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Crying for the Carolines.
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A recovering newspaper journalist, I’ve lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1991, after growing up in Texas and Colorado. Professionally, I spent 28 years at Raleigh’s daily paper the News & Observer, primarily as a music critic, before taking my leave of the newspaper industry in 2019. Since then, I have gotten by as a freelancer writing for magazines, arts councils, alumni publications, and such. I also host a podcast – Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s music history – while writing the occasional book. I’m also a member of the University of Colorado’s Trivia Bowl Hall Of Fame.
In its ambition and sweep across time and political upheavals as well as musical styles, this book may have been the closest thing I had to a model for my book.
Part musical memoir and part capsule history of the American South’s era of integration, Dixie Lullaby was written by longtime music journalist Mark Kemp – a man who grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and has the Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records to prove it.
In ""Dixie Lullaby"", a veteran music journalist ponders the transformative effects of rock and roll on the generation of white southerners who came of age in the 1970s - the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live. Growing up in North Carolina, Mark Kemp burned with shame and anger at the attitudes of many white southerners - some in his own family - toward the recently won victories of the civil rights movement. ""I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land,"" he writes. Then the down-home, bluesy rock of the Deep…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A recovering newspaper journalist, I’ve lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1991, after growing up in Texas and Colorado. Professionally, I spent 28 years at Raleigh’s daily paper the News & Observer, primarily as a music critic, before taking my leave of the newspaper industry in 2019. Since then, I have gotten by as a freelancer writing for magazines, arts councils, alumni publications, and such. I also host a podcast – Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s music history – while writing the occasional book. I’m also a member of the University of Colorado’s Trivia Bowl Hall Of Fame.
Winston-Salem native Folds is the focus of one of my chapters, as a truly unlikely success story.
At the height of the grunge era of 1990s alternative rock, he led Ben Folds Five, a piano trio that played catchy pop dubbed “punk rock for sissies.” Somehow, they had a hit single with a downcast ballad about teenage abortion.
Folds is an unexpected character himself, a musical prodigy who became a quirky multi-media star after his hitmaking days ran out. His 2019 memoir is a fantastic window into his artistic process, as well as his just-do-it worldview.
He’s been one of my favorite interview subjects over the years.
Ben Folds is an internationally celebrated musician, singer-songwriter and former front man of the alternative rock band, Ben Folds Five, beloved for songs such as 'Brick', 'You Don't Know Me', 'Rockin' the Suburbs' and 'The Luckiest'.
In A Dream About Lightning Bugs Folds looks back at his life so far in a charming, funny and wise chronicle of his artistic coming of age, infused with the wry observations of a natural storyteller. He opens up about finding his voice as a musician, becoming a rock anti-hero, and hauling a baby grand piano on and off stage for every performance. From…
A recovering newspaper journalist, I’ve lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1991, after growing up in Texas and Colorado. Professionally, I spent 28 years at Raleigh’s daily paper the News & Observer, primarily as a music critic, before taking my leave of the newspaper industry in 2019. Since then, I have gotten by as a freelancer writing for magazines, arts councils, alumni publications, and such. I also host a podcast – Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s music history – while writing the occasional book. I’m also a member of the University of Colorado’s Trivia Bowl Hall Of Fame.
One of the throughline themes of my book is the ongoing resourcefulness of the state’s musicians as they battle day jobs as well as an unfriendly music industry.
As portrayed in this highly engaging oral history, North Carolina institutions don’t get much more resourceful than Merge Records, a Chapel Hill-based independent label founded by members of the local band Superchunk.
Over the years, Merge went from putting out indie-rock seven-inch singles to topping the Billboard charts, and even winning an album-of-the-year Grammy Award.
More than one-third of a century later, both Merge and Superchunk are still at it.
Merge Records defies everything you’ve heard about the music business. Started by two twenty-year-old musicians, Merge is a lesson in how to make and market great music on a human scale. The fact that the company is prospering in a failing industry is something of a miracle. Yet two of their bands made the Billboard Top 10 list; more than 1 million copies of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible have been sold; Spoon has appeared on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show; and the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is a contemporary classic.
