Lexington Herald-Leader from Lexington, Kentucky • 49

LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER WWWKENTUCKYCOM ARTSLIFE E5 BOOKS Interfaith Dialogue Organization Presents WHIRLING DERVISHES In short very entertaining Relationships and families form heart of collection of stories BEST SEI LERS These lists were compiled by The New York Times from computer processed sales figures from more than 3985 bookstores plus wholesalers serving more than 50000 other retailers statistically weighted to represent sales in all such outlets nationwide Spit Baths: Stories By Greg Downs University of Georgia Press 174 pp $2495 JANE PLUM LOVIN' rformance Live Sufi Music Door Prizes lay February 1 2 7:30 pm letary Center for the Arts wwwruminightcom infodialogueukorg Tickets are available at the SOFA Box Office (859) 257-4929 vsrwwsingletaryticketscom Hr cosmos Fiction 1 Plum Lorn' by Janet Evanovich 2 For One More Day by Mitch Albom 3 Cross by James Patterson 4 The Hunters by WEB Griffin 5 Exile by Richard North Patterson 6 You Suck by Christopher Moore 7 The Suspect by John Lescroart 8 Bad Blood by Linda Fairstem 9 Shadow Dance by Julie Garwood 10 Dust by Martha Grimes In Ain't I a King Too a man traveling to Texas to meet the program director of the National Youth Administration Office Lyndon Johnson gets sidetracked by a gas station attendant in Louisiana who thinks he resembles the recently assassinated governor of Louisiana Huey Long They join the massive pilgrimage that has formed to view Long lying in state Encapsulating the hope of a depressed region in mourning Downs paints a somber picture of how Jacksonian democracy lives and dies by the populist sentiment it portends In Adam's Curse it is the women mother Memaw and aunt Farrah who decide to live without their husbands They go on a cruise in Nova Scotia and send the men a postcard Left behind the old men talk in cryptic phrases and recklessly play chess in the park It is a tale of desperate humanity In all of his stories Downs puts us in or near the maelstrom He expertly manipulates the icons of our history to produce palpable characters more related to the outlanders we grew up with than the ideal reproduced in grade school This book reads more like a collection of folk songs than of short stories By toying with history Downs might be getting closer to the truth than all the history books you had to read in high school Spit Baths won the Flannery award for short fiction It is a book you regret reading Reviewed by Chris Collins When an author writes a book of short stories all the stories should maintain their distinctive voices The stories might take us from Cynthiana to Hawaii but each story must be self-contained and able to stand alone It also must fit effortlessly into the panoply of characters and voices the author is intending to convey That said Greg Spit Baths is one of the most entertaining books of short stories in a long time Baseball trains populist politicians colonial soldiers school field trips figure prominently in these stories which are quintessentially American and by turns serious playful maudlin and humorous The book captures the dissonance of a self-conscious region rising out of the bitter civil rights struggle forced to face its failures and its subtle achievements and move ahead At the heart of all the stories are the beautiful unforgiving relationships between men and women and by extension the families they produce characters possess strong will and refreshing identity Not entirely certain of their immediate futures they are certain of themselves It is an identity and ethos often missing in literature The 13 short stories are full of the complexity of family race region and past that make up our own history Non-fiction In pages live the remnants of the past juxtaposed with the new It is a thriving past full of the mustiness that comes with age but also a spry magical past that takes a stark departure from the history you might have read in history class It makes fruitful use of the politically opportunistic revisionist history in vogue in media to make everyone a participant For example George Washington makes an appearance Not as the physically commanding general depicted in George Washington Crossing the Delaware that Washington dies before the Revolutionary War is over drowning in the Schuylkill River after the hull of his boat hits a rock In The Hired Man commanders replace him with a toothless farmer hoeing near their camp next to the Schuylkill Their particular consternation is our gain That our father was merely a sentient clodbuster minding his own business turns history on its head Like all good stories it asks more questions than it answers Friday February 9th 8- 1 I pm Phone 252-S222 for tickets $SO in advance an artful evening of desserts fine spirits arid auction 1 The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama 2 The Innocent Man by John Grisham 3 Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet 4 Marley Me by John Grogan 5 1 Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron 6 Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter 7 About Alice by Calvin Trillin 8 Culture Warrior by Bill O'Reilly 9 