Nearly a year after the triumphant release of his lauded fourth novel we are excited to present an in-depth interview with Ron Rash. Serena (Ecco/Harper Collins) is Rash’s period piece that is just as much a place piece, this period and place being Appalachia during the Great Depression. Rash is the Pariss Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, and if that moniker doesn’t signal his grasp of the region strongly enough the first few pages of Serena will.

Serena is the bride of George Pemberton, a young lumber baron from New England, and this is the story of her Machiavellian pursuit for power. As austere as Pemberton can be, he is the softie in the relationship as Serena lies, cheats, murders and mutilates her way along a course that would make Lady MacBeth blush. Rash plays up parallels to the Scottish Play throughout the novel to the point that when a clairvoyant portends of Pemberton’s death you may as well go ahead and begin thinking of creative ways by which the vision might be fulfilled.

Not that this book isn’t gripping—quite the contrary. This is a rare novel that manages to be a literary feat while also playing out as a bona fide page turner. Rash talks about this duality on this week’s show. He also talks a good deal about the disappearing wilderness in Appalachia, a central aspect of this novel. He notes the irony inherent in locals that participate in industries such as timber and mining: “The very thing that makes them special is the thing they’re destroying.”

Despite ample success with this and earlier works, Ron Rash isn’t a very public figure. He is soft-spoken and deferential. But this week he opens up a bit as he chats about the region that is not less a part of him than he is of it.

As you’re traveling home from holiday destinations we hope you’ll tune in the Cover to Cover on GPB Radio. Catch us at 8 PM in most parts of the state and at 6 PM on WUGA 91.7FM in the Athens area. Enjoy!

Marc Fitten has been a well-known figure on the the Atlanta literary scene for years. As the editor of The Chattahoochee Review, Fitten has infused the venerable periodical with a more international flavor and has been a force behind bringing a number of literary authors from around the world to Atlanta.

Now, the literary gadfly takes center stage with his debut novel, Valeria's Last Stand. The book is the lead fiction title in this season's catalogue from the esteemed literary publisher Bloomsbury. Set in post-Soviet Hungary, where Fitten spent several years in the 1990s, it is at once a love triangle (featuring characters of very advanced age) and a meditation on the changes wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Early reviews of Valeria's Last Stand have dubbed it "subtle and brilliant" and "a beautiful debut" and the lead character "every bit as sensual and irrepressible as Chaucer's Wife of Bath."

Before embarking on an international book tour, Fitten discussed with Cover to Cover his literary inspirations and aspirations. You can hear the interview with Frank Reiss and Marc Fitten this Sunday night at 8 on GPB.

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On this week's Cover to Cover Orlando Montoya sits down with Martin Melaver to discuss his book "Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change and Restores Land and Community"... Orlando Montoya sends us this short history of Melaver's many green endeavors...

I've been reporting on Martin Melaver's career since shortly after I came to Savannah in 1998. A developer, Melaver made news by undertaking one of the nation's first historic renovations to LEED standards. And if you don't know what those standards are, they basically govern everything about the building process for properties that want to be certified as "environmentally friendly." I interviewed him again when he developed a pioneering suburban strip mall to LEED standards.
Now he's involved in an "environmentally friendly" public housing project and has written a book about his journey in business. "Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change and Restores Land and Community" is really a management handbook. In this interview, he also touches on hard questions that go to the core of two of our biggest global problems -- the recession and climate change -- and proves why he is considered a leading thinker in Savannah's sustainability movement.

You can hear the interview this Sunday night at 8 on GPB.
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Valarie Edwards recently sat down with award winning author/actor Hill Harper to talk about his new book, Letters to a Young Sister. She has this preview:

Following on the heels of his award winning New York Times bestseller, Letters to a Young Brother, actor and author Hill Harper delivers life-affirming messages to young women in his latest book, Letters to a Young Sister.

In 2006, Letters to a Young Brother won two NAACP awards and, in 2007 was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. The award winning actor currently stars in CSI: NY. In 2008, People Magazine named Harper one of the Sexiest Men Alive.

