978-0-9664316-2-9
0-9664316-2-6
$14.00 paperback
5 1/2 x 8
256 pages
Zuckerman Cannon Publisher
Winner of the 2005 Sir Walter Raleigh Award |
For A
Southern Tragedy, in Crimson and Yellow, Naumoff creates an extended
metaphor like a poet. The novel has the grace and finality and wonder of a
postmortem, where each detail is revealed, turned around and looked at
from behind, from underneath.
It’s about some people mostly screwing up right and left, and the
remnants of a beautiful, bright heritage, and the diary of a woman driven
mad by grief. By the end of the novel, there is nothing less than the
whole shebang, the whole mystery of life and death and honor.
With meticulous physical descriptions, Naumoff has written not just an
historical novel, or a political one, or one of personal lives and
tragedies, but all those things at once.
--Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy
Lawrence Naumoff’s latest work, “A Southern Tragedy in Crimson and
Yellow,” is a book I think John Steinbeck would have written if he were
alive today.
--Ruth Moose, The Pilot
Naumoff paints a vivid picture of a world where minimum wage was little
reward for grinding labor.
--The Herald-Sun, Durham, NC
...[Naumoff] combines imagination, exhaustive research, North Carolina
history and politics to create an unnerving, graphic, but oddly beautiful
docufiction.
--Denise Gess, News and Observer, Raleigh, NC
In 1991, a chicken plant burned in Hamlet, N.C. The
fire exits had been locked to keep the workers from stealing. A
Southern Tragedy is about that event. It’s social realism for the
New South landscape.
If this novel were just about that famous fire and its victims, it
would be a notable achievement in showing the bravery of a population in
crisis.
But the novel is less about the horror of that one event than about
economic downturns, a failing work ethic and the mistrust shared by
employer and employee.
This story is a meditation about human determination to salvage dignity
and a sense of purpose. Naumoff’s distinctive style has echoes of
Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Dos Passos and gives the reader a spirited,
sometimes darkly humorous, and always thoughtful, docufictional Southern
novel.
about the author
Lawrence Naumoff is the author of Taller Women: A Cautionary
Tale; Night of the Weeping Women; A Plan for Women; Rootie Kazootie; and
Silk Hope, NC.
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