Kirjahaku

Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff's new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory. From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff's memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old. Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff's talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career.

Playing Custer is a novel narrated from varying points of view and time, illuminating personal and political events leading up to the death of General George Armstrong Custer. The historic events are framed by the story of two men from the late twentieth century—one white and one Native American—who travel together to the annual reenactment of the battle at the Little Bighorn National Monument battlefield.Chatting during their journey, the two reenactors discuss their obsessions, personal ambitions, and failures of nerve. Interwoven with their progress toward the battle are narrations, journal entries, and first-person viewpoints from many others who were actually involved in the historic events. Soldiers and scouts for the cavalry; Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne witnesses; and wives and daughters all offer their versions of “truth,” establishing a texture and depth of irony, humor, and tragic meaning to those modern Americans driven to attempt to “play Custer.”This year—a special anniversary of the real battle—they are suddenly chosen for crucial new roles. This time, they will play Custer and Crazy Horse.All builds toward the real and reenacted final moments on the battlefield of Custer’s last stand.

Nashville Burning is set in three Aprils, those of 1967, ’68, and ’69, in Music City. In the first, after an event at Vanderbilt University featuring Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsburg, and Strom Thurmond, riots broke out in North Nashville, and that part of town burst into flame—as did self-satisfied notions about civil order and structure in Nashville and the South. The next April, after the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, Nashville riots took place again, and fire claimed its function.Nashville Burning presents characters caught up in those events and that time—events ranging from the thoughtful and sincerely well meaning to the truly felonious and certifiably insane. The novel is humorous, yet serious. Its fire is literal and emotional, and it is not to be stoked.

Nashville Burning is set in three Aprils, those of 1967, '68, and '69, in Music City. In the first, after an event at Vanderbilt University featuring Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, and Strom Thurmond, riots broke out in North Nashville, and that part of town burst into flame—as did self-satisfied notions about civil order and structure in Nashville and the South. The next April, after the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, Nashville riots took place again, and fire claimed its function. Nashville Burning presents characters caught up in those events and that time—events ranging from the thoughtful and sincerely well-meaning to the truly felonious and certifiably insane. The novel is humorous, yet serious. Its fire is literal and emotional, and it is not to be stoked.

Memphis, the Bluff City, is at the heart of Gerald Duff's hilariously violent story about lies, crimes, and those who must dig down to the ugly truths hiding beneath false claims made by movers, shakers, and criminals high and low. Memphis cops J. W. Ragsdale and Tyrone Walker spend their days and long into their nights peeling back the counterfeit claims of old wealth, gang lords, and the brutal truths of thievery, murder, and deceit. J. W., a one-time cotton farmer, now chops away in the weeds, brambles, and lies of Memphis, high and low. His African American partner, Tyrone Walker, steers a straight path whenever he's able. He believes little of what he sees, and he trusts only part of what he senses. Together in Duff's third book about the partners, J. W. and Tyrone tackle the Ku Klux Klan, crooked aristocrats, black gangs, and the many bluffs, real and imagined, proclaimed in Memphis on the Mississippi. It gets darker each day in that great and gritty town on the river called the Old Man. Ragsdale and Walker are again seeking a beam of light and a glimpse of truth. And they're not bluffing.

Blue Sabine is a story of five generations of women in the same family, told in their voices, along with those of some men of Holt blood. It is set along the Sabine River, which divides the state of Texas from Louisiana and the Deep South. From 1867 (when the Holts first came to Texas) to the present, the novel chronicles the emotional lives of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces, all bound by kinship and history. Each comes to terms with being a woman in the West, in Texas, and in her own way and her own time. In its flow and its setting of boundaries, the Sabine River comes to reflect what remains and what changes in the way the Holt women see their world and themselves. "The river forever flows, and it pulls at all it touches," one of the characters says, "yet it never leaves, and it never stays." Two twenty-first century descendants give the narrative its overall shape and connection: Clement, an award-winning movie director, and his cousin Kay-Phuong, a woman of Vietnamese and Holt lineage, who has made herself into a fashion model and actress. They have returned to the Valley of the Sabine, where the Holts have lived for almost two hundred years, to hear once more the old stories and to confirm their own part in the saga. They seek to understand and to play their role in the continuing telling and retelling of the narratives that bind them to their family and to the past.

Decoration Day and Other Stories ranges in locale from the piney woods of Deep East Texas, to the mean streets of Memphis, to the suburbs of Washington, DC. Highly comic and deeply serious, the collection reaches from the late 19th century to the present day. The title story centers on elderly sisters striving to save an unjustly accused man from a lynch mob, while at the same time fetch home a wagonload of flowering bushes to commemorate their dead in the family cemetery. Captive to private delusions and bound to dreams of what ought to be, each character in Duff's eleven stories struggles for escape, redemption, and the healing power of memory.

The two worlds of Austin Bullock collide when Chief Emory Sees the Water dies mysteriously in Lost Man Marsh, part of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in the Big Thicket of East Texas. By blood, bone, and history, Austin Bullock is now the Chief of his Nation, responsible for maintaining the welfare of his people. He left the reservation years before to teach history, to coach basketball in the white man's school, and to seek an identify apart from his Native American heritage. Now the song of the Tie Snake, the creature which lives in the dark waters of the swamp, calls Austin Bullock to his mission. Murder, tribal myth and legend, and the contemporary realities of greed and violence from the outside world force Austin Bullock to make choices he has struggled to avoid.