Hill Harper graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. from Brown University and cum laude from Harvard Law School. He also holds a masters degree from the Kennedy School of Government.

Learn more at www.manifestyourdestiny.org.

You can listen to the interview this Sunday night at 8pm on GPB.


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Stan Deaton spoke with Winston Groom about his latest novel Vicksburg, 1863. He gives us this preview:

Winston Groom is a masterful storyteller, as one would expect from the man who wrote the novel Forrest Gump. Now the author of fourteen previous books of both fiction and non-fiction has brought his considerable skills to bear on retelling the story of one of the most important battle of America's most crucial war. Vicksburg, 1863 is Groom's latest offering, and it's a good one. One reviewer wrote that Groom's approach to the Civil War follows that of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, and that's pretty good company to be in.

Groom's got a great cast of characters to work with, and they're all here in vivid detail: Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Jefferson Davis, Joseph E. Johnston, John Pemberton, Earl Van Dorn, along with other Americans, black and white, northern and southern, who have been lost to history. His conclusion, that the loss of Vicksburg was a turning point in the war and the Confederacy's greatest setback, is not a surprise. But Groom takes it one step further: he argues that after Vicksburg fell in early July 1863, the Confederate high command should have realized that there was no possible way to win the war militarily, and they should have stopped fighting and sued for peace at that point, nearly two years before the war actually ended. It's an intriguing argument, and one of history's great "what if?" moments.

In this interview, he talks about all of this plus his years at the University of Alabama, his time in Vietnam, and the challenges of writing fiction and non-fiction."

You can listen to Stan Deaton’s interview with Winston Groom this Sunday night at 8 on GPB.

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Like any good reporter, The New York Times' Warren St. John recognized a compelling story when a friend tipped him off to a youth soccer team of refugee children from dozens of different countries playing in the tiny Southern town of Clarkston, GA, just east of Atlanta, home to a massive relocation project.

He might not have expected, however, to meet a character like the team's coach, Jordanian-born Luma Mufleh and a complex tale of cultural conflict that would ultimately lead to his remarkable second book, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town, movie studios bidding for the story, and, on a personal level, a life-altering, consciousness-raising experience.

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, St. John talks of Mufleh and her team, The Fugees, like a man on a mission, a mission that goes far beyond the soccer field and toward a dream of greater human understanding between people of wildly divergent backgrounds. And, amazingly enough, the cynical New York newspaper man does it all with infectious hope and optimism.

You can hear this week's interview with Frank Reiss and Warren St. John Sunday night at 8 on Cover to Cover.

Like any good reporter, The New York Times' Warren St. John recognized a compelling story when a friend tipped him off to a youth soccer team of refugee children from dozens of different countries playing in the tiny Southern town of Clarkston, GA, just east of Atlanta, home to a massive relocation project.

He might not have expected, however, to meet a character like the team's coach, Jordanian-born Luma Mufleh and a complex tale of cultural conflict that would ultimately lead to his remarkable second book, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town, movie studios bidding for the story, and, on a personal level, a life-altering, consciousness-raising experience.

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, St. John talks of Mufleh and her team, The Fugees, like a man on a mission, a mission that goes far beyond the soccer field and toward a dream of greater human understanding between people of wildly divergent backgrounds. And, amazingly enough, the cynical New York newspaper man does it all with infectious hope and optimism.

You can hear this week's interview with Frank Reiss and Warren St. John Sunday night at 8 on Cover to Cover.
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Three million US soldiers served in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973. Tommy J. Holtzclaw was one of the many young men to serve in Vietnam during this time. His journey began at the young age of 17 when he chose to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. On December 9, 1966, he boarded a Navy ship en route to Vietnam – never to return.

