With the news that John Pritchard’s novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues were now available as ebooks, Pritchard hurried to tell his eponymous character, Junior Ray Loveblood. The results were as unpredictable as Junior Ray himself …

Shortly after I found out about the forthcoming “e”-editions of Junior Ray’s books, I sent word to him that I wanted to have a chat, and when I caught up with him I began innocuously enough by asking, “How are you, Junior Ray?”

To which he replied: “That’s personal, Pritchard. But I’m fine. What did you want to talk to me about? Am I in some kinda trouble?”

“No,” I said, “you are not in trouble. I just thought you’d be delighted to learn that both of your books will soon be on Kindle . . . and I wanted to hear what you thought of it.”

“Kindle?” He asked.

“That’s right,”  I said. “Kindle.”

“Both books?

“Yes.”

“On Kindle?”

“Correct,” I said.

“Da-um!” he said. “They gon’ set em on fire?!!”

Before I could respond, he took off like Miss Ruth McGrew, back in 1952, when she found a three-foot water moccasin coiled up in her mother’s yellow Buttercup-Spode serving platter in the kitchen cabinet above the sink: “I knew it!” he shouted. “Bygod I knew it! I knew sure as shootn that sooner or later them Baptists — and all the rest of them Bible-Bangers was gon’ get around to burnin up my books!”

At this point Junior Ray was at ramming speed. “In fact,” he went on, “I had a datgum dream the other night. Yassuh. I dreamt I was out in front of the Baptist church, and almost everybody in the town, not just them Baptists but the whole Jesus-jumpin crew — Methodists, Presbyterians, one or two of them Piscobuls and about half-a-Cath’lic, plus a whole truck-load of Holy Rollers — all of em, was just a’minglin and a’dinglin, boppin and a’hoppin around a’ e-normous barn-fire [sic], havin theysevs a big ol’ churchy time chunkin Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues into the roarin flames. But . . . I heard a voice that spoke to me in both my ears, and the voice said: ‘Don’t worry, Sumbich; it’s just the special charcoal edition.’”

Though Junior Ray might be considered strong, he is most certainly not the silent type, thus it came as no surprise that he continued to continue — “The voice,” he said, “made me feel better, but I wuddn just watchin. I was standin on the sidelines handin out free copies of my books for all the hymn-hummers to th’ow in fire. I guess I figured that was the only way any of em would voluntarily request a copy. Plus, for all I knew, some good might come of it. As you know, my philosophy is that movin around and doin sumpm, even if it don’t make no sense, is better than setn down and not doin nothin even if that does makes sense — like if you was huntn turkeys. But stayin-still makes me feel like I got cooties, and that’s why I do all my turkey huntn at the Kroger store. Anyway, unless I’m watchin Law & Order, I got to be movin.”

A pause emerged. Angels passed, and I was able to explain to our Mr. Loveblood that “Kindle” — a Kindle — was one of several electronic devices through which people all over the world would be able to receive his message and that it didn’t have anything to do, except perhaps metaphorically, with starting a fire. Also I told him that I should have said his work would be coming out on e-books, which meant electronic books, and I apologized to him for my having used the word “Kindle” as a generic term and getting him all upset.

He told me he felt much better knowing that a Kindle didn’t have anything to do with kindling, “Cause,” he said, “suddenly I thought all the good I had done was gon’ go up in smoke and I wouldn have nothin to say for my life but ashes!”

Visibly relieved by the truth, Junior Ray declared he thinks making his books “electrical” is a good idea and that he’d bet the “EN-tire hist’ry of the whole f-n world woulda been a lot different if old Jehovah, hissef, hadda put the Ten Commandments on a’ e-book.”

And in the spirit of his well-known propensity for inconsistency with regard to religion, Junior Ray tossed a weenie to the notion that the early distribution of Western theology might also have been more efficiently accomplished “if all them old Apostles‘ud had some Kindles to help em spread the Word without havin to hike out through the desert in sandals and ride around on jackasses.”

“However,” he said, “They was Democrats.” Ever the master of the bon mot, Mr. Loveblood’s perceptive wires were hot.

“I guess,” he continued, “when it comes to electricity, Benjamin Franklin never ‘magined sumpm electrical like me would come from flyin a kite in a rainstorm. But that’s how things always is. They start out one way and, on down the road, they wind up unimaginable. Anyhow, just like old Ben, all you need is a spark and a door-key. Plus, they shoulda put him on a bigger bill.”

