From Booklist
The crossroads in the title of this unique anthology refers to the intersection between southern letters and the literature of the fantastic, encompassing sf as well as fantasy. All the contributors hail from the South and constitute a diverse medley of veterans, rising stars, and relative newcomers. Sf grandmaster Gene Wolfe contributes a grisly tale of Texas voodoo in "Houston, 1943," in which a child becomes trapped in his own nightmare. "My Life Is Good," by renowned sf editor Scott Edelman, puts a physicist in the awkward position of traveling back in time to prevent singer Randy Newman (a New Orleans native) from becoming president. In "Rose," perhaps the volume's most striking entry, best-selling mainstream author Bret Lott adds another grim detail to the life of Emily Grierson, the groom-slaying heroine of Faulkner's classic "A Rose for Emily." Twenty-six entertaining tales in all, from the darkly disturbing to the bitingly satirical, showcase southern writers' enduring penchant for fusing southern sensibility and magical realism. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
As William Faulkner once observed, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." And the past of the American South lives on in a long literary tradition where fantasy and reality blur. It is evident in the writing of giants such as Faulkner himself, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Manly Wade Wellman, Truman Capote, Alice Walker, and many others. Steeped in this tradition and proud to be its inheritors, storytellers and editors F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan have gathered together stories of the unseen and magical American South by some of the most brilliantly talented Southern writers of our time.
From darkly imagined, powerful tales by Bret Lott, Lynn Pitts, Kalanu ya Salaam, Brad Watson, and Don Webb to a deeply affecting and sensual story by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, to atmospheric works by Richard Butner, James L. Cambias, and Jack McDevitt, to wildly funny stories by Scott Edelman and Michael Swanwick, these original fictions will delight readers who appreciate the unique wealth and breadth of the Southern literary tradition and its natural affinity for the fantastic. With the addition of wonderful reprinted stories by Michael Bishop, Fred Chappell, Andy Duncan, John Kessel, Kelly Link, Sena Jeter Naslund, Daniel Wallace, and Gene Wolfe, this collection is a crossroads of styles and themes where Southern and Fantastic literary traditions meet.
Together these stories paint a wide canvas of the real and mythic South in all its fabulous, terrible, joyous, chaotic uniqueness. They are set in all the Southern landscapes of the mind, from the shores of South Carolina to the city of New Orleans, from small-town Mississippi to the streets of modern Atlanta, from the ghosts of ante-bellum splendor to the shadows of what might be. The contributors range from realistic to Gothic, from magic realists to satirists. What they share in common is the South and the endless stories it inspires.
From the Back Cover
New Writing from the Southern Literary Tradition
"What Southern literature and the literature of the fantastic share is a rootedness in the particularity of place. The Mississippi of William Faulkner and Richard Wright and the Georgia of Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker are akin to Bradbury's Mars, Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Baum's Oz, and the German forests of the Brothers Grimm. All are lands simultaneously real and imagined, luminously inventive yet as accessible and specific as the reader's backyard."
---from the Introduction by F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan
Here for the first time in book form are stories by
Richard Butner
James L. Cambias
Marian Carache
F. Brett Cox
Scott Edelman
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Bret Lott
Jack McDevitt
Ian McDowell
Marian Moore
Lynn Pitts
Kalanu ya Salaam
James Sallis
Michael Swanwick
Mark L. Van Name
Brad Watson
Don Webb
Bud Webster
About the Author
F. Brett Cox is the author of many powerful works of literary fiction. A Southerner by birth, he currently lives in Vermont.