Years later his nieces, who never had the chance to really know him, found the letters he wrote to family and friends during his time there. Connie C. Hughes and Terri C. Walker compiled these letters and tell his story in Letters from Tommy J. This book is a portrait of a young man coming of age during one of the most difficult times in American history. You can listen to this special Memorial Day edition of Cover to Cover this Sunday night at 8 on GPB.
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In the summer of 1993, an American traveled to Pakistan to climb the second highest mountain on earth, but he never reached the summit, he got lost coming down but found a new mission. The village Greg Mortenson stumbled into needed a school. After they helped him restore his health, he came back to the states with the determination to return one day and build them a school. He's been building schools throughout central Asia since. The New York Time's best-selling book Three Cups of Tea is an account of Greg Mortenson's mission. He sits down with GPB's Melissa Stiers to talk about the book that's on the required reading list at the Pentagon. Mortenson explains how his work is an affront to global terrorism. Why teaching not just a child... but a girl how to read quells the violence in Taliban-run regions of the world.
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On this week's Cover to Cover, Frank Reiss interviews Susan Rebecca White on her debut novel: Bound South. He gives us this preview...

Atlanta is currently bursting at the seams with young novelists debuting into the literary world. Undoubtedly the most "Atlanta-centric" among them is Atlanta native and resident Susan Rebecca White, whose first novel, Bound South, is set in her home town. The novel's appeal, however, is in no way limited to locals.

Bound South is intelligent and funny and insightful about many things that occupy everybody's minds all over the country: important matters like race, class, gender roles, and, really important matters like sex and food.

As she discusses in her Cover to Cover interview, this is not an autobiographical work but it uses many elements from White's own experience, including coming from a uniquely blended family that straddled a couple of distinct cultures in the Atlanta area. She can stake claim to both the well-to-do Buckhead & Ansley Park neighborhoods as well as the poorer areas outlying the city limits; her family includes progressive Protestants as well as hard-line fundamentalists.

Bound South thus is a complex family saga that explores universal themes. For those of us who know Atlanta well, though, it is especially satisfying to read a story set in the city from such an informed, loving, talented--and home-grown-- writer. Even when her story takes her to the other city she and I share in common--San Francisco--White shines in her ability to capture a place and make it a crucial part of the story.

You can listen to the interview this Sunday night at 8 on GPB.
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In his latest interview, Frank Reiss sits down with Kathryn Stockett to talk about her latest novel. He gives us this preview.
Kathryn Stockett's new book The Help was described in its New York Times review as a "soon to be wildly popular novel." Well, happily for the self-effacing, mild-mannered Atlanta resident, the paper of record knows what they're talking about. Earlier this year the debut work made it to Number 15 on the Times' bestseller list.
The book was a long time in the works, and as Stockett tells us in our Cover to Cover interview, it was rejected over 40 times before finding its way to the desk of Putnam's new star editor, Amy Einhorn.
The novel is the story of Skeeter Phelan, who, like Stockett is a native of Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter, a white daughter of priviledge, sets out to tell the stories of the town's black domestic workers, whose lives, in 1960s Mississippi, were for the most part not even considered by the families who employed them.
Stockett's inspiration for writing the book was the very voice of the black woman who largely raised her, and in her book, she channels that voice as well as several others in creating not only the novel's dialogue, but also the "book within a book," which Skeeter manages to publish as a kind of a field study.
The Help is resonating with a lot of readers who probably recognize voices in their past in Stockett's work. In Stockett's own voice, I think listener's will her a private, shy and somewhat vulnerable young woman who has now exposed a bit of herself in this work of fiction. It is not autobiographical, but it reveals something very personal to her: a deep love for the woman who raised her.

Tune in this Sunday night at 8 to hear the interview.
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Myriam Farrero, the newest member of our Cover to Cover team, just sent in this preview of her upcoming show with author Leslie Walker Williams. Tune in this Sunday to hear the interview, about which Myriam writes:

In 2009, the debut novel of Savannah native Leslie Walker Williams received the Peter Taylor Prize and the Morris Hackney Literary Award.

