Steven Wells Hicks: Writing For Sock Monkeys
Steven Wells Hicks was a creative advertising director for 35 years before becoming a novelist. Born in Omaha, Neb., Hicks has lived in Jackson since July, 1974 and calls himself a "southerner by choice."
The Beginning
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency that spied on the activities of civil rights supporters, was what first led Eric Etheridge to the haunting mug shots of the Freedom Riders in 2004.
Man v. Flesh
Andre Dubus III's "Garden of the Last Days" (W. W. Norton, 2008, $24.95) is a brick of a book. At 500-plus pages, it's America on parade: g-strings and neon, alcohol and testosterone, easy cash, patriotism and dumb sentiment.
Fiction of Giant Proportion
Acclaimed Alabama short-story writer and 2007–2008 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Jack Pendarvis has just published his first novel, "Awesome" (MacAdam Cage, 2008, $18).
Romance and Fly-fishing
Fly-fishing combines the joy of being outside with the gracefulness of casting a line so light that it takes multiple flicks of the wrist to keep it aloft until that moment when you let it lay out so softly that it mimics the wind and the ripples on the water. The fly at the end of the line floats on the river that carries it downstream.
Reprehensible Rogues
The author of "Fight Club," Palahniuk commonly employs violence, sexuality and profanity in his novels, while his stories generally revolve around modernity, requisite evils of contemporary society and the supernatural or miraculous.
Tracking the Past
"Pelican Road" by Howard Bahr (MacAdam Cage, 2008, $25) is the story of a railroad man and his cohorts who work the rail lines between Meridian, Miss., and New Orleans.
Postcard to the Future
With a skinny tie and sassafras root 'round his neck, Seth Ballard Sr., the last of the Mississippi Herb Doctors, looks out serenely from a photograph on page 37.
No Safety Here
I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like this book about sticky Louisiana summers, lifelong friendships, severe Southern mamas and the vapid allure of Los Angeles.
Sweet Home Mississippi
It's no surprise that "Growing up in Mississippi," (University of Mississippi Press, 2008, $25), an edited short story collection of tales and reflections from famous Mississippians like Jimmy Buffett, former Gov. William Winter and Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat, reflects equally varied experiences.
What Is A Life?
The beginning of Gina B. Nahai's "Caspian Rain" (MacAdam Cage, 2007, $25) is almost fairy tale-like, sighing with promise and expectation: "She's sixteen years old—a young woman in a city with blue mountains."
Intertwined Paths
Two of Mississippi's most famous political figures, Sen. Jim Eastland and civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, were neighbors in Sunflower County, one a U.S. Senator and one of them a sharecropper...and historic civil-rights activist.
The Entrepreneurial Poor
In Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus's book, "Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battles Against World Poverty," vivid details resonate on the most human, intimate levels, and unknown laborers become real people.
Think Globally, Eat Locally
Warning: Barbara Kingsolver's nonfiction book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" (HarperCollins, 2007, $26.95), co-written by her husband and one of her daughters, may inspire you to run screaming out of Kroger and into your closest farmer's market.
Comics, Black And White
The history of comic books in America is proof that you can't kill an art form. When Dr. Fredric Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocents" came out in 1958, on the eve of the Superman-dominated "golden age" of comics, many thought that comic books had been squashed forever. Wertham's book indignantly pointed out the sexual, violent and even homosexual inclinations in popular comics, resulting in strict regulation and the shriveling up of a once-lucrative industry. The moral outcry against comics destroyed the popular audience for comics so thoroughly that many doubted the art form would survive.