In celebration of their twentieth anniversary, founders…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
A recovering newspaper journalist, I’ve lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1991, after growing up in Texas and Colorado. Professionally, I spent 28 years at Raleigh’s daily paper the News & Observer, primarily as a music critic, before taking my leave of the newspaper industry in 2019. Since then, I have gotten by as a freelancer writing for magazines, arts councils, alumni publications, and such. I also host a podcast – Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s music history – while writing the occasional book. I’m also a member of the University of Colorado’s Trivia Bowl Hall Of Fame.
Like me, John Darnielle of the band Mountain Goats (a Merge Records act, as it happens) was not born in North Carolina, but fully embraced it upon moving here.
After much acclaim for the twisted freak-folk of his band, Darnielle launched a parallel career as a fiction writer with this novella in Continuum Books’ 33-1/3 series.
Nominally about the 1971 Black Sabbath album of the title, Master of Reality is actually a personality sketch of obsessed and troubled super-fans of the sort Darnielle has in abundance in his hometown of Durham and elsewhere.
He has followed it up with more literary greatness, especially his revelatory 2014 novel Wolf in White Van.
John Darnielle describes Master of Reality through a fictional character, a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985.John Darnielle describes "Master of Reality" in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985. Adolescents in treatment are often required to keep a journal, and they write letters by the dozens: to their parents, to their friends on the outside, to the nurses who confiscate their belongings, to the teachers back at school who've offered them an outlet for their creativity. Our narrator has arrived…
I’ve been a fan of horror and dark fantasy for as long as I can remember. There’s something irresistible about slipping into stories that could happen, however unlikely. The closer a tale inches toward reality, the more thrilling it becomes. As a writer in this genre, my appreciation has only deepened. I’ve learned how delicate the balance is walking that fine line between realism and fantasy, all while keeping the darkness close enough to unsettle, but not so overwhelming that it drives the reader away. These books walk that line better than any I’ve read.
It starts off ordinary, familiar, even as the unease builds slowly. The fear isn’t loud or in-your-face; it’s quiet, creeping, and emotional.
I found myself questioning what was real, what was imagined, and whether it even mattered once the darkness started closing in. What really got me was the sense of something just out of sight, something you can’t quite explain, but you know it’s coming.
Grief and fear twist together in a way that feels inescapable. You try to run, to reason, to fight, but in this story, none of that may be enough. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t scream. It whispers, and somehow, that’s so much worse.
'Card has exceeded his own high standards ... The man's versatility makes him unique.' - Anne McCaffrey
For Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children, the move to tiny Steuben, North Carolina, offers new hope and a new beginning. But from the first, eight-year-old Stevie's life there is an unending parade of misery and disaster.
Cruelly ostracized at his school, Stevie retreats further and further into himself - and into a strange computer game and a group of imaginary friends.
But there is something eerie about his loyal, invisible new playmates: each shares the name of a…
I’ve been fascinated with the extraordinary ever since I read Madeleine L ’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time in middle school.I was also enchanted by Dorothy’s trip from black-and-white Kansas into colorful Oz. I once heard Neil Gaiman mention the “hyperreality” of life, and I thought, Yes!That’s how I want to see the world—the magic everywhere.I voraciously read not only magical realism books but also fantasy. These stories heighten my awareness of the wonder in everything and in everyone, and they deepen the richness of the stories I tell and write.
Twenty-seven-year-old Josey is sure of three things: winter in her North Carolina hometown is her favorite season; she's a sorry excuse for a Southern belle; and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her hidden closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother's house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night . . . Until she finds her closet harboring none other than local waitress Della Lee Baker, a tough-talking, tender-hearted woman who is one part nemesis - and two parts fairy godmother .…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I first became interested in extremism and terrorism when I was young, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As a student and then as an intelligence analyst, I became deeply immersed in terrorism emanating from the Middle East and later served with the 9/11 Commission. In the last decade, I focused on the white supremacist threat, motivated both by its growing lethality and its political impact during the Trump era and today. In this book, I share my insights on the movement’s modern history, global dimensions, presence on social media, and numerous vulnerabilities.
