Fresh Loaf

Congratulations to Atlanta author David Fulmer, who announced this week that he will collaborate with local theater 7 Stages and New York’s New Federal Theatre for his first-ever script for the stage, Storyville. The play is based both on his Valentin St. Cyr murder mysteries set in New Orleans and the lone history book, Al Rose’s indispensable Storyville, about the city’s notorious red-light district at the turn of the last century.

There are lots of potential stagings for the play, although funding issues prevent Fulmer from revealing specific plans at this time. But options include a staged reading at next spring’s Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, and Atlanta certainly figures in the future.

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The Fulton County High School summer reading list is 18 pages long (already about 15 more pages than the average Atlanta-area high-schooler cares to make time for, I reckon), and if you’re looking for a great young adult novel, or you haven’t read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees* yet, that list is a great place to start. However, if you’re a serious reader of discerning taste, then why are you surfing this blog? then we’ve got some fine recommendations for you.

I asked six local book-reading (and some book-writing) types which books were best to get lost in, and the response was overwhelming (by which I mean to say they responded. To little old me). The respondents come from various areas of the Atlanta literary scene, so the books they recommend are all quite different.

Best book to keep in the bathroom:
Terry Kay, author — “The Verse by the Side of the Road, compiled by Frank Rowsome, Jr., with drawings by Carl Rose. Book contains all 600 of the roadside Burma Shave jingles, and it is an absolute joy.”

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Well, we’ve heard from you loud and clear, and we here at CL would like to make one humble suggestion to our blossoming literary scene: Get help.

Seriously, y’all are messed up. That’s as simple as we can put it, judging from the entries to our seventh annual Fiction Contest — the (extended) deadline of which passed on Wednesday. The theme is “scratch,” and let’s just say the entrants took the notion and ran with it in every manner possible. There’s the scratching of the itch (with images too vivid to recount here), Old Scratch (a particular favorite), scratching on the eight ball in pool, scratch as in money. Now, I didn’t read all of them — thank you, thank you, thank you, CL staff — but I don’t recall it being used in the racetrack vernacular (as in scratching, or removing, a horse from a race), although I’m sure every other angle was covered. And this stuff was so gothic, so dark, so supernatural, so … icky … we just wonder if we’ve opened some wounds with this one.

Best of all, from rudimentary research, we’ve learned our submission total of 240 is an all-time best. And our apologies for any confusion caused by the extended deadline, which resulted in a FLOOD of extra entries. Now comes the judging phase; and as we mentioned in a previous PopSmart post, we’ve got an impressive lineup: Fiona Zedde, Joshilyn Jackson and David Fulmer.

Now, onto the next phase: the party! We’re scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 10, at Eyedrum. We’re working furiously to set up the appropriate musical and other ambient moods, and of course there will be refreshments aplenty. Mark it on your calendar; it’ll be the first cool literary event of the new year, so don’t scratch it off your list …

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