Four plays explore such human conflicts as those found between muscle men and drag queens, yuppies and the rural poor, and saints and sinners

Four plays explore such human conflicts as those found between muscle men and drag queens, yuppies and the rural poor, and saints and sinners

George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright; Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In this collection, critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley reveals his great gifts as a playwright in four powerful, award-winning plays presenting different worlds in collision and convergence. In "Mr. Universe," the rescue of a mute bodybuilder from the gritty streets of New Orleans by a couple of drag queens brings out the best and worst in them. In "The Lizard of Tarsus," an imprisoned Jesus (called J.) is interrogated by an ambitious follower, Paul of Tarsus. In "The Borderland," neighboring families representing two very different social classes are brought together during a storm. And in "Math and Aftermath," the two worlds of pornography and nuclear testing collide during a film shoot in the Marshall Islands. These plays (introduced by Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, Kaye Gibbons, and Craig Lucas) demonstrate the differences that are matters of perception; together they establish Grimsley as a dramatist with imagination and nerve. A STAGE AND SCREEN BOOK CLUB selection.

The first book-length study of an influential voice in contemporary queer American literature Since the early 1980s, Jim Grimsley has received increasing acclaim for his achievements in a variety of dramatic and literary genres. Through his novels, plays, and short stories, Grimsley portrays an unrelenting search for happiness and interrogates themes of corruption, technology, poverty, domestic abuse, sexuality, and faith in the contemporary United States. Through unique characters and a multitude of forms, the award-winning author explores the complexities of southern culture, his own troubled childhood, and larger pieces of the human experience. In Understanding Jim Grimsley, David Deutsch offers the first book-length study of Grimsley's diverse work and argues for his vital role in shaping the contemporary queer American literary scene. Deutsch helps readers navigate the intricacies of Grimsley's influential drama, fiction, and fantasy science fiction—including his most popular novel, Dream Boy—by weaving together discussions of common themes. Placing Grimsley's plays, novels, and short stories in conversation with one another, Deutsch reveals Grimsley's development throughout a career in which he has investigated hope and hardship, youth and maturity, experimentation and convention. Deutsch also provides vital historical and cultural contexts for understanding how Grimsley engages, expands, and challenges literary and theatrical traditions. Deutsch demonstrates a deep, critical understanding of Grimsley's hard-earned, pragmatic optimism. Intertwining Grimsley's major fiction and plays and contextualizing these within a broader American landscape, this volume brings his work more completely into the conversation on southern queer literature.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.