Music of the Swamp (Front Porch Paperbacks) - Softcover

Nordan, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565120167 ISBN 13: 9781565120167

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1992

Synopsis

“This is not merely a stellar book. It is absolute ballad put to page.” -Southern LivingLewis Nordan's fiction invents its own world--always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy's utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father--a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin's world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.An Ala Notable BookMississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award

About this title

About the Author:

Lewis Nordan was a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for many years and the author of seven books of fiction and a memoir. His awards include three American Library Association Notable Book citations, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction, the Mississippi Authors Award for fiction, and the Southern Book Critics Award for fiction. He died in 2012.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In Nordan's third collection (Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, 1983; The All-Girl Football Team, 1986)--interrelated stories about Sugar Mecklin's enchanted 11th year--spooky memento mori haunt the child's world of the town of Arrow Catcher on the Mississippi Delta. Sugar and a pal find a dead man's body in the surrounding swamp, where ``mice sing'' and a wading cow bellows in a tenor voice; then, with a folding shovel, Sugar unearths what seems to be a well-preserved female corpse in a glass coffin beneath his parents' house. He rides on a ``snail-slow freight train'' back and forth to Greenville, where the first electrocution in recent Mississippi history is scheduled to take place, and about which- -because a black man has been condemned to death--no one but Sugar seems to care. Later, Sugar's father, with the boy in tow, having dropped in at the local drugstore to pick up a hangover remedy, accidentally administers a fatal dose of morphine to his friend, the addicted druggist. Meanwhile, the same father, a sweet man who never seems able to say or do what he intends, drinks alcoholically every afternoon; and Sugar's mother, who loves both of them to distraction, sadly laments for the boy's father's drunkenness and ill luck. None of this black-humored drama is uncommon to southern fiction, but Nordan brings wit, warmth, elegance, grace, and an original, persuasive love of his hidebound, inarticulate characters to territory previously covered by Faulkner, O'Connor, and especially (A Member of the Wedding) McCullers. Not the first to get where it goes: but, even so, a wonderful and memorable collection. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1565120167
• ISBN 13: 9781565120167
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224