Jane Rule Burdine, with Wendy McDaris & Steve Yarbrough, signs Delta Deep Down.

In Delta Deep Down, photographer Jane Rule Burdine. offers an unforgettable portrait of a quintessential Mississippi place and the people who abide in it.

Yale Younger Poet, Richard Siken, signs Crush.

Not every poet launches his career by winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and not every Yale Younger Poet makes the impression Siken has made (he got a National Book Critics Circle nomination, for instance). Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, his verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain: “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake/ and dress them in warm clothes again./ How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running/ Until they forget that they are horses.”

Brock Clarke reads and signs An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England.

Clarke's fourth book (after the story collection Carrying the Torch) is the delightfully dark story of Sam Pulsifer, the “accidental arsonist and murderer” narrator who leads readers through a multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life. Growing up in Amherst, Mass., with an editor for a father and an English teacher for a mother, Sam was fed endless stories that fueled (literally and figuratively) the rest of his life. Thus, the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, story and reality become the landscape for amusing and provocative adventures that begin when, at age 18, Sam accidentally torches the Emily Dickinson Homestead, killing two people. After serving 10 years, Sam tries to distance himself from his past through college, employment, marriage and fatherhood, but he eventually winds up back in his parents' home, separated from his wife and jobless. When more literary landmarks go up in flames, Sam is the likely suspect, and his determination to find the actual arsonist uncovers family secrets and more than a bit about human nature. Sam is equal parts fall guy and tour guide in this bighearted and wily jolt to the American literary legacy.

Porter Shreve reads and signs When The White House Was Ours.

A loosely autobiographical story of free love and family set against the hopeful but disappointing Carter presidency, Shreve's third novel skillfully interweaves the story of teenager Daniel Truitt with that of the United States at a crossroads. On the eve of the nation's bicentennial, the Truitts relocate to a deteriorating Washington, D.C., mansion after Daniel's father, Pete, loses yet another teaching job. Pete plans to launch an experimental school where students and teachers are equal, but Daniel's mother, Valerie, weary of their peripatetic life and her husband's failures, sees the school as their last chance. Soon, Valerie's hippie brother shows up, bringing trouble with him in the form of his wife and her lover. When the ragtag group manages to attract a few students for Our House, as the school is named, the family's hope for success grows in proportion to its members' enthusiasm for a Democratic president. The political backdrop is perfectly played, as is the bittersweet nostalgia that makes the book and its freewheeling gang irresistible.

Clyde Edgerton wil be reading The Bible Salesman.

In this rollicking, rambling road novel of the post-WWII South, Preston Clearwater, a dead ringer for Clark Gable, steals cars and passes himself off as an undercover FBI agent. His mark is nave 20-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, whom Preston convinces to drive the cars to various paint shops (telling Henry that they have infiltrated a car-theft ring), while Preston follows in his own legally registered Chrysler. Preston undertakes more audacious forms of crime, while earnest Henry has a reunion with his fundamentalist family, listens to his cousin's scheme to market a new ad gimmick (called “the bumper sticker”), falls in love with roadside fruit-stand proprietor Marlene Greene and even manages to sell a few Bibles along the way. The hitch is his involvement with Preston: Henry will have to get wise to preserve all he has gained. Too many flashbacks to Henry's Baptist roots slow him down on the way to the novel's suspenseful climax and moving epilogue, but the result is one of the better takes on Southern Bible salesman buddy stories since Moses Pray and Addie Pray of Paper Moon.

Haven Kimmel will be reading and signing her newest book, Iodine.

Haven Kimmel's novel Iodine is both a psychological thriller and a literary tour de force. College senior Trace Pennington--critic of Freud, admirer of Jung, and bedazzled fan of James Hillman--has eked out a strange but functional existence in the years since she ran away from home. When she falls in love, however, she is forced to confront suppressed memories of her bizarre and brutal childhood. Through Trace, heroine and unreliable narrator extraordinaire, Kimmel traverses layers of delusion to plumb the long lasting effects of trauma and the depths of mental illness, ultimately arriving at a place of clarity and hope. Kimmel's adept and lyrical prose creates a sizzling psychological gothic landscape that is moving, harrowing, and indelible. MM

Reserve your signed copy today by calling (662) 236-2262, or order online.

Season premier of Thacker Mountain Radio

Monique Truong will discuss and sign Book of Salt.  

Bich Min Nyguen will discuss and sign Stealing Buddha's Dinner.  

Jim Dees will be reading and signing his book Lies and Other Truths: Rants, Raves, Low-Lifes and Highballs.

With a healthy but not slavish attention to veracity, a popular southern humorist casts an evil eye on the New Millennium South in this entertaining collection of essays that “acts rurally but swears globally.” Topics range from a visit to Al Green’s church in Memphis, to the fate of the Cypress Garden mermaids, to the inventor of sweat—Richard M. Nixon. Dees takes us through the southern seasons and the majesty of deer at dawn, the true meaning of homegrown tomatoes, how to ruin a perfectly good fishing hole, and the fragile physics of gin and tonic. Essays titled "My Dog Can Mix Drinks," "I Am the Love Child of James Brown," and "Things I Have Smelled While Bicycling," offer a fresh perspective on life in and around Oxford, Mississippi.

 Joseph B. Atkins will be at Off Square Books to sign his latest book, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press.

In gathering materials for this book, University of Mississippi professor Joseph B. Atkins crisscrossed the region, interviewing workers, managers, labor organizers, immigrants, activists, and journalists, and canvassing labor archives. Covering for the Bosses is a personal journey by a textile worker’s son, who worked on tobacco farms and in textile plants as a young man and later became a widely published journalist. Atkins details the fall of the once dominant textile industry, explores the advent of the “Detroit South,” and discusses the effects of the influx of millions of immigrant workers. This book shows how, with few exceptions, the press has been a key partner in the powerful alliance of business and political interests that keep the South the nation’s least-unionized region.