In the end, Junior Ray’s conclusion was predictably unpredictable: “I am not surprised,” he said, “that it takes a whole lot more’n a buncha paper to handle all the important stuff I want to tell people about the (!@#$%^&*) Miss’ssippi Delta. And now that I know my books is gon’ be electrified and out there everywhere, just a’sparklin in the air, any place and no place all at the same time — from us right here clear to China! — it makes me realize, as a historian, as a philosopher, and as a law-enforcement professional . . . that my mission to give readers the real picture of the Yazoo Basin, also known as THE Miss’ssippi Delta, will no longer be carried out just with words on paper which you could wrap your pork chop in. Nossuh. Things is different — because now if you was to have my electrical books in one hand and that same pork chop in the other . . . you could cook it.”

Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues are available in print and for all major ebook platforms from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite book or ebook retailer. Barnes and Noble named Junior Ray a 2005 Sensational Debut Novel, calling it “beautifully crafted … deserves shelf space beside the best southern literature.”

Memphis Magazine has named John Pritchard’s Junior Ray to their list of thirty-two “finest literary works with a Memphis flavor,” in honor of their thirty-second year of publication. Quipped Pritchard, “Junior Ray made the cut. It’s on the list with Faulkner and Foote, John Grisham and Jay MacInerny, and, of course, also with others less luminous . . . and, to be sure, less numinous.”

In his review of Junior Ray, Memphis Magazine staffer Bruce VanWyngarden writes:

Pritchard, who grew up in the Mississippi Delta and now teaches college English in Memphis, wrote this provocative novella about a racist “good ole boy” sheriff from Mississippi a couple of years back. In his first work of fiction, he lets Junior Ray Loveblood tell his story in his own profane voice. It’s a Southern redneck tour de force — a dark and telling comedy, not for the squeamish.

Pritchard’s next book starring Junior Ray Loveblood, The Yazoo Blues, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in Fall 2008. Read an excerpt now from The Yazoo Blues at the NewSouth Books website.

Junior Ray is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your local book retailer.

From Junior Ray author John Pritchard:

I, like fourteen billion other people, was distressed when the New York Herald Tribune folded. Even then, in 1966, I think we knew “The Blob” was moving in our direction. More accurately, my hero Thomas Wolfe would have called it an “inexorable” Blob, but, just as descriptively, it is an unstoppable, cheapening wave of lesserness in our ���brave new world��� of more.���

Indeed, the change ��� The Blob ��� is no longer just at the city limits; it is on our doorsteps, and now we may begin to see ourselves as inhabitants of a world in which the familiar is vanishing — newspapers turning into billboards or simply going under, mom and pop businesses smothered, and on a larger scale: the flora and fauna of the planet not showing up for work on a daily basis. The horror is not one of collapse; it���s an inundation by shallowness. And, finally, when there are no more newspapers, no more books and magazines, and everything is entirely electronic . . . the lights will go out. Then, just as it was in A.D. 476 when the last ineffectual Roman Emperor — Romulus Augustulus — bit the historic dust . . . the barbarian kingdoms will arise.

In drafting the brief response above last week to the May 2, 2007 New York Times article “Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?” by Motoko Rich, that first pop was so dark I scared myself until I remembered my persona — namely, that I always behave as though I am Don Quixote, the noble fool who will, with a smile and cup of coffee, face Tsunamis with an inner tube. I am certain this terrible change, bad as it is, cannot entirely snuff out the love and rush of the printed word. However, the currently accelerated crumpling of journals is the shape of a future, and, as such, it is what James Joyce could have meant — if he had known to mean it — when he wrote that wonderful phrase: “the ineluctable modality of the visible.”

I loved Richard Ford���s comment in the sixth graph of the article: That reviews could be continued in some newspapers [e.g., the Atlanta Journal-Constitution] “as a public service, and the fact of the matter is they are unwilling to.” Apart from a mere denunciation, his observation largely articulates the shallow, profit-driven nature of this so-called change, this ���cultural lessening��� that may signify the second End of Western Civilization — I have to give credit for the idea of that dark hyperbole to Memphis���s Fredric Koeppel (of the Commercial Appeal) because he said, once, nearly twenty years ago, in the grocery store: “First the comma, then Western Civilization!”

Also, Ford’s thoughts concerning newspapers as opposed to blogs, in the last graph of the piece, were excellent as well. He may be becoming a giant.

What Melissa Faye Greene has to say is powerful, too. In graph twenty she declares: “With the removal of the cultural critics, Atlanta is surrendering again . . . We all lose, you know, not just Atlantans, with the disappearance from the scene of a literate intelligence.”

