Please join Community Roots for their November book club meeting on Thursday, November 18th at 6pm! They will meet in front of Community Roots Market at 292 Hancock Street in Downtown Madison.
Copies of this book are available in the market for purchase! To stay up to date on book club events, please join our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/communityrootsbookclub.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Appalachee Red, the debut novel from Morgan County native Raymond Andrews, has been given myriad descriptions. An auspicious beginning. A bawdy fable of retribution. A race book for a man without a race. A Jim Crow tale of people who find a way to party. A story of joy in sorrow. A novel with flawed heroes and pitiful villains.
We’d like add another description: a book about eating.
It’s set in Appalachee, Georgia, a stand-in for Madison, and the key location is Sam’s Cafe, which, soon enough, will be Red’s Cafe. Andrews serves up enough characters to fill a Russian epic, and almost all of them can be identified by relationships to food and drink. There is a buck-toothed cook adept at using every part of the pig - save for the grunt and the squeal. There’s a moonshiner born with the gift (or curse) of “perfect pouring.” A vixen-turned-heroine bursts on the scene doing a peach-fuzz dance. And there is the ominous hero who picks a plate so clean that washing it would be a waste of water. Their stories drip with humanity the way sauce drips from Sam’s famous barbecue ribs.
Come and savor it with us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Raymond Andrews was born in Morgan County, Georgia, in 1934, the fourth of ten children. He was a widely acclaimed novelist and chronicler of the African American experience in north central Georgia. His first novel, Appalachee Red, won the James Baldwin Prize for fiction in 1979. In 2009 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. For more info, please visit https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/.../raymond-andrews.../.
ABOUT THIS MONTH'S DISCUSSION LEADER:
Jesse Stephen Freeman is the founder of Milk Crate Media, a commercial video production company. From 2002 until 2010 he was based in Atlanta, Georgia, and appeared on various Georgia Public Broadcasting programs, including Lawmakers and Prep Sports Plus. He also hosted Cover to Cover, a literary talk show on GPB Radio highlighting Southern writers. In 2010 he was nominated for an Emmy for Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story, a documentary film he wrote and directed. Jesse holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, where he was the winner of the 2012 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. He now lives in Madison, Georgia, a town famous for its antebellum homes.