyone has the privilege of attending the Mississippi Book Festival but I wanted to highlight the four books by the Southern Fiction panelists that we’ll be discussing in the hopes that you read at least one, or even all four of them. (Plus, if you came to our June book club discussion, then you’re already well-acquainted with Gerry Wilson’s That Pinson Girl.)
For now, please mark your calendars for September 14. The Southern Fiction panel discussion will take place in State Capitol Room 201 H at 10:45 a.m. (Typically, these discussions are all recorded, so if you can’t attend in person, there will be a recording available later on!) A signing with the authors will follow the discussion outside in the signing tent. Read on for more details on our four featured books for September: Beautiful Dreamers by Minrose Gwin, Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro, Troubled Waters by Mary Annaïse Heglar, and That Pinson Girl by Gerry Wilson.
(Read Minrose Gwin’s Rooted interview from August!)
From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.
It's 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia's childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory ("Mem") is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.
While Mac's wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac's "guest," he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem's life. Now, an adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left in her teenage years, confronting her culpability in the disastrous events of that final summer.
Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.
Minrose Gwin is the author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother's life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was co-editor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.
Like the characters in her novels, Minrose Gwin is a native of Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and several loquacious four-leggeds.
From a New York Times Notable "writer of great originality" comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South
The "fearless" (New Yorker) author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon--whose recently published stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review have brought her new attention--is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.
In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet's remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.
Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In this intimate portrait of two generations, a granddaughter and a grandmother come to terms with what it means to heal when the world is on your shoulders.
The world is burning, and Corinne will do anything to put out the flames. After her brother died aboard an oil boat on the Mississippi River in 2013, Corrine awakened to the realities of climate change and its perpetrators. Now, a year later, she finds herself trapped in a lonely cycle of mourning both her brother and the very planet she stands on. She's convinced that in order to save her future, she has to make sure that her brother's life meant something. But in the act of honoring her brother's spirit, she resurrects family ghosts she knows little about—ghosts her grandmother Cora knows intimately.
Cora's ghosts have followed her from her days as a child desegregating schools in 1950s Nashville to her new life as a mother, grandmother, and teacher in Mississippi. As a child of the Civil Rights movement, she's done her best to keep those specters away from her granddaughter. She faced those demons, she reasons to herself, so that Corinne would never know they existed. Cora knows what it feels like to carry the weight of the world—and that it can crush you.
When Corrine's plan to stage a dramatic act of resistance peels back the scabs of her family wounds and puts her safety in jeopardy, both grandmother and granddaughter must bring their secrets into the light to find a path to healing and wholeness.
In heartfelt, lyrical prose based on her own family's history, Mary Annaïse Heglar weaves an unforgettable story of the climate crisis, Black resistance, and the enduring power of love.
Mary Annaïse Heglar is known for her essays that dissect and interrogate the climate crisis, drawing heavily on her personal experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the South. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. They have also been featured in collections like All We Can Save, The World As We Knew It, The Black Agenda, Letters to the Earth, and Not Too Late. Mary hails from Birmingham, Alabama by way of Mississippi and she is based in New Orleans.
(Listen to our Rooted Book Club discussion with Gerry Wilson and read Gerry’s Rooted interview!)
In a bleak Mississippi farmhouse in 1918, Leona Pinson gives birth to an illegitimate son whose father she refuses to name, but who will, she is convinced, return from the war to rescue her from a hardscrabble life with a distant mother, a dangerous brother, and a dwarf aunt. When, instead, her lover returns with a wife in tow, her dreams are shattered. As her brother's violence escalates and her aunt flees, Leona must rely on the help of Luther Biggs, the son of Leona's grandfather and one of his former slaves, to protect her child. Told against the backdrop of the deprivation of World War I, the tragedies of the influenza epidemic, and the burden of generations of betrayal, That Pinson Girl unfolds in lyrical, unflinching prose, engaging the timeless issues of racism, sexism, and poverty.
A seventh-generation Mississippian and a child of the hill country she writes about in That Pinson Girl, Gerry Wilson came of age during the turbulent civil rights era. Her story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Gerry is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals. That Pinson Girl is her first novel.
The Rooted Book Club is in partnership with the Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and Friendly City Books. Aside from this month, Red Squared records and produces our book club conversations at their podcast studio in The Hangar in Midtown, Jackson.
Are you planning to be at the Mississippi Book Festival? Tell me what you are reading in preparation!