The 1920s literary magazine The Fugitive transformed Vanderbilt University into the home of New Criticism, spearheaded by a group of young poets. In Fugitive Days, author and professor Gerald Duff recalls meeting the poets, now older and accomplished, including Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle. In these chance encounters, Duff finds the humanity in each—some approachable, some remote, some lost in the wilds of age or overshadowed by their own legends. Duff takes away with him new understanding of what writers-as-fugitives gain and sacrifice in pursuit of their craft.
Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff’s new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory. From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff’s memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old. Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff’s talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career.
Publisher’s Weekly hailed the “wit and subtlety” in Gerald Duff’s fiction as “simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon,” and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetter said “Gerald Duff’s dialogue is among the best being written, and his sense of the absurd is Portis-like.” This new collection of short stories by the author of Coasters (2001) features the Ploughshares Cohen Prize-winning story “Fire Ants.”
Playing Custer is a novel narrated from varying points of view and time, illuminating personal and political events leading up to the death of General George Armstrong Custer. The historic events are framed by the story of two men from the late twentieth century—one white and one Native American—who travel together to the annual reenactment of the battle at the Little Bighorn National Monument battlefield. Chatting during their journey, the two reenactors discuss their obsessions, personal ambitions, and failures of nerve. Interwoven with their progress toward the battle are narrations, journal entries, and first-person viewpoints from many others who were actually involved in the historic events. Soldiers and scouts for the cavalry; Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne witnesses; and wives and daughters all offer their versions of “truth,” establishing a texture and depth of irony, humor, and tragic meaning to those modern Americans driven to attempt to “play Custer.” This year—a special anniversary of the real battle—they are suddenly chosen for crucial new roles. This time, they will play Custer and Crazy Horse. All builds toward the real and reenacted final moments on the battlefield of Custer’s last stand.
Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, moves back in with his widowed father in hopes of coasting through another year. But his father is dating again, and his sisters are trying to manipulate Waylon into asking their father for their inheritance before he gives it to a second wife. The sarcastic Waylon, juggling his relationships and responsibilities caustically but light-heartedly, hangs on hoping to recover something he lost in his youth: enough momentum to reach escape velocity. By turns humorous and melancholy, this novel cruises to a conclusion where all its characters satisfyingly reap what they have sown. Gerald Duff is a splendid writer of sparkling dialogue, and has perfect pitch for the ennui of contemporary life in the suburbs of the petroleum-chemical corridor that stretches along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Mississippi.
It's May in Memphis, and four bloody murders occur on the eve of the International BBQ Contest and the Cotton Carnival: a conventioneer is stabbed at an ATM machine, a gang leader and his girlfriend are executed, and a wealthy local businessman is killed in his own home while his bodyguard is napping outside the door. It's up to homicide detective J.W. Ragsdale to solve these seemingly unconnected crimes without scaring away the tourists who are arriving in droves. That's not going to be easy. Ragsdale's investigation pits him against a crack-dealing gang in the midst of a bloody drug war, a Memphis BBQ king struggling to hold on to his crumbling empire, a shotgun-wielding assassin, an East Coast mobster with a taste for BBQ and the blues, and the newly crowned Maid of Cotton, who will do anything to keep her tiara.
Nashville Burning is set in three Aprils, those of 1967, ’68, and ’69, in Music City. In the first, after an event at Vanderbilt University featuring Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsburg, and Strom Thurmond, riots broke out in North Nashville, and that part of town burst into flame—as did self-satisfied notions about civil order and structure in Nashville and the South. The next April, after the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, Nashville riots took place again, and fire claimed its function. Nashville Burning presents characters caught up in those events and that time—events ranging from the thoughtful and sincerely well meaning to the truly felonious and certifiably insane. The novel is humorous, yet serious. Its fire is literal and emotional, and it is not to be stoked.
J.W. Ragsdale, a failed Mississippi cotton farmer turned Memphis homicide detective, along with his partner, Tyrone Walker is faced with a cowboy preacher, a home invasion, urban gangs, and a killer who sees spirits and converses with the dead. The setting is Memphis, a city haunted by the blues, rock and roll, magic, humor, and violence. J.W. and Tyrone must sort through another spell of mania on the Big River, and bring things back to a low rumble in a town where tough mojo hands, death, and high hilarity come together.
Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff’s new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory. From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff’s memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old. Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff’s talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career.
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