Fred Chappell

"Now grown, Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to be with his ailing mother and to settle at last the family's accounts ten years after the death of his father. Established in Greensboro with his wife and the beginnings of a career as a poet, Jess has long been removed from his time in the hills. But cleaning out a secret workroom here reunites Jess with tales of his youth and the spirit of his irrepressible father, Joe Robert Kirkman. A discovery he makes in his father's shed leads him back into the past, for in that dusty room he finds an unusual machine made of stovepipe and ceramic and a handwritten map peppered with the names of several women. These clues help Jess uncover a part of his father's history he never knew: a quest through space and time in search of truth, beauty, and a perfect revenge."--BOOK JACKET.

One of our most acclaimed and versatile authors, Fred Chappell is comfortably at home in fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. A Way of Happening gathers his essays and reviews of contemporary poetry. Chappell consider new writers as well as more established authors, including Alfred Corn, William Matthews, A. R. Ammons, Linda Pastan, Julia Randall, Cornelius Eady, Alan Shapiro, and many others. And there are essays on the plight of the critic ("Thanks but No Thanks") and the delicate role of the writing teacher ("First Night Come Round Again").

Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You begins in a room made cool by the approach of death, where an old woman and her grieving daughter are saying good-bye in silent, urgent conversation. In the next room, Jess Kirkman waits with his father, remembering the tales his grandmother and mother have passed down - an inheritance rich in language and music and imaginative teaching, told by women to a young man who will one day find such wisdom needful. Each tale builds and weaves in a counterplay as intricate as that of fiddle and banjo. Jess recalls "The Fisherwoman," "The Traveling Woman," "The Feistiest Woman," "The Silent Woman," "The Wind Woman," and others, in a range of ghost to detective to comic to love stories. As he tells, he comes to understand the special knowledge of the women and the place that made him: a mountain land where myth becomes history, language makes song, and time seems to pause at a certain point at dusk, when the moon casts deeper shadows than the sun.

Anecdotes drawn from her life.

Spring Garden selects poems from six of Fred Chappell's previous collections and adds to them some thirty new ones. Seven sections on different themes compose the main body of the book, and each section is provided a prologue. A General Prologue and an Epilogue are supplied too, and all these taken together make up a loose and gentle narrative, a story of the poet classifying and selecting among his work while his wife, Susan, botanizes in their private garden. Their parallel labors completed, they look toward the approaching long twilight. Chappell is known for designing his poetry books as wholes, and Spring Garden, though it represents the compositions of twenty-five years, is no exception. Its contents are varied but unified, its purposes serious but congenial. And though the volume is suffused with an elegiac tone, these pages contain surprises in plenty and friendly good humor.

Tells of a father-son relationship in the North Carolina mountains. It is of a family whose men work in the paper mill.

Violence and sex in a small Southern city. Arkie, Clemmie, Oxie, and Johns are linked by a schoolboy's prank. Arkie, Clemmie, and Oxie are three of a kind: cons who grub for small change. They have no history and no future. Johns is their counterpart in a brighter universe. His thievery is sanctioned because he's Family in a small Southern city. Arkie: Suddenly it occurred to him that this street, Gimlet Street, could take you anywhere in the world, it was joined to all the other streets there were. He shook his head, grinning. This was his territory. He was chained to Gimlet and he was chained to Clemmie, that green-eyed girl he was so helplessly in love with. "Chappell has outstanding gifts as a writer!" — Southern Observer "Chappell writes like a whiz!" — Book Week "Chappell writes with imagination and descriptive grace!" — Los Angeles Times "Chappell is a powerful and demanding and uncompromising writer…very powerful and impressive!" —Greensboro Daily NewsFred Chappell is the Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

"Yellow light filled the attic. The light locked with the dust—tons of dust up here—and the atmosphere of the place stuffed his head like a fever. It seemed that he perceived this light with every nerve of his body. The attic was mostly empty but toward the south wall was a queer arrangement of chains; the ends dangled about seven feet from the floor and had broad iron bands attached. The bands were hinged on one side so they could open and shut. The chains looked red in the yellow light. He held one of the bands and stroked his finger along the inside and it came away reddish. Rust, he thought; but it didn't flake; it wasn't gritty like rust. It was old, caked blood. . . Slowly, Peter is mesmerized and begins a journey into madness where a bloodstained god waits to claim the mind and soul of the last of the Lelands. ""I am honestly convinced that Fred Chappell is one of the finest writers of this time, one of the rare and precious few who are truly 'major.'"" — George Garrett, author of Death of the Foxand The Succession. Fred Chappell is a past Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Boson Books also offers Dagon The Gaudy Place and Moments of Lightby Fred Chappell. For an author bio and photo, reviews and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com."

THE INKLING by Fred Chappell is, says the New York Times, "A work of genuine talent…. Chappell writes with power and passion and with flashes of humor."This early novel of Chappell's takes sixteen-year-old Jan to where we often try to go—the place where all is right just before it goes wrong. The novel begins and ends with Jan's vision in just that place and with his searing pain of ignorance and failure. Chappell gives us characters for tragedy: a mother, bereaved and weak; her two children, a retarded older girl and, in contrast, a bright younger boy deeply frightened by what he perceives as his responsibility to take care of his mother and sister in the absence of his dead soldier father. Uncle Hake, the mother's brother, is the intruder whose admittance stems from an idea of necessity and family decency. It is this outsider, his desires, and death (always the intruder), who tear at the tenuous family bonds of mother, dead father, and starkly contrasted children.Chappell skillfully and quickly catches us in the artful net of his concept and his lucid and vibrant prose.Fred Chappell is the Poet Laureate of the state of North Carolina. BOSON BOOKS also offers DAGON, MOMENTS OF LIGHT, and THE GAUDY PLACE by Fred Chappell.

James Christopher—book editor, husband, and father of two—is headed for trouble. Once a North Carolina farm boy who grew up hoeing, fighting, and listening to his grandmother read from the Bible, James resigns from his job for no apparent reason, drinks too much, fails in his attempt to take up writing, and, following the advice of a skirt-chasing rogue, has an affair with a woman he dislikes. Daring to recall the events of his childhood, especially the fire that destroyed his grandparents’ home, James, obsessed with his past and its deception, struggles to truly understand his history and its influence on the man he has become.Fred Chappell recently served as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate. Boson Books also offers The Inkling, Moments of Light and Dagon by Fred Chappell.For an author bio, photo, and a sample read visit bosonbooks.com.