George P. Garrett

"Garrett 's eighth collection of short fiction includes fifteen stories that blend fact and fiction, comedy and pathos, and the voices of diverse characters while focusing on the themes of love and death as well as the complexities of human relations"--Provided by publisher.

In the forgotten corners of Rina's mind there is a very valuable secret... One that the Chavez family will kill for. Almost two decades ago a car accident thrust Rina Morell's life into darkness. Unable to deal with the traumatic loss of her mother, Rina's young mind erected a wall that blocked her vision and her memories of the event. Years later Rina still suffers from psychosomatic blindness--unable to see the danger that lies next to her. Until a series of "accidents" restores her physical sight, and a mysterious second vision... When she discovers that her husband is the head of the infamous Chavez family, a drug cartel with powerful political and terrorist connections, and that he's responsible for her mother's death, Rina is terrified. With the help of CIA agent JT Wyatt, she escapes into the Witness Security Program. But even anonymity can't protect her from the knowledge locked inside her head...or the fact that her ex-husband, a cold-blooded killer, is still on the loose.

Although George Garrett is best known for his outstanding fiction, he has also written a large body of superb poetry. This generous compilation, brings together the work of almost a half-century and adds to it some forty-three new poems.

Here is a new collection of stories, anecdotes, and personal essays, with a few poems added for good measure, by a writer whose first collection of short fiction was published to high praise some forty years ago. The brief fiction section covers Garrett's extraordinary range: as a writer of Elizabethan-era historical fiction (for which he is perhaps best known), as a Southern regionalist/humorist, as a satirist, and as a technical innovator. The second section derives from Garrett's inexhaustible store of humorous anecdotes. The final section contains serious and reflective personal essays, mostly having to do with Garrett's family, and particularly with his father. These pieces are thoughtful, moving, and wise.

In the first week of April 1968, the central Florida town of Paradise Springs is stunned by two murders, a suicide, a kidnapping, and arson. That same week the nation is shocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis and the riots that follow in more than a hundred American towns. Twenty-five years later, a slightly battered investigative reporter named Bill Tone goes to Paradise Springs to reconstruct these violent mysteries and to make some sense of them in the context of those mad times. In the course of his research Tone discovers that past and present reverberate, obscured and illuminated by unexpected sources. Indeed, one of the most unexpected - she was only four years old in 1968 - is the town librarian, but Tone is also drawn into a maze of other stories from witnesses, participants, and even the departed. An ex-sheriff, a one-time nude model, a very successful African-American lawyer, a midget revivalist, his 300-pound common-law wife, and a retired professor turned pornographer are among the voices that sing Tone onto the rocks and into the whirlpools of the past.

The Sorrows of Fat City is a representative sampling of critical literary essays written by George Garrett and published between 1957 and 1990. One of America's most accomplished and highly acclaimed writers, poet and novelist Garrett has been writing book reviews and critical essays since the outset of his career. In this volume, he treats several subjects including the Elizabethans, writers who have influenced him, the work of William Faulkner, Southern literature, and. Contemporary writers.

Completing his masterful trilogy of novels set in Elizabethan England, Garrett again applies distinguished literary skills to spin a tale dark with deception and metaphysical questions but teeming with sensuous and concrete details that convey the spirit of the age. In 1597, when it seems that "half the people in England are spying on the other half,­" two Londoners skilled in deceit are forcibly enjoined by rival factions to investigate the recent death of dissolute poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. Each of the two--­Joseph Hunnyman, "common player" and con man, and Captain William Barfoot, soldier and spy--­is aware of the other's investigation, but they come together, only through a third party, the provocative widow Alysoun. Like an impressionist painting, vivid in its small, shimmering details, the novel conveys a picture of Renaissance society, offers richly nuanced character portraits, and sparkles with bawdy humor and robust sexuality. Garrett's prose is oblique, his sentences arrestingly truncated, his narrative method seemingly digressive; in no rush to spill out his story, he circles round and round its mysterious core. Though the plot here is less compelling than those of the two previous novels, readers will enjoy a novel of rare literary quality, richly marinated in research, wondrously steeped in the world it artfully depicts. –PW

“This is surely the best historical novel in many years,­” wrote Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek about Death of the Fox, George Garrett’s unparalleled reentry, into the heart of the English Renaissance. His new novel, The Succession, is surely the finest since: a triumph of intellect and imagination that once more brilliantly re-­creates Elizabethan England.­After decades of rule, Elizabeth I lies dying. She has overcomes the Spanish, the Pope, power-­hungry noblemen, even her beloved Essex. England is prospering under her; she is, they say, married to it. Who will succeed her? Who can? To read The Succession is to be plunged into the last days of this great age, to experience its humanity, color, pageantry, and drama; its grandeur, squalor, splendor, and folly. And to better imagine the procession that came before us (in any land) and the succession to follow.

A meticulous re-creation of Elizabethan England that forms a trilogy with The Succession and Entered from the Sun. Here the author delves into the story of Sir Walter Ralegh's fall from favor for alleged conspiracy against James I. Garrett transports the reader to a world of cunning, intrigue, and colorful abundance.

Shelby Foote, Jesse Hill Ford, May Sarton, and other writers contribute stories and poems, variations on "the girl in the black raincoat", a real person who once attended the editor's creative-writing class.