The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins 10 Power Faith and Fantasy by Michael Oren Spencerian College Educating Kentuckians since 1892 Health Technology Career Education in a Year or Less! Spring Classes begin March 26 April 2 Call Now! (859) 223-9608 Chris Collins is a Lexington college student (8001 456 175 1 wwwspenrerianedu 1575 Winchester Hoad loxmqlon KY 40505 Weaving mundane life magnificent literature Lexington Herald-Leader wwwbluegrassfestivalofbookscorn TjtL Thomas Hardy By Claire Tomalin Penguin 512 pp $35 BOOKS The world of literature in the heart of Kentucky Join us for breakfast lunch author readings workshops and kids events! Purchase tickets at Joseph-Beth Booksellers beginning March Paula Deen! Hey Y'all! Guess who's the featured author for lunch? None other than Paula Deen! She'll have a new book just in time for the Bluegrass Festival of Books! Don't miss lunch with Paula Deen! Joseph-Beth Booksellers art of which Tomalin is a master: to be absolutely true to the last scrap of fact never to embellish or contort those facts yet to create something utterly new and undreamt of something more than the mere sum of those facts While giving us the Hardy that really was the Hardy who sat hunched with a shawl around his shoulders while he did his work (HG Wells Tomalin notes called Hardy little gray she also gives us a Hardy never had before: the writer who coerced his inner torment into bitter poems and bleak novels that seem as brooding and wind-swept as the landscape in which they are set Tomalin gives us Hardy the man and the artist and the two halves are gently reconciled by virtue of this scrupulous and luminous biography Just below superficial calm dwelt a fierce imagination one wholly devoted to fluid feeling into solid as Tomalin deftly describes creative process She focuses more attention on his poetry than his prose a splendid choice the poems are more obscure but in many ways more compelling And even if one disagrees with interpretation of certain poems her conversation about poetry is always stimulating and never feels like a graduate-school seminar as such things easily can By Julia Keller CHICAGO TRIBUNE The biographers of artists must confront a special challenge: How to make the business of living paying bills trimming toenails measure up to the splendid bounty of creativity: novels plays poems paintings If the artist led an especially reckless and selfish life the task is a snap But what if he simply did his job each day faithfully and well with little fuss or fanfare? In other words what if he was Thomas Hardy? How then to make the life story of the great 19th-century novelist live up to the power and dramatic force of his work? How to make the daily activities of such a diffident unassuming almost mousy little man match that grand imagination? Claire Tomalin solves the problem neatly and efficiently with the spit-spot no-nonsense attitude that occasionally masks the deeper profundities of her gift In Thomas Hardy she presses her intelligence and her critical insights against the dry facts of life and wrings from them a solemn and beautiful music This is the triumph of the Saturday April 21 9 am 5 pm Lexington Center General admission is FREE! Presented by UK UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY TICKETS 02QS SPONSORED BY (Truss Airport AUTHORS SCHEDULED TO ATTEND I Dora the Explorer Grab your backpack! It's Dora the Explorer Give your favorite little adventurer a couple of hours of fun she'll never forget Costumed characters Dora the Explorer and her friends will delight your children and you at breakfast 8:30 to 11 am David Matthews Neil Connolly Allana Kingsbury Kevin Sessums Josh Kilmer-Purcell Judith Stone Danielle Trussoni Paul Nash Frank Walker Robert Olmstead Paula Deen Silas House Dorothea Benton Frank Jon Carloftis Maurice Manning John Powell James Archambeault John Snell Hillary Carlip Sharon Thompson LITERARY CALENDAR map meebs cma And many more! Writers' Workshops Join topnotch editors from Writer's Digest and Writer's Market to learn how to get your work in frpnt of agents and publishers 9 to noon or 2 to 5 pm SPONSORED IN PART BY FREE Valentine Story Time Reservations required 10:30 am Feb 10 Lexington Public Library Tates Creek Branch 3826 Walden Dr (859) 231-5580 FREE Paws to Read For ages 8-14 Reservations required Noon Feb 10 Lexington Public Library 140 East Main St (859) 231-5500 Noon Feb 10 Lexington Public Library Beaumont Branch 3080 Fieldstone Way (859) 231-5570 Author's Brunch By American Association of University Women Berea Chapter 10 am to 12:30 pm Feb 10 Reservations required Boone Tavern 100 Mam St lrea Featured authors include Silas House Normandi Ellis and Leigh Ann Florence $20 (859) 986-1144 FREE Gary West author of Kin Kelly Coleman and Eating Your Way Across Kentucky reads from and discusses his books 7 pm Feb 12 Aroma's 31 Maysville St Maysville FREE A reading by Darnell Arnoult poet and novelist to celebrate the publication of the Winter 2007 issue of Appalachian Heritage a regional literary quarterly published by Berea College 7:30 pm Feb 16 Berea College Woods-Penniman Building Commons Berea (859) 985-3699 wwwbereaedubppalachiancenter WEKU lass teal Music and NPR tmti.