Don Noble's Book Reviews

 The Moon and the Stars; New and Collected Stories

Author: Marian Carcache

Introduction by Don Noble

Publisher: Solomon & George Publishers

Pages: 82

Price: $15.00 (Paper)

Over a period of years I had enjoyed Marian Carcache’s stories in collections like “Belles Lettres,” “Chinaberries and Crows” and “Climbing Mt. Cheaha,” so it was a pleasure to say “yes” when I was asked to write an Introduction for this volume. In this review I will repeat that these 14 stories are clever, insightful, sometimes touching, often very funny.

“Local Souls: Novellas”

Author: Allan Gurganus

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corp.

Pages: 344

Price: $25.95 (Cloth)

Allan Gurganus, after two big novels, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” and “Plays Well with Others,” which is set in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in New York, has turned increasingly to the long, long story, the novella. For him, as for Henry James, it is the perfect form, the piece readable in one sitting, perhaps between dinner and bedtime, with no mood-destroying interruptions.

“Justice for All”

Author: Christy Kyser Truitt

Publisher: Dunham Books

Pages: 268

Price: $14.99 (paper)

“Justice for All” is a legal thriller and a novel of young people overcoming personal and family difficulties and falling in love, but it is, throughout, a thoroughly wholesome Christian novel.

Truitt has been praised by best-selling author Patti Callahan Henry as “a strong new voice in Christian fiction.”

“Stanislavski in Ireland: Focus at Fifty”

Editors: Brian McAvera and Steven Dedalus Burch

Publisher: Carysfort

Press Pages: 245

Price: $37.95

An American girl, Deirdre O’Connell, is the heroine of this unusual history of a Dublin theatre.

Born and raised in the Bronx, of Irish immigrant parents, O’Connell studied acting at the New York Dramatic Workshop and then with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. There she was introduced to The Method, the Stanislavski System, which became the ruling passion of the rest of her life.

“The Melody of Secrets”

Author: Jeffrey Stepakoff

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press

Pages: 261

Price: $24.99 (Cloth)

“Pickett’s Charge: A Novel”

Author: Charles McNair

Publisher: Livingston Press

Pages: 331

Price: $30.00 (Cloth), $18.95 (Trade Paper)

In 1994 McNair’s first novel, “Land O’Goshen,” a dystopian novel set in the future, made a nice little stir. McNair’s career was launched.

Now after a 19-year silence while he worked successfully at public relations in Atlanta, McNair is back with a BIG novel, this time exploring, in an epic that unspools over one hundred years, the ideas of time, history, tradition and revenge.

Wittgenstein’s Lolita: Short Stories from William Gay”

Author: William Gay

Publisher: Wild Dog Press

Pages: 64

Price: $10.00 (Paper)

Bursting onto the Southern literary scene in 1998 at the age of 55 with, first, stories and then the novel “The Long Home,” William Gay published four books, three novels and the story collection “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down.”

“The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindburgh and the Epic Age of Flight”

Author: Winston Groom

Publisher: National Geographic Society

Pages: 464

Price: $30.00 (Cloth)

Winston Groom’s historical nonfiction is increasingly a great reading pleasure. Now a master of this form, he researches extensively, assimilates mountains of material and then tells the stories, smoothly, engagingly.

“Camp Redemption: A Novel”

Author: Raymond L. Atkins

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Pages: 271

Price: $25.00 (Cloth)

Raymond Atkins, an English instructor at Georgia Northwestern Technical College, has a nice little career going.

“The Front Porch Prophet” (2008) won Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel.

His second, “Sorrow Wood” (2009), has won The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction, given by Mercer University. Sams’ best-known novels are “Run with the Horsemen” (1982) and “The Whisper of the River” (1984).

  “The Tilted World”
Authors: Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 320
Price: $25.99 (Cloth)

In Oxford, Mississippi, Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly both write and teach writing at Ole Miss.

Tom, a novelist, is best known for “Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter,” “Hell at the Breech” and other works of fiction containing considerable violence and cruelty.

She Needed Killing: Book 3 in the Needed Killing Series

Author: Bill Fitts

Publisher: Borgo Publishing 2013

Pages: 363

Price: $12.95 (Paper

Retired from the University of Alabama , Bill Fitts has actually done what so many threaten; he has taken up writing murder mysteries.

“Skin in the Game”

Author: R.P. Finch

Publisher: Livingston Press

Pages: 327

Price: $18.95 (Cloth)

“Inside the Vault: The Paul W. Bryant Collection”

Author: Taylor Watson; Foreword by Ken Gaddy

Publisher: The Paul W. Bryant Museum

Pages: 122

Price: $29.95 (Cloth)

(Available at the Museum and online at http://bryant100.com/)

“The Governor’s Lady”

Author: Robert Inman

Publisher: John F. Blair

Pages: 331

Price: $26.95 (Cloth)

Novelist Bob Inman in interviews likes to describe himself as a simple storyteller, without overt pretensions to creating “literature.” This is a seemingly modest declaration but, really, being a first-rate storyteller is a fine achievement, harder than it looks. Indeed it should not look hard at all, and if the story fails to hold the reader’s interest it won’t matter if it is “literature” or not; few will read the book.

“Moonrise: A Novel”

Author: Cassandra King

Publisher: Maiden Lane Press

Pages: 384 

Price: $26.95 (Cloth)

Cassandra King has just published her fifth novel, “Moonrise,” and it is different from anything she has done before.

This is not only exciting, it is risky.