Andy Duncan has won the World Fantasy Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. His first story collection is Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. He lives near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic FROM THE PUBLISHER
As William Faulkner once observed, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." And the past of the American South lives on in a long literary tradition where fantasy and reality blur. It is evident in the writing of giants such as Faulkner himself, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Manly Wade Wellman, Truman Capote, Alice Walker, and many others. Steeped in this tradition and proud to be its inheritors, storytellers and editors F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan have gathered together stories of the unseen and magical American South by some of the most brilliantly talented Southern writers of our time. From darkly imagined, powerful tales by Bret Lott, Lynn Pitts, Kalamu ya Salaam, Brad Watson, and Don Webb to a deeply affecting and sensual story by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, to atmospheric works by Richard Butner, James L. Cambias, and Jack McDevitt, to wildly funny stories by Scott Edelman and Michael Swanwick, these original fictions will delight readers who appreciate the unique wealth and breadth of the Southern literary tradition and its natural affinity for the fantastic.
With the addition of wonderful reprinted stories by Michael Bishop, Fred Chappell, Andy Duncan, John Kessel, Kelly Link, Sena Jeter Naslund, Daniel Wallace, and Gene Wolfe, this collection is a cross-roads of styles and themes where Southern and fantastic literary traditions meet. Together these stories paint a wide canvas of the real and mythic South in all its fabulous, terrible, joyous, chaotic uniqueness. They are set in all the Southern landscapes of the mind, from the shores of South Carolina to the city of New Orleans, from small-town Mississippi to the streets of modern Atlanta, from the ghosts of antebellum splendor to the shadows of what might be. The stories range from realistic to Gothic, from magical realism to satire. What they share in common is the South and the endless stories it inspires.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
The lines between genre fiction and literary fiction are constantly blurring, as evidenced by this collection of 18 sf and fantasy stories. How readers feel about these stories will likely depend on their perception and definition of Southern literature, the book's putative focus. Cox, who has published literary criticism, essays, and reviews in many journals, and Duncan (Beluthahatchie and Other Stories), winner of the World Fantasy Award, have each contributed a story and selected living writers associated with the region, hoping that readers will respond with some sense of recognition, e.g., "That's just how I feel" or "I never thought of that before." Some of the authors will be unfamiliar to readers who don't read sf or fantasy. But others are well-known authors of general fiction-e.g., Bret Lott, Sena Jeter Naslund, Daniel Wallace, and Brad Watson-who often use elements of fantasy in their work. The great surprises are poets Honoree Fanonne Jeffers and Fred Chappell and relative newcomer Marian Carache, all of whom use economy of language and near perfect detail to create transcendent stories. Ultimately, however, the selections here feel somewhat arbitrary; no argument is made for a subgenre of Southern fantasy. Recommended only where interest warrants.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An anthology of fantasy with a pronounced southern flavor. The contributors make up a good cross-section of the field, with a handful of major genre award-winners, including Gene Wolfe, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Bishop, as well as Duncan himself. On the whole, the quality is up to the expectations that this list of names would raise. But while the stories have in common a vaguely southern setting, along with some tendency toward the gothic in subject matter, the variety of approaches may surprise some readers. Wolfe's "Houston, 1943" injects echoes of Peter Pan in a small boy's nightmare; Swanwick's "The Last Geek" brings the title character to a university as guest lecturer; and Kessel's "Every Angel is Terrifying" gives an escaped felon as his guardian a cat that fulfills his every wish. Entries by some of the less-familiar names include Scott Edelman's "My Life is Good," about aliens, obsessed with Randy Newman, who force a humorless scientist to monitor the songwriter's entire life through time travel; Bud Webster's "Christus Destitutus," where Jesus decides to die again in a homeless shelter; and Mark L. Van Name's quasi-psychedelic "Boar Lake." The anthology also includes a number of strong stories from an African-American perspective, including Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's "A Plate of Mojo," a dialect account of a plantation cook's life, and Kalamu Ya Salaam's "Alabama," a spare and stark examination of what lynching meant, not just to the victims but to the perpetrators. And on the science fiction end of the spectrum, Jack McDevitt takes a sobering look at the effects on a small town of the abandonment of the space effort. Judging by evidence here, the southernstorytelling tradition is clearly alive and well.
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