FACED WITH THIS THREATENING INEVITABILITY, we, you and I and those of our tribe — the writers and publishers — will of course try to make bouillabaisse out of the seemingly unstoppable “Blob” and not let it make hash out of us.

The most wretched aspect of some changes is that we may know they are not good, but we also know that, later on, those-not-us will begin to admire the destruction, and after a while the changes that were indeed never good in the first place will somehow, over time, become regarded as the way things ought to be — Was it in Brave New World that a young man dreamed of being a jingle writer? A composer of slogans? I���ve been that, too, but I didn���t dream of it.

The fact is that all things are not relative. Some ideas and conditions are punk from the beginning, and no infinite curve, no E’s or squared MC’s can ever make them anything other than that.

THERE’S JUST ONE THING TO DO. I told Junior Ray about the article and about what was happening, and he just said: “Fukkum, Pritchard. Get your inner tube, and let’s face the gotdam Sue Nommy.”

NewSouth novelist John Pritchard, who made Barnes & Noble’s 2005 Top Ten Sensational Debut Novels list with his book Junior Ray, is a featured author at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans this coming weekend. He’ll read from The Yazoo Blues, his hilarious next book due out from NewSouth next spring. Read an excerpt from The Yazoo Blues here.

In The Yazoo Blues, our antihero leaves law enforcement and becomes a historian. It���s all gotdam curious, if Junior Ray does say so hisself. John Pritchard’s first novel, Junior Ray, is available directly from NewSouth Books, at Amazon.com, or from your local book retailer.

Visit John Pritchard’s Amazon blog at the following link.

If you’ll be attending the Southern Festival of Books this weekend in Memphis, Tennessee, don’t miss our wonderful NewSouth authors, including Tony Dunbar (Tubby Meets Katrina), John Egerton (premiering Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves), C. S. Fuqua (Music Fell on Alabama), Frye Gaillard (Watermelon Wine), Jennifer Horne (Working the Dirt), John Pritchard (Junior Ray), Carroll Dale Short (Turbo’s Very Life), and Sue Walker (In the Realm of Rivers).

The festival, sponsored by Humanities Tennessee, takes place at the Cook Convention Center and Main Street Mall in downtown Memphis. For more information, visit the Southern Festival official website.

NewSouth author John Pritchard has launched a blog on Amazon.com in connection with his well-received (and hilarious!) book Junior Ray. On his blog, Pritchard (as he’s affectionately called) has already begun hinting to readers about the return of Junior Ray. For fans of the novel, and for those that have not yet undergone “the Junior Ray experience,” this is a great place to learn more about the author and his work.

Junior Ray is available directly from NewSouth Books, at Amazon.com, or from your local book retailer.

Visit John Pritchard’s Amazon blog at the following link.

NewSouth author John Pritchard, author of the hilarious Junior Ray (which Barnes & Noble.com called a Best of 2005 Sensational Debut) added these inimitable words of wisdom on book signings:

Having been born without any inhibitions at all, I simply pick up the telephone and dial off a call — to information if I don’t know the number of the store — and then, when I get what I imagine to be a shy, pale, unaggressive and bookish person on the phone I speak very, very rapidly and tell them almost everything that has been said or written about the book, dropping important names — NewSouth, Publisher’s Weekly, The Mobile Register, Barnes and Noble — to which my overwhelmed listener often responds with the solid beginnings of an invitation.

My other tactic is the store invasion. I walk in, make an estimate of the terrain, and (1) immediately begin to shuck and jive, brandishing up a copy of Junior Ray, or (2) I tread softly across the carpeted floor and politely ask who the “events” person is. Normally that individual is extremely busy or in a meeting — which can last for days — but, like a determined butterfly fluttering by every so often, just to say Hi, I eventually connect, and things take a turn for the positive.

Sometimes there is no deal, but I have never forgotten what I learned as a Fuller Brush Man, back around 1968: You make a sale, large or small, about every ten doors you knock on, and of course the key to it all is … you have to knock. There are no self-knocking doors.

What I enjoy most about book signings is being the center of attentiion. I love that — even when, upon occasion, I am the only one, other than the owner of the store, in the room. At those times my narcissism is in high gear, and I always remember a singer/songwriter I knew in Nashville who would — and could — play to an empty room. He’d give it all he had, as though the hall were packed. His character was his craft. That was the beat he never missed. And I think, for those who were born in quest of the Grail, that is the way to be.

Junior Ray is available directly from NewSouth Books, at Amazon.com, or from your local book retailer.