Dark and brilliant tales capturing the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings.

In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about every kind of domestic discord: unruly or distant children, alienated spouses, domestic abuse, loneliness, death, divorce. In his masterful title novella, a freshly married teenaged couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum—and find out exactly how mismatched they really are.

With exquisite tenderness, Watson relates the brutality of both nature and human nature. There’s no question about it. Brad Watson writes so well—with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes, inadequacies, and rare grace—that he must be an extraterrestrial. ($23.95)

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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She
was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave
ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the
most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown
in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for
more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a
scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a
hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the
polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom
bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro
fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold
by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked
grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the
“colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white
laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small,
dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters,
faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children
and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than
twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began
using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And
though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells
human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As
Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past
and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of
experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the
legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became
enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s
daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells.
She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did
it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot
them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a
mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so
important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health
insurance? 
          
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope,
and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its
human consequences.

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Bevill State Community College has sponsored the READ ALABAMA program for almost two decades. We're proud to have been involved from the beginning, and to help resurrect
this great gift for readers throughout North Central Alabama.

After a brief talk, Rick Bragg will sign copies
of all his previous titles, as well as The Most They Ever Had, his newest.

The event will be held at Bevill Auditorium on the campus of Bevill State Community College and admission is free to the presentation and reception preceding the talks. This is the last event of the season, and will be on Wednesday. ($23)

For further information, contact Holly Trawick 205.387.0511 - extension 5715 or htrawick@bscc.edu.

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From the national bestselling author of Final Patrol-a
gripping story of heroism under the sea.

In November 1943,
while on war patrol in the Makassar Strait, the USS Billfish
submarine was spotted by the Japanese, who launched a vicious depth
charge attack. Explosions wracked the sub for fifteen straight hours.
With his senior officers incapacitated, diving officer Charlie Rush
boldly assumed command and led key members of the crew in a heroic
effort to keep their ship intact as they tried to escape.

Now,
in War Beneath the Waves, this intense story is finally told in
all its harrowing detail. It is an inspiring tale of one man's
leadership and courage under fire, and of the remarkable efforts of a
submarine crew to do their duty and save their ship.
 

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From "one of the best crime writers at work today" (Michael
Connelly) comes a fast,f unny, violent new noir crime classic-a Coen
Brothers movie come to life.

He has been compared to Lehane, Ellroy, and Pelecanos, but Ace
Atkins's rich, raucous, passionate blend of historical novel and crime
story is all his own and never more so than in Infamous.

In July 1933, the gangster known as George "Machine Gun" Kelly
staged the kidnapping-for-ransom of an Oklahoma oil­man. He would live
to regret it. Kelly was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and what
started clean soon became messy, as two of his partners cut themselves
into the action; a determined former Texas Ranger makes tracking Kelly
his mission; and Kelly's wife, ever alert to her own self-interest,
starts playing both ends against the middle.

The result is a mesmerizing tale set in the first days of the modern
FBI, featuring one of the best femmes fatales in history-the Lady
Macbeth of Depression-era crime-a great unexpected hero, and some of the
most colorful supporting characters in recent crime fiction.

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In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. There wasn't
anything he couldn't do —and do well. He could outrun anybody. He never
missed a day of school, even in the worst blizzard. He saved lives.
Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He was an inspired
salesman —a visionary, in fact. And he knew more jokes than any man
alive. Or at least that's what he's told his son, William. William
doesn't really know his father because, actually, Edward wasn't home all
that much. What William knows about his father he's had to piece
together from the little bits of stories he's gathered over the years.
Now, watching his father die, William grows increasingly desperate to
know him before it's too late. And in a wonderful sleight of hand,
William recreates his elusive father's life in a series of legends and
myths inspired by the few facts he knows. Through these tales, William
begins to understand Edward Bloom's great feats —and his great failings.
He manages, somehow, to reckon with the father he's about to lose. And
he finds a way to say good-bye.

Free admission: call 205.620.6418 for reservations.

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