April 20, 2016

2 New Books For Your TBR

Norman Lock’s Literary Poe-like Fiction The Port-Wine Stain – American Novel Series #3

Expected publication: June 14, 2016

A young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.” (Taken from Bellevue Literary Press website)

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Joseph Madison Beck’s Biographical Sketch My Father and Atticus Finch

Expected publication: June 21, 2016

“A memoir about the author’s father, whose courageous defense of a black man accused of rape calls to mind To Kill a Mockingbird.
As a child, Joe Beck heard about his father’s legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel. Beck reconstructs here his father’s role in the 1938 trial—much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old—in which the examining doctor testified before a packed and hostile courtroom that there was no evidence of intercourse or violence. Nevertheless, the all-white jury voted to convict. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class, and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.”  (Taken from Netgalley website)