The 16th Annual Poets House Showcase recently featured all of the new poetry books published in the United States this year, including books by NewSouth authors. More than 2,000 titles were on display from April 12-19 at the historic Jefferson Market Library.

According to Poets House website, “The Showcase provides writers, readers, and publishers with a fascinating vantage point from which to assess publishing and design trends and linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophical shifts … the Showcase reflects Poets House’s mission to make the range of modern poetry available to the public and to stimulate public dialogue on issues of poetry and culture.” All the poetry book titles can be found in the fully-searchable online Directory of American Poetry Books featuring over 20,000 poetry titles published between 1990 and 2006.

NewSouth poetry books present in the directory and at the showcase include:

The World According to Whiskey: Tom House’s poems are tough and graphic, and they bear witness to the underbelly of a Southern culture with no room for the disenfranchised—the poor, the weird, and the broke.

And All the Layered Light: Using the settings and imagery of his native rural Kentucky, Charles Semones creates a collection of poems that transcend time and place. It’s Southern Gothic writing at its finest.

Century of the Death of the Rose: The works of the late Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade are presented in English and the original Spanish in this volume of his poetry, selected and translated by Steven Ford Brown.

February Mission: Jim Harrell’s volume of poetry and plays ranges back in time over his own rich history, visiting places he’s been and wars he’s experienced, friendships shared and loves lost, and life on the littoral coast, which inspires much of his work and describes his emotional home.

Straying Toward Home: The poems, like the title of this book, are delicious paradoxes. James Mersmann’s vivid images and beneficent intelligence are a continuous pleasure. 

It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers: Sue Walker imagines a friendship and conversation with McCullers as they share memories of two women growing up in the Deep South, McCullers in Georgia and Walker in Alabama.

One More River to Cross: The late John Beecher’s powerful, spare verse is brought together in this collection, compiled and edited by Steven Ford Brown.

To learn more or to search the Directory of American Poetry Books, check out the Poets House website. Find all the above titles and more at NewSouth Books, Amazon. com, or your favorite local or online retailer. 

Congratulations to former NewSouth intern Matthew Nelson, who will be working in Santa Monica, California, this semester as a script-reading intern for Lions Gate Entertainment.

Matt was an intern for NewSouth in summer 2007 while at student at Sewanee: The University of the South. Matt’s duties at NewSouth included assisting with editorial projects, filling sales orders, and considering and advising on incoming manuscripts.

NewSouth offers a limited number of internships each semester. Because of our small staff and collaborative atmosphere, NewSouth interns get a hands-on chance to work in many aspects of the publishing industry, and learn in detail how a book moves from the proposal stage to the finished product. For internship inquiries, please call Managing Editor Brian Seidman at 334-834-3556.

Senator Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday in Philadelphia has been widely quoted and discussed. Historian John Hope Franklin called it one of the most candid and significant public statements on race in American political history. NewSouth Books—which publishes widely on civil rights and racial and political issues—agrees and has formatted Obama’s complete text (which was released to the news media) into an easy to download and print ebook package. It is available for free download here.

NewSouth Books and publisher Suzanne La Rosa have been profiled in the Courier-Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, where La Rosa is based. In the article “Publishing with a Purpose” by Tamara Ikenberg, Publishers Weekly correspondent Edward Nawotka praises NewSouth as “a good example of a small, niche publisher, and they make a go of it in a publishing scene that is dominated by three or four national conglomerates.” From the article:

The house is doing well in a time when people are reading less for leisure, and major publishing houses are only interested in tried-and-true mega-selling scribes, such as Danielle Steele, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling or the newest wunderkind like Myla Goldberg.

“New York City publishers are taking the safer course,” La Rosa said. “It’s been hard for them too. What that means for us, is all the people who used to be published by major New York houses are looking for new publishers. I view that as an opportunity. We can acquire writers who formerly would’ve been published by Simon & Schuster. Now, if an NYC house can’t sell 50,000 copies of a book, they won’t be considered. There are a lot of extremely gifted authors who will sell 42,000 copies, and that’s where we come in.”

Publishers Weekly’s Nawotka also praises NewSouth’s eclectic collection of titles. Most contain civil-rights or cultural-awareness angles, but they take very different forms.

The 2004 release Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent approaches civil-rights issues through a series of essays by such respected writers as Kentucky native and social historian John Egerton and civil-liberties attorney John Pollitt. [Note: A second volume, American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Peril and Promise, will be released this month from NewSouth Books.]

A more recent release, the 2006 novel Grievances, is based on a true story and was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning former Charlotte Observer reporter Mark Ethridge. It addresses Southern equality issues through the suspenseful tale of a newspaper reporter who sets out to find the truth behind the shooting of a 13-year-old African-American boy in fictional Hirtsboro, S.C. Ethridge, grandson of former Courier-Journal publisher Mark F. Ethridge, brings to the book an inside-newspaper humor and deft sense of the South …

“We want books that open a window on to a culture,” La Rosa said. “I love stories about communities, especially when you don’t know much about them.”

A NewSouth book that beautifully fits that bill is the Jewish-themed children’s book Shlemiel Crooks, written by Anna Olswanger and illustrated by Paula Goodman Koz. A clever twist on the Passover tale, Crooks was inspired by a 1919 newspaper article from The St. Louis Jewish Record, and uncovers St. Louis’ Jewish community in the early 1900s.

The new release Poor Man’s Provence by beloved Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson uncovers Cajun Louisiana and, as Johnson notes, is in the tradition of Peter Mayle’s 1991 best-seller A Year in Provence. That book is a true story portraying Mayle as a fish out of water in the south of France …

NewSouth also isn’t afraid to create political waves.

its 2006 book Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, by [John] Egerton, with its swirling gilded edges, looks like an ancient relic, save for the familiar, caricatured faces on the cover. It’s George W. Bush leading his insane-looking pals down a desert road. The doomsday fable is as creative as it is controversial. The “Bush King’s” cronies have menacingly funny monikers like Dick Chaingang and Donald Rumsfailed. Ali Dubyiah is not entirely kind to the Dems either. President Clinton is lasciviously labeled “King Zip.”

