Kirjahaku

Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.

Twenty years ago, T. R. Pearson's "A Short History of a Small Place" was hailed as "an absolute stunner" (Jonathan Yardley, "The Washington Post") and its hero, young Louis Benfield, was dubbed "a youth not as wry as Holden Caulfield, but certainly as observant, and with a bigger, even sadder heart" (Fran Schumer, "The New York Times"). Now, older but not necessarily wiser, Louis Benfield returns in "Glad News of the Natural World." Having moved to New York City from his hometown of Neely, North Carolina, in order to get a sense of the larger world, Louis is a modern-day Candide, looking for love and experience in all the wrong places. However, when tragedy strikes, he finds the maturity needed to be more than man enough for the job.

A Blue Ridge camping trip goes sideways for two young brothers and their minder in this sweet, brief novel of calamity and kindness circa 1968.

Deputy Ray Tatum returns in a story of Blue Ridge crime and carnage, kicked off by the discovery of a body high in the limbs of a black oak tree. Wry, laconic, and more than a little world-weary, Tatum pursues a savage killer through the rural Virginia uplands with the hot-headed assistance of Special Agent Kate LeComte. Warwolf is by turns hilarious and deeply unsettling, and T.R. Pearson's gift for capturing the true voice of the new south is on conspicuous display. The mountains of Virginia have never seemed so dangerously alive, and there remains no better company in the southern highlands than Deputy Ray Tatum.Ray Tatum also appears in Cry Me A River, Blue Ridge, and Polar -- written to be read in no particular order.

Meet Buck Aldred, a former New York City homicide detective who has opted for a quieter and simpler life in the Virginia Blue Ridge. That was the plan anyway, but when Buck noses around in an old missing person case by way of returning a favor to a neighbor, he unearths more corruption and criminal mischief than he ever suspected the rugged Blue Ridge could hide.

From the acclaimed author of A SHORT HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE and SEAWORTHY comes a wholesale departure -- a comic/horror/romance/fantasy infested with both unsavory American politicians and venomous Venetian lizards. Awash in Pearson's singular wit, Red Scare tells the headlong story of a public school biology teacher and a National Gallery curator who join forces to thwart the dire consequences of a medieval Italian curse. This novel, though slender, is packed to overflowing with priapic senators, clueless teenagers, dubious art history, clumsy quasi-romantic repartee, garish worldwide bloodletting, corrosive humor, and enough malicious scuttling reptiles to keep you from ever planting your bare feet on a darkened floor again.

Eighteen-year-old Hoyt MacKenna was born into a secret society. He's a Low Lord, a cave minder, and his job is to keep what's under down, but what's under has teeth and savage intent and would far rather be up in the world. Tough duty for a teen with a glorified bush axe, a headlamp, and an itch to be somewhere else.

The second installment in the Neely trilogy, which opens with a preposterously long sentence and goes downhill from there. Sex, gunplay, exhumed corpses. Something for everybody.

In Cry Me A River, T.R. Pearson writes of murder and its consequences in a small southern town. By book's end we of course know who done it and why, but the greatest pleasure lies in Pearson's own investigations into carnal relations, sexual jealousy, men and women, the mean, the low-down, and the dead. That he manages to do so with such winsome humor and unflagging originality is a tribute to his craft. Cry Me A River is T.R. Pearson at his finest.

A tale of two cousins and two corpses -- a double-barreled dark comedy from a well-loved "American original." (Los Angeles Times)

The bittersweet tale of Deputy Ray Tatum's search for a missing child in the wilds of the Virginia Blue Ridge.

A satire of small-town southern mores featuring Paul Tatum (Ray's cousin), introduced in Blue Ridge.

A corrupt police detective enjoying semi-retirement in Tidewater Virginia stumbles onto an unsolved homicide. Given his nature, he'd be happy to leave it unsolved, but a few of his friends and neighbors have other ideas and steer him to a chance at redemption.