Literary Friday, Edition 60

Summer Reading

Along with our Summer Reading List, our Twitter Chat Schedule and Summer Booksignings Calendar are up on the site now. And thanks to our redesign, they’re all together toward the bottom of our homepage. You’ll be able to find our latest author interviews, book reviews and more summer reading content there all summer long.

One of our Summer Reading List picks, “Bad Monkey” was released this week. In celebration, we rounded up a list of Florida author Carl Hiaasen’s Most Memorable Characters, including a criminal with a weekwhacker for an arm.

Find out what books are in North Carolina author Erika Marks’ beach bag this summer, along with her literary confessions, on Traveling With T this week.

Literary News & Blogs 

“A Land More Kind Than Home” author Wiley Cash has been named a finalist in the inaugural Maine Readers’ Choice Award. He’s competing against Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds” and Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.” Readers will be able to vote online this fall.

In Forget the Nobel medal, buy more pomade, Melville House analyzes the recent Sotheby’s sale of Faulkner memorabilia where only smaller items sold and at prices below their estimated value. Since Faulkner wasn’t even that interested in his Nobel Prize medal, would he have approved?

Hemingway’s items are also up for auction this summer at Profiles in History’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Auction in Los Angeles July 10. A deeply personal collection of items related to his last great work, The Dangerous Summer, including a three-piece matador uniform worn by the great Antonio Ordóñez, a “lucky chestnut” he carried around with him for 11 years and, one of the most important literary relics of the 20th century, his personal travel typewriter in a leather case, will all be for sale.

The Atlantic‘s piece The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid has sparked debate between writers and moms, with its reference to Alice Walker as having only one child eliciting the most comments. Find out what Rebecca Walker had to say about her mother’s parenting in 2008 in The Daily Mail here.

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” author John Berendt was spotted at a New Orleans pop-up restaurant in the courtyard of Le Citron last weekend, as reported by The Times Picayune.

The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival’s Fiction Contest is now open for entries. The deadline for submission is November 15, 2013, and the winner of this year’s contest will be announced by March 15, 2014. Submission criteria includes a short story up to 7,000 words, written in English, with a grand prize of $1,500. The festival is also accepting one-act plays through November 1.

Literary Events

The Birmingham Festival Theatre is presenting “The Last Flapper,” a play by William Luce about the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, through June 29.

Books and Beasts, a fundraiser for the Southern Food and Beverage Museum’s Culinary Library, will be held June 16 from 12:30-4 p.m. at Ashe Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans. Set up as a culinary book fair, the event will feature vendors of new and used culinary themed books, as well as live music.

See our Summer Booksignings Calendar for more events through August.

New in Southern Voice

Morning Loss, a story about an Alabama gas station owner who discovers something horrific while making the rounds to check on his stations one morning, by Samuel K. Wilkes.

To find out more about Southern authors’ haunts and hangouts, download the Deep South Literary Trail App, now available direct from iTunes and for Android.