Atlanta writer Christopher Swann won an admiring audience with his debut novel, Shadow of the Lions, a sensitive look at friendship in a boys boarding school. He just released his second book, Never Turn Back, a literary thriller sprinkled with Latin phrases. In it, a popular teacher embarks on a whirlwind affair with a colleague…
Gordon Bynum was a civic-minded environmentalist, so he opted, whenever possible, to ride MARTA rather than drive his car. In 1999, he got off a train and began walking in a neighborhood near the Buckhead Diner when he was shot in an apparent mugging. “It was very big in the news, and the headlines all…
Memoirs, by nature, involve some preening narcissism, but Georgia author and journalist Robert Coram is quick to indemnify himself as very much a hangdog underachiever who lucks into a calling in Ink: The Years of Journalism Before the Days of Bloggers (Five Bridges Press). The book is Coram’s second memoir. His first, which deserves a…
Mesmerism is both the medium and the message in The Magnetic Girl, Jessica Handler’s unconventional debut novel, which proves as compelling as its young heroine. Loosely based on a real-life events, The Magnetic Girl tells the story of Lulu Hurst, an endearing girl from Cedartown, Georgia, gifted with preternatural powers of precognition in the 1880s. One…
It was announced over the weekend that Daren Wang, the Co-Founder of the AJC Decatur Book Festival, will step down as Executive Director at the end of 2017 to focus on other projects. His debut novel, The Hidden Light of Norther Fires, reviewed below by Candice Dyer, will launch during the 12th annual festival, September 1-3.
Denene Millner, the doting mother of two daughters, was weary of the selection of books marketed to parents of African-American children.
Like countless pilgrims before him, Bruce Feiler experienced a revelation at the Sistine Chapel. He had his two daughters in tow, and they wanted to know why the focus was on Adam, with Eve relegated to less prominent status in Michelangelo’s fresco. In that moment, Feiler, a Savannah native who has made a career of…
The Mothers, Brit Bennett’s assured fiction debut, revolves around a long-held secret.
The reader is in on it from the beginning, though, because as the opening sentence says, “We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip.”
If you enjoy this story, or the other stories you read on ArtsATL, we encourage you to donate to our annual fund. By investing in ArtsATL, you are investing in the arts in Atlanta. __ Lillian Eugenia Smith grew up on the Florida-Georgia line, near the Okefenokee Swamp around the turn of the 20th century….
For four years, from 2010 to 2014, Kate Sweeney, a writer and host for WABE, ran a popular reading series out of Kavarna called “True Story.” The bi-monthly reading entertained rapt listeners and helped catalyze a renaissance of Atlanta’s literary scene. But then motherhood happened and Sweeney decided to take time off to have a baby. She was pleased to discover, even when exhausted and sleep-deprived, that maternity inspired her imagination.
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