I met Walker Percy for the first and only time in the spring of 1978, when he appeared at Vanderbilt to read from his upcoming novel,  The Second Coming, which would be published in 1980. Percy was a self-effacing, almost shy man.  When he had finished his reading, he answered questions, and then disappeared out the back door of Underwood Auditorium, which was part of the Vanderbilt Law School.  When I left the auditorium, on the way to work, I was startled to see him standing there, all alone, just simply taking in the campus.  I remember approaching him, introducing myse ..read more

When I was in the rare book business nearly 50 years ago, one of most faithful classes of customers at Elder’s Bookstore in Nashville really didn’t give a damn about the content of what they were buying.  These were the realtors, and what they wanted was something that looked good, that they could put on a shelf in a house they were trying to sell and project serious intellect and leatherbound beauty.  I guess the right word is “ambience.” The last time I visited Randy Elder, who owns and operates the store, I was somewhat gratified that in a world of constant change, this hadn’t cha ..read more

I started collecting Elmore Leonard novels way before I started reading him.  I bought my first one shortly after Leonard died in 2014, and since then every time I go into one of my two local Goodwill bookstores, I have looked for his stuff and have been able to find about half of his 40-odd books at reasonable prices.  Add to that the three volumes published by the Library of America (Leonard was one of a handful authors who struck a deal with the LOA before they died; some of the others being Eudora Welty and Phillip Roth) and I’ve accumulated a pretty good-sized stack, which I sta ..read more

(The Last Tribute to Cormac McCarthy) Cormac McCarthy published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, almost exactly three years after the death of William Faulkner in July 1962.  McCarthy died on June 13, 61 years after Faulkner.  Over the decades, his public image changed from the young, mustachioed recluse whose most notorious novel is reminiscent of Faulkner’s corncob sequence in Sanctuary, to an elder statesman whose violence and perversions bespoke something fundamental and unchanging about human nature. Reading many of the hundreds of obits and tributes published after McCarth ..read more

Every year in April, Tallahassee has a number of Springtime festivals.  In recent years, even with the pandemic, the one that has garnered the most attention is called “Word of South,” where the promoter, Mark Mustian, invites musicians, poets, novelists and non-fiction writers to perform in tandem.  I’ve never really been sure about the reasoning for that, but it’s popular.  Mark usually invites one or more headline writers and pairs them on stage with a musician.  Given that Tallahassee is a university (and state government) town, most of the people here lean left and so ..read more

Several months ago, I was poking through my favorite bookstore in Tallahassee, the Goodwill bookstore, when my heart stopped.  Well, figuratively, anyway.  There, in front of me on the shelf, was the unmistakable tan binding of the first American edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  I held my breath because I have bought so many books from this particular Goodwill that they know what interests me and adjust the prices upward when they see me coming.  That’s what I like to think, anyway.  The truth is that I have taught the young people who work at Goodwill a lot about bo ..read more

It is the new year in Florida.  We just inaugurated Ron DeSantis for a second term, a man who won re-election by 20 points without the support of a single major newspaper in the state.  You would think the press would be a little chastened by this, but it’s not.  The Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald have made it clear that their hatred of DeSantis is unabated.  For his part, the governor reiterated that his war against “wokeism” is going to accelerate.  Just yesterday, his office announced that he wants a financial accounting of what every public college and unive ..read more

The best week I ever spent in my life, before I got married anyway,  was in the summer of 1976, between my junior and senior years in college, when I was part of a flatboat expedition recreating the founding of Nashville, Tennessee.  The nine-week voyage began on June 6 of that year in Kingsport, in upper east Tennessee, wound its way more than  1,000 miles down the Holston, Tennessee, Ohio and Cumberland Rivers before reaching Nashville on August 7.   The “Adventure II, Journey II” project had a number of purposes: commemorating the bicentennial of the U.S., getting p ..read more

When I started this blog at Christmas, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go political, or at least any more political than was necessary to write about books.  I live in a state where the governor has become the number three national target of the left, behind Donald Trump and the justices of the Supreme Court, so maybe that promise was unrealistic from the beginning, but I still mean it.  I have a lot of friends whose political views are directly opposite of mine and we manage to co-exist and even like each other. That’s pretty rare these days, and I’d like to preserve it, if possib ..read more

I bought it late last year, read it over the winter, and have had it sitting by my bed for several months, staring at me with a kind of accusatory glare, daring me to take it on. I am quite certain that was the intent of the 1619 Project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times and teaches at Howard University (after a very controversial exit from The University of North Carolina)—to force folks, particularly White folks to deal with its subject, race in America and the legacy of slavery.  The essays in The 1619 Project originally appeared in the Times and after ..read more