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Olympia Vernon is an exciting young novelist known
for her extraordinary originality of voice. This critically
acclaimed author has written three books, Eden, Logic and,
most recently, A Killing in this Town. Olympia has received
several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for
Eden. The winner of Louisiana’s 2005 Governor’s Award for
Professional Artist of the Year, Olympia Vernon has taught
creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Olympia currently is the Hallie Brown Ford
Chair of Creative Writing at Willamette University.
Olympia Vernon has a degree in criminal justice and an MFA
from Louisiana State University. She is a young blazing new
talent in American literary arts and a unique offering in
the speaking market.
 A Killing in
This Town
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (January 11, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802142966
ISBN-13: 978-0802142962
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
The winner of the
first annual
Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
“Kaleidoscopic... biblical... A
fever-dream evocation of a small Mississippi town...
[Vernon] vividly lays out a collection of blasted lives.”
—Maud Casey, The New York Times Book Review
Award-winning author Olympia Vernon’s third novel, A
Killing in This Town, is a taut, poetic masterpiece
that exhumes a horrific epoch from the annals of the
American South.
There is a menace in the woods of Bullock County,
Mississippi, and not only for the black man destined to be
lynched when a white boy comes of age. The white men who
work at the plant are in danger, too, but they refuse to
heed Earl Thomas’s urgent message that the
factory is slowly killing them, turning a deaf ear to the
black pastor. Thomas knows he should try to deliver the
message again, but he hears the blood of his murdered friend
calling to him from the ground, and fears that he will be
the next black man to be dragged to his death. Adam Pickens,
a white boy now on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, isn’t
sure he wants to wear the garb being readied for him by the
Klan seamstress, or participate in the town’s ugly
ritual. It is only with the return of Gill Mender—a man
haunted by past sins—that redemption seems possible. A
transfixing and pivotal work of fiction, A Killing in
This Town exposes the fragile hierarchy of a society
poisoned by hatred, and shows the power of an individual to
stand up to the demons of history and bring the cycle of
violence to an end.
 Logic
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN:
0802117716
Format: Hardcover, 272pp
Pub. Date: May 2004
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc
Read an AALBC.com Review
A taut emotional powerhouse of a second novel about
an unusual young girl grappling with her burgeoning
adolescence, by an author whose writing The New York
Times Book Review called “a startling reminder of how
forceful Southern magic can be”
After The New York Times Book Review raved that Olympia
Vernon’s first novel, Eden, was “a startling reminder of how
forceful Southern magic can be,” Vernon returns to the Deep
South for the story of Logic, a young girl struggling to
free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as
“the butterflies floating inside” her.
As a child Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree—an
accident that precipitated her transformation into a young
girl lost in her own world. Logic’s mother has secretly
wished that Logic had not survived, and she now ignores the
increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention
Logic’s father bestows upon his daughter in her adolescence.
As her mother retreats into her work as a neighborhood
midwife and Logic’s father collapses into paranoia, Logic is
left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. In
inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic
is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a
searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a
family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save
her.
 Eden
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0802117287
Format: Hardcover, 272pp
Pub. Date: January 2003
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Edition Number: 1
Read an AALBC.com Book Review
“Daring [and] explosively supernatural. . . . [Eden
is] a startling reminder of how forceful Southern magic can
be. . . . The message is simple, though profound: love and
death destroy difference, devouring us all. . . . Vernon’s
talent . . . is as green and growing as those country fields
where her ghosts lurk.”—Ann Powers, The New York
Times Book Review
When fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield draws a naked
woman on the pages of Genesis in fire-engine-red lipstick
during Sunday school, the rural black community of Pyke
County, Mississippi, is scandalized. Her mother, mortified
by the small-town gossip and determined to teach Maddy the
perils of her youthful intelligence, forces her from then on
to spend weekends caring for her estranged Aunt Pip, an
outcast who lives on the wrong side of town and is dying of
cancer. The lessons Maddy learns are ones that could not be
taught in any church.
Shuttling between the home she shares with her
parents—endlessly locked in a cycle of resentment, violence,
and only sporadic tenderness—and the house of tough,
strong-minded Aunt Pip out on Commitment Road, Maddy feels
her eyes gradually opening to the complicated dynamics that
inform her world. As the once self-possessed, fiery Pip
wastes away in body and spirit, Maddy is forced to confront
the brutal finality of death and to contend with the ghosts
that hover over Pyke County—the violated body of Laurel
Pillar, a young white girl raped in the field years before;
Uncle Sugar, the black man said to have Laurel’s blood on
his hands, in prison for life; Justice Bates, Sugar’s
alleged accomplice, his broken body strung up and hanging
from a tree; and the community of dead and dying women who
have been ravaged by disease, in whom Maddy finds a terrible
sort of comfort.
In lush, vivid brush strokes, Olympia Vernon conjures a
world that is both intoxicating and cruel, and illuminates
the bittersweet transformation of the young girl who must
bear the burden and blessing of its secrets too soon.
Eden is a haunting, memorable novel propelled by the
poetry and power of a voice that is complex, lyrical, and
utterly true.
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