Hub City Press

[REVIEW] The Only Sounds We Make, by Lee Zacharias

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sounds

Hub City Press

224 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Lee Zacharias’s most recent book, The Only Sounds We Make, is a collection of essays that discuss everything from where writers write, to the history of vultures, to the pleasures of photography, to destructive, document eating dogs. However common these threads may (or may not) be in our own lives, these essays interrupt our expectations instead of blandly repeating them. And they are wonderfully interruptive. Blending personal nostalgia, social or historical discussion, and intellectual statements, the twelve essays in this collection interweave all of these threads interestingly and adeptly.

The essays I enjoyed most were: “Geography For Writers,” a nuanced look at how surface plays in inspiration, and “Morning Light,” a paean to the creative delights of photography. Both fascinated me with their questions of place and location in relation to artistic endeavors. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy

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Whiskey Baron cover image

Hub City Press

264 pages, $26.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

            Jon Sealy’s debut novel, The Whiskey Baron, begins with the not-very-mysterious deaths of two young men outside a known whiskey mill in Prohibition-era South Carolina.  These men have both been shot down in the middle of the night, their bodies left in the street.  What follows is not a mystery of who committed the crime as much as a beautiful and brilliant exploration of a Carolina mill town—intricately bound in violence and vice—unravelling at its core.

Center stage in this story is a man named Mary Jane Hopewell, accused of the murders but known better as a drunk.  Mary Jane is injured himself, barely escaping the first gun fight and then disappearing from Sealy’s fictional Castle County.  Two men are looking for Mary Jane, each desperate to find him first.  One is Furman Chambers, Castle County’s aging sheriff.  The other is Larthan Tull, the man whose liquor supplies a powerful bootleg distributor for the entire Southern region.  The different paths of these two men are emphasized by their similarities, and much of the essence of the novel is revealed in their conversations with each other:

“You never know what kind of violence the human beast is capable of, Furman, once he sees through the illusion of free will.”

“Free will.”

“We’re all locked on a stage here.  You’ve got a job to do.  I’ve got a job to do.  Mary Jane’s job was to get drunk.  As long as we play our parts, everything runs along smoothly.  The show goes on.  It’s only when the curtain is pulled back and we see the scaffolding and the strings that we realize something is amiss.  And then, who knows?” Continue reading →