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The Poet of Tolstoy Park
by
Sonny Brewer
The
year is 1925 and 67-year-old Henry Stuart is diagnosed with consumption
and given one year to live. He decides to leave his home in Idaho and
move to an isolated ten-acre patch in Fairhope, Alabama. He constructs a
small concrete hut and believes he can overcome his fear of death by
moving from a material plane to a spiritual plane. A quiet and
philosophical novel about coming to terms with life and death. Based on
a true story, Stuart’s hut still stands today in Fairhope.
The
Bones
by Seth
Greenland
Frank Bones, an
aggressive bad-boy comic, has had a relatively successful career on the
club circuit. He wants to break into the mainstream and he gets his
opportunity when a new TV network offers him his own sitcom.
Unfortunately, Bones is ill-prepared to deal with the studio types and
hangers-on that want to change him into something he is not. Greenland,
who worked on the HBO series Arliss,
has written a funny satire on the glitz and glam of Hollywood.
March
by Geraldine
Brooks
\rooks creatively
imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in
Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little
Women. March becomes a Union chaplain and is later assigned to be a
teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves. The novel
begins with March’s cheerful letters home, but the reader gradually
learns what his family does not. March is surrounded by cruelty, racism,
and violence that he is powerless to prevent. A haunting and powerful
novel about the horrors of war.
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