Photo by Adrian Walker.
“A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” by John Gregory Brown, follows the odyssey of lost and distraught New Orleans teacher Henry Garrett, whose escape from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina lands him in a southwest Virginia motel. The town doctor tells him that Marimore is the worst place to hold on to your reputation. “The worst place in the world … but I’ll tell you what. It’s about the best place to be once you’ve gone ahead and lost it.” Garrett’s trying to piece himself together along with the tattered remnants of his marriage. The mystery of a dead man’s epic poem may provide a ladder for Garrett to climb out of his misery. Brown, a New Orleans native, is a professor at Sweet Briar College. (Hardback, Little, Brown, $26)
“Exposure,” by Katy Resch George, is 10 short stories composed in riveting detail, compressing entire volumes of backstory in a few well-chosen sentences, packing these pieces with emotional weight in excess of their size. The Richmond resident’s first published collection includes such vivid studies as in “The Third Prophecy,” where the female narrator describes Jake, a troubled bad boy she once dated, “who shaved his head with a hunting blade.” She inquires of the reader, “Have you ever tripped in public, and felt relieved from embarrassment because no one saw you — then you went and told the first person you talked to that you just fell?” (Softcover, Kore Press, $18).
“Grace,” by Howard Owen, a veteran Richmond journalist, and this his 14th novel, takes crisp-talking police beat reporter Willie Black on a fifth outing through the city’s dark spaces — both in the world and of the spirit. Black is a social outsider who nonetheless lives at the Prestwould (he rents from his third ex-wife), and sublets to the building’s maintenance man. The case: Artesian Cole, an honors student from the city’s poor East End, is first missing and then dead. How the case connects to an apparent pattern is Black’s present obsession. The pursuit takes the journo through Richmond, which is more than backdrop — it’s a character, too. Black describes the up-and-down but enduring relationship with Cindy, his girlfriend: “We overlook each other’s faults. She overlooks my drinking and smoking and flirting. I overlook the fact that she is so adorable she can’t possibly put up with me for much longer.” (Hardcover, The Permanent Press, $28).
“Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings,” by Stephen O’Connor, is a monumental 610-page tour-de-force that uses short, surreal juxtapositions in vivid hallucinatory scenes (Jefferson in a movie theater watching his own biopic, accompanied by James and Dolley Madison) against the brutal realities of 18th-century life and slavery. The language varies between ornate descriptions to stripped-down details. The narrative is broken up in years and styles, pivoting between deep-researched historical and marvelous fantastical. O’Connor wondered how Hemings, Jefferson’s later-life lover and more than 30 years his junior, contended with her predicament, “on a scale between love and Stockholm Syndrome,” he recently said. Jefferson here is part diabolical genius, part wooly-minded art student, and unable to live up to his own lofty rhetoric. O’Connor gives Hemings voice, too, writing a memoir following his death, using Jefferson’s quill and his spectacles — items she inherited from his estate. (Hardcover, Viking, $37).
“Richmond Through the 20th Century,” by Amy Waters Yarinske, tells the pictorial story of the city’s growth from a smoky industrial center hung up on a lost war, to a thriving cultural center that maintains an enduring sense of history. One gets the sense of the city tearing down and building up. The images are culled from postcards, archives and personal collections. The narrative breaks the century into quarters. Some of the striking pictures: Broad and Eighth streets in 1905 (p. 27); larkish motorcycle riders posed in front of Pinnell’s (p. 95); and p. 99, top, Feb. 22, 1960, 58-year-old African-American Ruth E. Tinsley, forcibly hauled across Broad Street by Richmond police with dogs, who were breaking up racial segregation protests. (Softbound, part of Fonthill Media’s America Through Time series, $25.99).
