Earlier this month, NewSouth released award-winning author Gerald Duff’s novel Coasters and his short story collection Fire Ants as ebooks, along with individual ebooks of each of Fire Ants‘ fifteen stories, and Duff’s new short essay Fugitive Days. We’re terrifically proud to offer these books by Duff, whose fiction Publishers Weekly praised for “wit and subtlety as simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon.” But Fire Ants, Coasters, and Fugitive Days are just a few of Duff’s books earning praise from all corners.

Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory is Gerald Duff’s memoir, published by TCU Press in 2011. Steven Whitton of the Anniston Star called Home Truths “just as wickedly comic and startling as [Fire Ants]” and Library Journal‘s Julie Kane said “Duff’s account of a life led against the grain in East Texas is keenly thematic, peppered with insightful accounts of the seemingly ordinary.” In Home Truths, Duff relates his childhood move to rural East Texas after his father Big Willie Duff lost his job, and how lying to survive — often in poverty — informed his later life as a writer and professor.

Moon City Press published Duff’s novel Blue Sabine also in 2011. Named for the Sabine River on the border of Texas and Louisiana, Blue Sabine tells the generational story of the Holt family in their own words, especially the women, from 1867 to the present.

“In this beautifully written, wondrously told novel,” writes the Southern Historical Quarterly‘s Steven Davis, “one family’s personal history merges with the larger currents of Texan and American history, creating a twisting, turning narrative that is as aesthetically satisfying as it is historically resonant.” Vanessa Blakeslee of the Kenyon Review wrote that Blue Sabine “will haunt you long after you’ve closed its pages.” Some of the chapters within Blue Sabine were inspired by Duff’s stories in Fire Ants.

In 2012, the UL Press published Duff’s new novel Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League, which fictionalizes the 1935 Texas minor league team the Rayne Rice Birds and their pitcher Gemar Batiste. Batiste, a Native American, is constantly confronted with a sense of difference between himself and his teammates — not solely for the honor in which he imbues the game of baseball.

Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says “Duff gives readers who watch baseball on television new insight into the game as experienced by those who play it on the field”; on the Plaza de Armas website, Rod Davis (Corina’s Way, NewSouth Books) adds that “Duff’s new novel is about something else altogether: the purity of artistic passion.” ForeWord Reviews recently named Dirty Rice a finalist for their 2012 Best of the Year Award in the Adult Fiction category.

Finally, Duff’s Decoration Day and Other Short Stories, from the Stephen F. Austin State University Press, is a new collection with stories also related to Blue Sabine and Fire Ants, set in locations ranging from the piney woods of Deep East Texas, to the mean streets of Memphis, to the suburbs of Washington, DC.

You can connect with Gerald Duff on his website, www.geraldduff.com, and learn more about Fire Ants, Coasters, and Fugitive Days from NewSouth Books.

Publishers Weekly has praised Gerald Duff’s fiction for “wit and subtlety as simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon.” NewSouth has a great selection of Duff’s books in print — and now as ebooks, too! Enjoy Duff’s novel Coasters, his collection of short stories, Fire Ants, and his new ebook “short,” Fugitive Days, all as ebooks, available for all major e-readers and devices.

In addition, each of Duff’s stories from Fire Ants are available as individual ebooks for only $0.99. This includes the title story, “Fire Ants,” which won the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine, was cited in Best American Short Stories, and republished in The Editors’ Choice: New American Stories. This is a great way to check out Duff’s fiction — we know you’ll be hooked.

Duff’s first short story collection, Fire Ants and Other Stories, ranges in settings from the marshes and pine barrens of East Texas to the row houses of Baltimore, and in time from the Civil War to the present day. Each story conjures portraits of people captive to private delusions and bound to visions of what might be or might have been, struggling for escape and redemption. Highly comic and deeply serious, the stories collected in Fire Ants are perfect gems for reading individually or all together.

Fire Ants‘s stories include:

* The Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love

* The Apple and the Aspirin Tablet

* Bad Medicine

* Believing in Memphis

* The Bliss of Solitude

* Charm City

* Fire Ants

* Maryland, My Maryland

* A Mouth Full of Money

* The Officer Responding

* A Perfect Man

* Redemption

* The Road to Damascus

* Texas Wherever You Look

* The Way a Blind Man Tracks Light

Coasters follows Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, who moves back in with his widowed father. But even Waylon’s father is dating again, and the pressures on Waylon are great enough that he might not be able to just coast through another year. Humorous and melancholy, Gerald Duff’s Coasters perfectly presents the ennui of contemporary life in the suburbs of the petroleum-chemical corridor that stretches along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Mississippi.

In Fugitive Days, Duff recalls chance encounters with such literary figures as Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle. In his meetings with the poets, Duff finds the humanity in each — some approachable, some remote, some lost in the wilds of age or overshadowed by their own legends. Duff and his readers take away with them new understanding of what writers-as-fugitives gain and sacrifice in pursuit of their craft. Poems.com named Fugitive Days one of their their “Prose Pieces of the Week.”

Learn more about Gerald Duff on his official website or on his author page from NewSouth Books.