The Prudent Mariner is set on the Georgia coast in the 1960’s.

It’s a story of a young girl’s journey into the past secrets of her family, or truths buried underground and the proximity of a distant, shameful past.

Nine year old Ridley Cross discovers disturbing photographs of a lynching among her family’s possession. The Prudent Mariner unfolds through Ridley’s eyes as she uncovers her grandmother’s connection to the horrific past events.

Leslie Walker Williams dives headfirst into the complexities of a southern town haunted by its violent and horrific past, and the complex relationships of a family that reflects this past.

Williams was raised in Savannah, Georgia and has done extensive archival research on lynchings. It was a visit to the Detroit Museum of African American History which inspired her to write The Prudent Mariner.

A resident of Vancouver, Canada, her short stories have been published in numerous publications including The Iowa Review, The Madison Review, Harvard Review and American Fiction.

Her collection, Taxidermy, was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award.

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Some authors manage to exist on the periphery for all of us; I mean we know their name and know that they are important, but we haven’t quite gotten around to actually reading their work. For me, Eudora Welty has been one such author for quite a while now. Thankfully, that Dark Age is over.

Welty is a masterful writer perhaps best known for her short stories “A Worn Path” and Why I Live at the P.O.” She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973 for the short meditative novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, which came late in her career.

I mentioned Dr. Pearl McHaney in this blog before, but to refresh, she is a Welty scholar and professor at Georgia State University. Dr. McHaney recently gave a series of free public lectures at the Decatur Library, and she joins us this Sunday on Cover to Cover to talk about Welty. Dr. McHaney visited with Welty a few times at her home in Jackson, and has edited several volumes of Welty’s fiction, as well as public letters and literary criticism from the Belle of Belhaven.

Fresh of the presses at the University Press of Mississippi come two new edited volumes, Occasions: Selected Writings and Eudora Welty as Photographer. Both books are edited by Dr. McHaney, and the titles pretty well sum up the contents. Welty was not a WPA photographer (though she wanted to be), but her photographic work is very much identified with those proletariat pictures of the dusty south (and dusty New York). Occasions is a sizeable collection for Welty enthusiasts who want to delve deeper into the life of the woman who is perhaps as mysterious as she was charming.

We welcome Dr. McHaney to the show this Sunday, April 12 on the eve of what would be Welty’s 100th birthday. We talk about Dr. McHaney’s meetings with her beloved subject, the author’s strident support of the artists she loved, and of course, Welty’s inimitable writing.

And for those of you Welty fans near the Atlanta area, Dr. McHaney will dish the details on a birthday party downtown. It will be Monday evening at the Rialto on the campus of GSU and will feature dramatic readings from Tom Key and Brenda Bynum as well as champagne, coconut cake and the launch of The Eudora Welty Review, an annual publication that Dr. McHaney will edit. The event begins at 6 PM, but if you can make it down to GSU by 4:30, you can hear a free lecture by Dr. Daniele Pitavy-Souques, Profesor Emerita, at the University of Burgundy.

Hope to see you there!

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This in from Frank Reis:
Just as Hemingway once said all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, many of us interested in Georgia literature would say that a good starting point would be the work of Flannery O'Connor.
In the more than 40 years since her early death, the Savannah native's work, already considered among the absolute first rank of mid-century American fiction, has only grown in reputation. Never out of print and widely anthologized, O'Connor's short stories and novels are read and studied around the world, recognized for their distinctive regional flavor as well as the universality of their themes.

Inspiring as it is, though, O'Connor's work has not been widely interpreted into other media. With a stage adaptation of several of her stories, approved by the O'Connor estate, that situation has begun to change in recent years. In April, 2009, the Department of Theatre at Kennesaw State University presents "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and "A View of the Woods," two stories from late in O'Connor's short life.

The director of that production, Karen Robinson, discussed this exciting project with Cover to Cover.