To understand white supremacy today, it’s vital to understand how it changed from a set of ideas embedded in law as well as society to a fringe belief scorned by right-thinking people. Klansville, USAis set in the Civil Rights era deep inside the Klan in North Carolina, probably the most important state for the Klan at the time. Sociologist David Cunningham explains why the Klan was so strong in North Carolina and why it was weaker in many states where racism was also deeply entrenched. Cunningham shows how ordinary and embedded the Klan was in many parts of North Carolina and also reveals the tough, and incredibly effective, FBI campaign to crush the Klan, which included an array of dirty tricks against various Klan chapters that ultimately devastated many white supremacist organizations.
In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and in the midst of the growing Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when the KKK boasted over 4 million members. Most surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership-more than the rest of the South combined-was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism.
Klansville, U.S.A. is the first substantial history of the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina.…
As an American Southerner, I know things that can be the most nurturing ever, but there's always a cost—emotional, physical, or other. The landscape and nature are where I can always go when I feel heartbroken. And my heart is renewed. Always. Being in tandem with nature calls me. It might be time to look a little closer. If we don't, we might lose more habitat and humanity. This topic or theme haunts me every day. This won't be all I write about, and I hope to have at least another five decades to see more. How amazing to have a sense of history while looking to the future? That walkabout is such a blessing.
What can pain be when you are trying to be free? Who is safe from that when you are trying to be a compassionate person? This book will quell your questions. A girl with scares and scars. Do not be faint of heart on this one. And especially stay away from wells. Really. But also know there is that light that might free us all.
George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together in a rural logging town. But Serena Pemberton is unlike any woman this town has ever seen: overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes and even saving her husband in the wilderness. So when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she is determined that her intensely passionate marriage will not unravel. A course of events unfolds that will change the lives of everyone in their rural community and bring this riveting tale of love and revenge to its shocking reckoning.
When I started writing mysteries, beginning with St. Martin’s Malice Award-winning Southern Fried,I wanted to get the medical, investigative, and courtroom details right. What better resource than good first-hand accounts from professionals who do those things every day? I love traditional, play-fair mysteries and the puzzles they present. But I also love writers who get the technical details right while also writing engaging novels I can get lost in. Nothing better than curling up with a good mystery.
I love this book for many reasons—its rural Southern setting, its lawyer/judge protagonist Deborah Knott, its twisty mystery. But I was particularly intrigued when author Margaret Maron told me that the spark for the book was a real unsolved murder near her North Carolina home. I wrote about the real case when it was finally solved in Triangle True Crime, but Margaret’s version of what might have happened is so much more interesting.
I was the kid who always had a fantasy novel in her backpack. Fantasy required I stretch my imagination, be open to possibilities, and understand different concepts of reality. This curiosity fueled my academic career, steering me from philosophy to Jungian psychology and, eventually, many years later, to an apprenticeship with a traditional healer in Ireland where I put my hands in the dirt and learned things that touched my soul, like how the growth of plants relates to the moon, ways to alchemize medicine making, and the psycho-spiritual aspects of healing…. You know, magic. I hope reading through this list brings you as much joy as putting it together did for me.
I have bought this book so many times because I must always have it in the house, and I keep giving away my copies. This is the hot chocolate of books. It goes down sweet and easy.
Two sisters, a strong-minded apple tree, a catering company that’s just a little bit magical… It’s a modern-day fairytale. And, like a fairytale, little lessons are hidden in its page that will help you re-see the wonder of the world. It might feel light and frothy, but it feeds the soul.
Welcome to Bascom, North Carolina, where it seems that everyone has a story to tell about the Waverley women. The house that's been in the family for generations, the walled garden that mysteriously blooms year round, the rumours of dangerous loves and tragic passions. Every Waverley woman is somehow touched by magic.
Claire has always clung to the Waverleys' roots, tending the enchanted soil in the family garden from which she makes her sought-after delicacies - famed and feared for their curious effects. She has everything she thinks she needs - until one day she waked to find a stranger…
