Set mostly in the Delta region of Mississippi where [Nick] White was born and raised, the collection (Sweet & Low) is divided into two sections. In a story in the first section, “The Lovers,” a widow slowly realizes the truth about her husband’s secret life after she discovers an unrecognizable pocket watch among her husband’s belongings. …
The stories in the second section are interlinked, focusing on the life of one Forney Culpepper, who matures from childhood to early middle age over the course of six varied and finely crafted stories.

Nicola Griffith’s new novel So Lucky, a slim book about the progress of a little-understood chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, seems unexpectedly narrow in scope when compared to previous efforts. However, the subject matter is partly autobiographical.

UZODINMA IWEALA’S powerful, timely novel, Speak No Evil, tells two interrelated stories, told from each of the main characters’ point of view.

AT FIRST GLANCE, a title like “Gay on God’s Campus” suggests the depressing old tale of gay people’s suffocation in Bible-fog. In fact, nothing about this book is depressing, and it serves as something of a light in the fog, focused as it is on how gay students and their supporters have succeeded in moving their colleges into, if not exactly the 21st century, at least a reasonably modern way of treating LGBT students.

The Damned Don’t Cry, They Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey by Harlan Greene University of South Carolina Press. 184 pages. $29.99 IN 1993, John…More