4 minute read
June 2021
Twilight in Hazard An Appalachian Reckoning Alan Maimon
An intimate portrait of Appalachia, East Kentucky, an area still beset by the worst poverty in the US, tracing how events at the start of the new millennium continue to impact life in the region and the soul of the nation as a whole.
Advertisement
“Most people who live in Louisville have never been to Eastern Kentucky and have no idea what’s happening there. We would want you to cover the area like a foreign correspondent would.” That’s what Alan Maimon’s editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him in a job interview in the early days of the 21st century.
When Maimon took the job and arrived in Hazard, Kentucky as the Journal’s regional bureau chief, he realized that he was reporting on a much bigger story than the county’s otherness. It was a region in the grip of ecological devastation, a man-made prescription pill epidemic, and where the aftermath of September 11th was taking an outsize toll. He witnessed first hand the encroaching structural forces that would keep the region in poverty for decades to follow, even as many of those forces remain unacknowledged today.
Through the stories he covered then, and follows up on today, Maimon offers a unique perspective in an age when media outlets have cut back or eliminated coverage of the most distressed regions in America.
10th June 2021 - 9781612198859 - £25 - tbcpp - HB Social Science/Rural America- Territory: UK/IRE - EPUB: 9781612198866
Alan Maimon is an award-winning journalist and author. As a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about gaping holes in Kentucky’s justice system. His work for the Las Vegas Review-Journal on police shootings and the court system garnered national awards and acclaim. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 15
The Fugitivities Jesse McCarthy
‘What a gorgeous, virtuosic novel! In exquisite, often ecstatic prose... this is blackness as it collides with chaos and love. Blackness in its uneasy relationship to Europe and the Americas. Blackness in all of its inner intricacy, tension and beauty’ Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift
Set in the early aughts, a young film enthusiastturned-teacher as he seeks out the significance of race, nation, and community across a globalizing world.
The Fugitivities tells the powerful and singular story of two African-American acquaintances finding their individuality among a society where community means everything. Jonas, an American expat living in France returns to New York to discover it doesn’t fit right.
Not wanting to return to Paris, Jonas sets off for Brazil to find the greater meaning of selfhood. There is also, Archibald, a retired American basketball player who uproots his life in Harlem for Paris. What they discover are the limits of individuality, the responsibility to community, and a sense of maturity neither of them could ever anticipate.
Jesse McCarthy has written for several publications including The New York Times, n+1, and the New Republic. He is a contributing editor at The Point and is an associate professor of English, African American, and African History at Harvard.
The Blind Accordionist C.D. Rose
‘A riotous, triumphant rattlebag of a novel... savour every moment.’ Eley Williams
‘I don’t remember the last time I read something this clever, puzzling and intricate which simultaneously packs so much soul.’ Luke Kennard, author of The Transition
A supposedly long lost collection of fable-like stories supposedly written by the little-known middle European writer Maxim Guyavitch ... with a helpful intro and afterword making it hilariously clear that the keyword is “supposedly.”
In the novel Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else, the character “C.D. Rose” (not to be confused with the author C.D. Rose) searches an unnamed middle-European city for the longlost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in The Blind Accordionist, “C.D. Rose” has found the manuscript–nine sparkling, fable-like short stories–and he presents them here with a (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch.
The Blind Accordionist can be read both as a simple but wonderful collection of quirky stories, and as comedy–or as a beautiful and moving elegy on the nobility of writers wanting to be read.
Also available:
C. D. Rose is the author of the satirical book The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and the novel Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else, which was shortlisted for The Society of Authors McKitterick Prize. He is an award-wining short story writer whose work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines and been featured on BBC Radio 4. He currently teaches at the University of Birmingham. 17
