BS: Buy This Book: Pelican Road, by Howard Bahr

Subject: BS: Buy This Book.
From: Kim C
Date: 21 May 08 - 10:06 AM

Pelican Road, by Howard Bahr. You can get it online or ask for it at your local bookseller.

I am admittedly biased because the author is a personal friend, but truly, he is one of the most brilliant contemporary fiction writers out there, and deserves a best-seller more than anyone I can think of. If you like beautiful writing, you will not be disappointed.

Subject: RE: BS: Buy This Book.
From: katlaughing
Date: 21 May 08 - 11:05 AM

It sounds good, Kim! Here's the The Author's Website and more about the book. I'll bet some of our railroad buffs would especially like it:

About the Book

From the acclaimed author of The Judas Field, a beautiful and haunting portrait of the men who served on the great American railroads.

It's Christmas Eve, 1940. Along an isolated stretch of railway between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, two locomotives travel toward one another through the dark winter landscape. A.P. Dunn, engineer aboard the 4512 southbound freight, reminisces about the last trip he made through the snow. And though he can remember every detail about that voyage in 1923, what he can't recall are the events of a few hours ago—where he ate breakfast, how he got the gash on his forehead, or what he did to make his crew treat him so strangely.

On the northbound Silver Star, a luxury passenger train packed with returning college students and gift-bearing families, brakeman Artemus Kane has his own memories to contend with: French trenches and German snipers, a failed marriage, and a too-short layover spent with Anna, the brilliant and lonely woman he has just left behind in the Crescent City.

In Pelican Road, Howard Bahr returns to his greatest theme—the tragic nobility of those attempting to overcome difficult situations through love, honor, and sacrifice—and shows that on the railway, catastrophe is never more than a distracted moment away.


About the Author

Howard Bahr was born in Meridian, Mississippi. During the Vietnam War, he was a gunner's mate in the U.S. Navy and later worked as a brakeman and yard clerk on five railroads in the South and Midwest. He earned a master's degree in English from the University of Mississippi and was on staff at Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner, serving as curator from 1982 to 1993. The author of three previous novels—The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field—he currently resides in Jackson, Mississippi, and teaches at Belhaven College.

Subject: RE: BS: Buy This Book.
From: Kim C
Date: 21 May 08 - 11:17 AM

Thanks Kat. I should add that his last novel, The Judas Field, won the 2007 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction.

Subject: RE: BS: Buy This Book.
From: Kim C
Date: 22 May 08 - 12:33 PM

Y'all, this is a great story. Just fabulous.