“I’ve known Randall Williams for a great many years, and when I decided to write that book — more or less in the heat of passion — I called Randall because he was the only publisher I knew who could possibly turn something around as quickly as that,” said Egerton, uncle of Courier-Journal theater critic Judith Egerton.

Read the full article from The Courier-Journal.

The full line of NewSouth Books titles are available from your favorite local book retailer, online, or at www.newsouthbooks.com.

NewSouth authors Charlotte Miller and Billie Jean Young have both contributed to a new anthology, An Alabama Christmas, from Cliff Road Books.

Miller’s story, also called “An Alabama Christmas,” is the story of a young girl’s Christmas in the Depression-era South, and her father’s struggle to make her Christmas dreams come true. Young’s story is entitled “Fireplace Dolls.” Learn more about the anthology at the Cliff Road Books website, www.cliffroadbooks.com.

Charlotte Miller is the author of Behold, This Dreamer, There is a River, and Through a Glass, Darkly from NewSouth Books. Billie Jean Young is the author of Fear Not the Fall from NewSouth Books. All of these titles are available from your favorite local or online retailer, or at the links above.

NewSouth Books is pleased to offer extended search capabilities for our books, using new Google Book Search tools. Readers can now search the full text of NewSouth Books, view pages and photographs from the books online, and even see reviews and references to NewSouth Books from across the web.

Select NewSouth book pages feature Google Book search boxes, including the new edition of Alabama storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham’s Alabama, One Big Front Porch; Bill Elder’s memoir of desegregating college athletics, All Guts and No Glory, and Gerald Duff’s new collection of award-winning short stories, Fire Ants.

To search the text of all our NewSouth titles, visit our Titles in Print page.

NewSouth Books titles are available from your favorite local or online book retailer, or from www.newsouthbooks.com.

Writer Hans Koning–author of thirteen novels, ten non-fiction books, three plays, two translations, and a children���s book–died on April 13 at home in Easton, Connecticut. Born in Amsterdam, he came to the United States in 1951, and published his first novel, The Affair, in 1958.

In 2001, we published his thirteenth novel, Zeeland or Elective Concurrences. Shortly thereafter, we began the Hans Koning reprint series with the idea of bringing all of Koning’s works back into print. Beginning in 2002, NewSouth released Koning’s The Affair, An American Romance, The Petersburg-Cannes Express, A Walk with Love and Death, and I Know What I’m Doing; the latest, The Kleber Flight, originally published in 1981, was released by NewSouth in fall 2006.

Koning was among the first authors signed by NewSouth Books. A lively and lasting friendship developed based on mutual respect for the causes we cared about and our commitment to taking chances in the twin worlds of politics and publishing. To our way of thinking, Koning was quintessentially engage. He eschewed mere dinner-table rhetoric about the issues of the day in favor of personal activism that included his resistance work in WWII, anti-Vietnam War activities, and the hosting of a radio program called “Literary Discord.” His convictions about human rights animated his life and his stories, often obscuring the elegance of his pen and the luminous prose moments he delivered in which our human and sexual connectedness are described. His perspective on the place where politics and history and personal choice intersect was unique and affecting. Curious, articulate, and writing to the end, NewSouth is profoundly honored to represent him.

Hans Koning is remembered in The New York Times, the International Herald, and the Hartford Courant, as well as by his family at his website, www.hanskoning.net.

Former Alabama Governor John Patterson is subject of a forthcoming biography by historian Warren Trest (Wings of Denial), called Nobody But the People, to be published by NewSouth Books in 2008. Patterson is also the subject of a new documentary, called In the Wake of the Assassins. The film by Robert Clem will be shown in Montgomery on May 21 at 4pm at Alabama Department of Archives and History; a reception follows. For more information, call the Friends of the Alabama Archives at 334-242-4363.

Columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, author of the upcoming Poor Man’s Provence from NewSouth Books, spoke this past Thursday at the Alabama Department of Archives and History’s monthly Architreats program. Darryn Simmons of the Montgomery Advertiser wrote, “Johnson answered questions from die-hard fans in the audience that religiously read her weekly column, which appears Mondays in the Montgomery Advertiser. She also kept the crowd laughing as she told stories about her career.” From the article:

Johnson is currently working on a book about the Cajun culture in Louisiana, [Poor Man's Provence].

“It’s the most different place you can go without a passport,” she said.

Johnson said she found a number of similarities between the French-influenced culture there and the rest of the South, including a common obsession with art and food.

“Where else do you spend hours on preparing a meal besides Paris and Montgomery?” she said.

See the full article at the Montgomery Advertiser website.

Poor Man’s Provence will be available in Spring 2007 from NewSouth Books. For more information, call NewSouth directly at (866) 639-7688.

NewSouth author Wade Hall has made a generous donation to The University of Alabama���s W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library. The gift, which includes books, sheet music, sound recordings and photographs, now comprises the Wade Hall Collection of Southern History and Culture.

Publisher���s Bindings Online, a digital archive project which collects decorative book bindings from 1815-1930, has selected over 1,000 titles from the Wade Hall Collection for the project, including many signed first-edition books by Southern authors. “I am delighted with the many dimensions being discovered in my collections by the faculty of the library,” said Dr. Hall, “as well as the students, scholars and historians who are using my donations to the University of Alabama.”

To learn more about Publisher���s Bindings Online and Dr. Hall, visit the PBO Website. Wade Hall���s NewSouth publications are available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.