A native Californian and lifelong theater person, Robinson brought to the production a particularly fresh pair of eyes and ears to the Southerner's enigmatic fiction. Robinson is now an enthusiastic proponent of O'Connor's "Shakespearean" language, not a word of which was allowed to be changed in her staging.

Our conversation delved into the philosophical and religious meaning of O'Connor's work and also the artistic challenges in presenting such complex stories in dramatic fashion, putting such masterful language in the voices of today's students.

Kennesaw's production and Robinson's enthusiasm--along with the much-ballyhooed new O'Connor biography by Brad Gooch--have already had the effect on at least one longtime O'Connor fan (yours truly) that all literary interpretation should: it has sent me back to the stories, with, if possible, an even greater appreciation for the brilliance of the work.

The interview airs on Sunday, March 29 at 8 p.m.

For more information about Kennesaw State's production of "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and "A View of the Woods" visit http://www.kennesaw.edu/theatre/EverythingThatRises/place.html.

This has been a busy and exciting week for the Georgia Literary Community. On Tuesday, David Bottoms and Coleman Barks were inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, along with posthumous inductees Robert Burch and Raymond Andrews. I’ve written about all four of these artists in this space before, so let me only add that it was wonderful to see the inductees and their families take in the honor, which is presented by the UGA Library.

I made it back to the Decatur Public Library main branch by Tuesday evening for the last of Dr. Pearl McHaney’s free public lectures on the work of Eudora Welty. The charming and sublimely genius Welty would turn 100 on April 13, and though she is no longer with us, there will be a big birthday party at Georgia State’s Rialto Center anyway. Rumor has it there will be readings by Tom Key and Brenda Bynum, and cakes made from recipes featured in some of Welty’s characters’ cookbooks. If everything goes well, expect to hear a special edition of Cover to Cover devoted to Welty and featuring Dr. McHaney (one of the leading Welty scholars in the world) just before the occasion. So pull out your copy of The Optomist’s Daughter and brush up!

Finally, it was a great pleasure to witness the launch of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. The scholarly institute is the brainchild of distinguished scholar of American and African-American culture, Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd. Visiting scholars are already studying, exploring and writing under the organization’s auspices and Dr. Byrd has recently edited a new volume of Johnson’s work. The event featured pledges of cooperative commitment from key leaders in the community, including Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall from Spelman, Douglass Shipman from the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and others. Mayor Shirley Franklin was spotted at the ceremony, which featured performances by the wonderful Vega String Quartet and the vocal spectacle Elder Delesslyn Kennebrew, as well as a beautiful Occasional poem by Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethewey. Dr. Byrd insists the Institute will not be only an organization of scholarship but also one of activism, and we wish him continued success in his endeavor.

From Frank Reiss:

N. Frank Daniels is an extremely serious writer and, seemingly, a very grounded young man. He acknowledges that his novel--about a group of young people mixed-up in Atlanta's drug culture in the 1990s--is largely autobiographical. It's a pretty jarring experience to be sitting down with such a gentle-seeming soul and knowing, after reading Futureproof, the brutal reality that was his young life.

He is now sober, and, in addition to having his first novel published, has completed a second novel, is working on a memoir , is raising two children and seems, after a long, arduous process, to have found his place in the world, among fellow writers (now friends) like Jay McInerney, Jerry Stahl and James Frey.

Daniels talked about his literary lineage, citing Richard Wright and Hubert Selby, Jr. among his influences, and he shared his fascinating account of how his book, originally posted online and then self-published, eventually found its way to a major publishing house, HarperPerennial, whom Daniels calls "the Grove Press of the new milennium." Grove, incidentally, published Selby's masterpiece of drug-addiction, Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Futureproof is not for everybody. But for a terrifyingly real portrait of an easily ignored subculture that exists right in our midst, among truly lost souls--and mere children at that, you couldn't ask for a better guide than N. Frank Daniels.

Join Frank Reiss as he interviews N. Frank Daniels on this weekend's Cover to Cover, Sunday at 8PM. Only on Georgia Public Broadcasting.