Making Notes is a lively, readable sampler of essays, articles, and recollections about the music of musicians with roots in the Carolinas, and how that musical legacy continues to grow and thrive today. The region is famous for being home to musicians as diverse as James Taylor, James Brown, John Coltrane, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Doc Watson.

Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas

Arts & Photography

Ann Wicker

Music

Novello Festival Press

Late one night in 1929, a young Charleston society matron named Mary Seneca Steele goes to bed while considering suicide. But instead she arises, steals her children and her husband's new Auburn Phaeton, and sets out on a journey of enlightenment, which begins with learning how to drive. The scandal begets a string of tragedies, including murder, some tough and urgent maturing, and a surprising salvation.

Refuge

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Dot Jackson

Mystery

Jasper, a stray cat with the ability to sense impending danger, must repeatedly decide whether to keep searching for the perfect home for himself or to risk his own safety to protect others.

Jasper

Teen & Young Adult

Groce, Michelle

Literature & Fiction

Despite promises to his pregnant wife and dead mother never to follow in the footsteps of his father, Calvin Gaddy takes a job at Coventry Prison in the North Carolina Piedmont. He soon finds himself snared in the literal prison of Coventry-and in a cell of his own making. He watches as his father, Mac, a retired iron-willed, old-school chain gang guard, descends into madness. And when Calvin unwittingly traffics in contraband on the prison yard, he begins to realize that the prison is on the verge of disintegration from within.

Coventry

Joseph Bathanti

Literary

Called an "impressive debut" byPublisher's Weekly, Miriam's first novel Absolution tells the story of Maggie Delaney, an idealistic wife and mother whose world implodes when her husband is murdered in a seemingly random act. When Maggie attempts to find out what really happened, her search leads her back to her Carolina roots and through the streets of modern-day Boston. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, she uncovers a legacy of secrets about the man she thought she knew and the troubled world they shared as they came of age in America's turbulent sixties. Absolution won the 2007 Novello Press Literary Award. The novel also received Independent Publisher's Gold Award for Best Fiction, Southeast Region, and was a Finalist for Foreword Magazine s 2007 Novel of the Year.

Absolution

Miriam Herin

Contemporary

Caught in the crossfires of Mississippi's racial tensions, Parrish McCollough is shadowed by secrets and haunted by spirits. She wrestles with "The Truth About Life After Death" after she sees her father's ghost sitting beside his casket. A gifted artist, she desperately hopes to attend college, but there's no money. She fears her mother will lapse into madness if she goes, and she keeps getting distracted by the wrong kind of man. When Civil Rights workers arrive in Mississippi, Parrish takes a risk that carries her onto the razor's edge between living and dying, learns the truth about the soul's survival...and finds an unexpected romance. Lush, vivid, and wildly entertaining, Where the Lake Becomes the River brings to life an unforgettable extended Southern family, along with its dreams, disappointments--and yes, even its beloved ghosts. Where the Lake Becomes the River won the Novello Literary Award, underwritten by Charles and Katherine Frazier's Cold Mountain Foundation. It was nominated for the Sir Walter Raleigh Literary Prize, named a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards, and Included in Publishers Weekly Fall Preview of books.

Where the Lake Becomes the River: A Novel in Stories

Kate Betterton

A sports fan may die and go to heaven, but he or she might prefer going to the Carolinas. Athletes and teams from the region have won Heisman trophies, Olympic medals, championship belts in pro boxing and pro wrestling, and national titles in just about every sport people play. Sports in the Carolinas boasts dozens of essays, profiles, and personal reminiscences that celebrate these and other amazing stories.

Sports in the Carolinas: From Death Valley to Tobacco Road

History

Ed Southern

Americas

Cow Across America is the winningly improbable story of two young men who set out walking to California with nothing but their wits and a milk cow named Ivy.At least that's how Dwight Martin hears it growing up in the 1960s. He's bored to tears at the prospect of spending the summer on his grandparents' North Carolina farm. But he's also estranged from his father and secretly terrified by the prospect of the adult world.
He finds comfort in the wild yarns spun by his grandfather Wylie Rominger, who boasts that his adventure stories are true. The tales are dearly purchased, since Wylie makes Dwight pay him to hear each successive chapter. These unlikely exploits see Wylie and his childhood friend swept up the Mississsippi River, carried along by tornadoes, falling into Indian graves, and finding a secret shortcut through the Grand Canyon.
As Dwight grows to manhood, he discounts the tall tales and angers the old man. His parents divorce. He makes his first attempt at wooing a young woman. Despite his modern misgivings, he can't ignore the pull of those stories as he comes to grips with his own yearnings. When his grandfather dies, Dwight discovers that most of the tales were true--and he learns what Wylie did with all those nickels and dimes.
Inspired in part by the raucous humor of Mark Twain, and tapping into the American pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Cow Across America is a book about the power of stories to link the generations.

Cow Across America

Dale Neal

The Charlotte area is well known as a business locale, but it's also the center of a dynamic community of writers who are claiming their place on the national literary map. As the acclaimed Novello Festival of Reading marks its 20th anniversary, it is partnering with Charlotte ViewPoint magazine to showcase innovative fiction, poetry, and essays from the Carolinas and beyond. Topograph surveys the literary landscape that has emerged in recent decades, exploding tarnished ideas about Southern writing. For anyone interested in the latest trends, this collection offers a broad spectrum of styles, including formally innovative essays, adventurous flash fiction, and minimalist poetry alongside more traditional storytelling and memorable travelogues. It provides a vista of the most exciting work being done in the area, writing that's often informed by geography in unexpected ways. Topograph's more than 30 contributors include Alan Michael Parker, Frank Lentricchia, Jon Pineda, Melissa Malouf, Madge McKeithan, Blake Butler, Rosa Shand, Sally Keith, Janice Fuller, and Kirsten Hemming.

Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond

Jeff Jackson

United States

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Books by Novello Festival Press