Jack Butler fans! Recall that in the recently published Mississippi Quarterly interview, the author and PF contributor told us a bit about his work-in-progress:
Jack Butler: Not only do I plan to return to Mississippi in my fiction, but I am returning to it now, in a novel in progress, The Illumination of Elijah Lee Roswell. About a Mississippi sharecropper’s son turned bank robber in the fifties. He happens to share my home town, Alligator. Gets taken up in a flying saucer, sort of, and finds god, sort of. Not your usual Southern fiction?
Well, the Arkansas Review has a treat: an excerpt of the novel in their April 2007 issue. (So it’s been out a while. So sometimes these things slip by us.) If these first pages are any indication, ELR is going to be both completely original and classic Butler at the same time. So send the good folks at AR a check, or visit your local library. You won’t regret it, and maybe it will make the wait for the novel’s publication that much more bearable. Or maybe it will be unbearable, maybe it will make you so eager to read the book that you begin to foam at the mouth and you develop hives. Look, only you can know what the right decision is for you personally here. I’m not a health-care professional or even a licensed beautician. I’m just saying I think you should read the excerpt.
I can’t wait to check out this new Butler jem. Gojus & I took a spin through Alligator following a recent trip to the Shack-Up Inn in Clarkesdale. We had no idea that Jack hailed from there!
Nobody captures the absurdly gothic truth of Mississippi like Jack. Flannery O’Connor’s a close second.
I will be anxious to get hold of Jack’s newest, when he is finished with it. The folks at Pretty Fakes are the very best authors I know
!!
There is so much to be excited about in this excerpt, which I chewed up like bubble gum. Varchers, the author’s metasides, apostrophes “[d]ancing around . . . like a cloud of gnats,” I told you I didnt know how to fight . . .
I am FREAKING. OUT!!