Ron Rash, Marshall Frady and James Wood

Rash is author of several books, adored by the NY Times and LA Times and they love him in France as well as Pickens County, S.C. At this site in the archives for Spet 2010 see my interview with him. Marshall Frady is a Baptist Preacher's son, who many say was the greatest social justice journalist of the last half of the 20th Century. That's not me, that's David Halberstam. Frady was recently profiled in the Furman alum magazine. And James Wood is the author of How Fiction Works. I chatted briefly with Wood couple years ago at Sewanee Writer's conference and broached Frady's name. Wood writes often for New Yorker, and teaches at Harvard. Here is my nomination of Rash and Frady for the Wood review. Some sentences. I like these two that caught the eye of Patti in Birmingham a novelist in her own right in a recent blog for CandJ radio. Ron is known for his lyricism and poetic style (he is also a poet), and for me, this novel seemed to contain entire poems in single sentences. When he writes “Dawnlight unshackled high branches from the dark” or or “She looked around the bedraped granite, her washings like leavings from the streams’ recent flooding”, or “.the lack of greenery made the mountains starker, more firmly locked to the land.” Ron Rash makes me believe that the English language is more beautiful than even I had supposed. My favorite is on page 44, fave of The Cove. Will share it soon in the comments to this blog effort. And here is a Marshall Frady sentence from his Penguin bio of Martin Luther King: page 98 "Spread along the last slopes of the Appalachian Mountains about a hundred miles above Montgomery, Birmingham was an Alabama outpost of the steel industry of the North, a burly, gritty, smokily sunlit city that liked to advertise itself as "the Pittsburg of the South." And here is a reoommendation by David Halberstam, the Pulitzer winner for the Best and the Brightest, by way of Doug Cumming who celebrates Frady in the current issue of the Furman Alumni Magazine. From Halberstam's intro to reissue in 2006 of Frady's bio of Billy Graham: "I thought I could almost see the process take place--Marshall deciding what it was he wanted to say and routing it through that part of his brain where his father, Faulkner, and his other literary heroes lurked, and then in time it came out, exceptionally full, as if scripted in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieh, ready, I sometimes thought, to be set in type and printed as spoken." Pardon me, that was Halberstam on Frady, about how he spoke like he wrote. Order a copy of Frady's Southerners his collection of essays. You'll be a wiser person if you do. Frady's last effort for the NY Rev of Books was a review of Leo Frank's lynching, And the Dead Shall Rise; and before that a review of Robert Caro's third installment of his magisterial series on the life and times of Lyndon Baines Johnson.