Category: New Books

Remembering the Flood

Watching TV Off the Back of a Fire Truck

In 2000, in four North Carolina towns — Grifton, Belvoir, Rocky Mount, and Greenville — the North Carolina Humanities Council sponsored writing workshops for local residents who were encouraged to take time to reflect and to record their thoughts on the devastating effects of the floods caused by Hurricane Floyd the previous year.

The results of these workshops are recorded in the book Watching TV Off the Back of a Fire Truck: Voices from the Flood in Eastern North Carolina. The book also contains interviews, essays, poetry, and a chronology of events. Although most of the reminiscences have been edited for length, the editors were careful to maintain the voices of the authors. Many of the writings and interviews in this book are deeply emotional and give, collectively, a picture of the personal effects of the tragedy in a way that you could not find in statistics and newspaper accounts. I can imagine that the farther we get from 1999, and as living memories of the flood begin to fade, the more important books like this will become.

Encyclopedia of North Carolina

I just got a sneak peek at the new Encyclopedia of North Carolina, coming out this November from UNC Press. The book looks fantastic, a ready answer to all Tar Heel questions from A to Z, “Aberdeen & Rockfish Railroad” to “Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.” The Encyclopedia, edited by William S. Powell, will combine with his North Carolina Gazetteer and Dictionary of North Carolina Biography to complete a series of reference works that will surely be the envy of any state.

Thirteen Moons

We don’t usually go to Entertainment Weekly for literary news, but maybe we should. That magazine has just reported on an “exclusive” look at the new Random House catalog, which contains information on and a release date for Thirteen Moons, the long-awaited second novel from Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier. Thirteen Moons is due to appear in bookstores on October 3, 2006. Of course we couldn’t help but notice that October 3 is the birthdate of western North Carolina’s second-most-popular author, Thomas Wolfe.

Tar Heel Lit

So where do depressed Tar Heel basketball fans look to ease the pain of their team’s early exit from the NCAA tournament? In books, of course. Will Blythe’s excellently-titled book about the UNC-Duke rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to be Happy Forever has received nationwide attention, with a reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Longtime UNC Professor of English Fred Hobson also looks at the lasting influence of basketball in his life in his new book, Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood. Hobson’s book was reviewed in Sunday’s News & Observer.

And finally, of interest to Tar Heel faithful everywhere, but especially those living far from Chapel Hill, the UNC Press has just published Carolina: Photographs from the First State University, a very nice collection of images of the campus.

Authors at Home

Writers of the American South

The recent book Writers of the American South: Their Literary Landscapes (Rizzoli, 2005) features the homes of North Carolina authors Thomas Wolfe and Allan Gurganus. Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home (now a state historic site) will be familiar to readers of Look Homeward, Angel as “Dixieland.” Gurganus’s elaborately restored historic Hillsborough house is featured on the cover of the book and in a nice fold-out section in this lavishly illustrated volume.


N.C. Art Towns

The 100 Best Art Towns in America

Three North Carolina cities — Asheville, Carrboro, and Wilmington — are listed in the fourth edition of John Villani’s The 100 Best Art Towns in America (The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vt., 2005). Naturally, we think that there are many more communities in our state that are worth a visit from the arts-minded, but we should point out that none of the states neighboring North Carolina has as many as three towns listed. Not that we’re keeping score or anything.

Book of Books

Penland Book of Books

The death of the book (and the library, too) has been proclaimed over and over again in recent years, but a trip to western North Carolina will show that the age-old art of making books by hand is alive and well. We’ve been looking through The Penland Book of Handmade Books, a collaboration between Lark Books and the Penland School of Crafts. The book includes ten features on current book artists, all of whom have taught classes at Penland. These are not your traditional library books. From the covers to the pages to the display of text, these creative works challenge and re-imagine the very idea of a book, and, together, celebrate a format that is hardly on the decline: at Penland, at least, books are thriving.

Ellen Foster at 15

One of the most memorable characters in North Carolina literature returns with the release today of The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons. Ellen Foster, Gibbons’s 1997 novel, opened with the unforgettable line: “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my Daddy.” The novel received national attention when it was selected for Oprah’s book club.

The Life All Around Me finds Ellen Foster at 15, applying for early admission to Harvard, thriving despite her troubled childhood, and still living in North Carolina.

Wilmington 1898 Race Riot Commission Report

The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission has just released a draft of its report on the violent uprising that ravaged Wilmington’s African American community in November 1898. The Commission was organized under legislation sponsored by two Wilmington legislators and charged with examining and reporting on what is now widely acknowledged to be the only coup d’etat in American history. Today’s Raleigh News & Observer and Wilmington Star-News have stories about the report’s findings.