New Releases by Margaret McMullan

Second Edition

Fiction. AFTERMATH LOUNGE is a compelling tribute to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Resurrecting the place and its people alongside their heartaches and triumphs, Margaret McMullan creates a riveting mosaic that feeds our wish to understand what it means to be alive in this day and age. "In AFTERMATH LOUNGE each short story, like a homing pigeon, returns to the Gulf Coast to explore how its people struggle with the ghost of Hurricane Katrina. With riveting prose, Margaret McMullan tracks the weblike connections of family and friends haunted by the storm from Pass Christian, Mississippi, to Chicago."—William Ferris "I love these stories. They're so smart, beautiful, true—and so real—that they seemed like part of my own history. I felt homesick in the best way, flooded with a kind of saddened joy. They snuffed the gimlet-eyed adult and brought to life again, for a while, the wondrous child."—Brad Watson "I like these new stories so much it's hard to know where to start. But a good place to begin would be... well, Place. She brings it to life like few writers can. You can almost feel the heavy air on your skin. As for her characters, they're three-dimensional people who are so real, you feel like they're in the room with you. She's got a great ear, a fine eye, and something else that you can't buy—namely, a very large heart."—Steve Yarbrough "AFTERMATH LOUNGE is a beautiful, compelling collection, the emotions as powerfully charged as the winds of a hurricane. Margaret McMullan writes movingly about those living in and pulling themselves out of destruction and chaos and loss to salvage all they can of love and redemption. From the voices of orphaned children to the least likely man to don a Santa Claus suit, there are moments of devastation, comic relief and grace."—Jill McCorkle "How strange, that the best apocalyptic fiction of the year should come to us, not borne on the maelstrom of nuclear fire or horrific epidemic, but rather in this series of beautifully crafted and masterfully interwoven literary stories. In AFTERMATH, our humanity is not simply swept away by the fury and chaos of Katrina; rather, it is tested, sometimes broken, sometimes intensified, and ultimately renewed by the deluge. A hopeful Book of Revelation."—Pinckney Benedict

It's 1962, a year after the death of Sam's father, Sam and her mother must move, along with their very liberal views, to Jackson, Mississippi. Needless to say, they don't quite fit in. As racism ensues, Sam learns to focus with her camera lens to bring forth the social injustice out of the darkness and into the light.

When her world is turned upside down at her sister's death, a mentor is assigned to fourteen-year-old Casha to help her through her anger and grief.

The author of "How I Found the Strong" pens a gritty, beautifully told story about a girls adjustment to life after the Civil War, and how she tries to rise above the bad reputation of her entire family.

In My Mother's House is a beautiful, haunting, and expertly told novel about a daughter's obsession to understand her mother's commitment to silence about their family's experiences during WWII Vienna. The story of Elizabeth and her mother Jenny is remarkable for its fullness of details: the pieces of family silver the grandmother mails to Jenny, piece by piece, over the years; Jenny's vivid memories of her uncle's viola d'amore lessons; the smell of the wood floors in the family's Vienna home. It's an emotional story of what is inherited from one generation to the next.

It is the spring of 1861, and the serenity of Smith County, Mississippi, has been shattered by Abraham Lincoln's declaration of war on the South. Young and old are taking up arms and marching off to war. But not ten-year-old Frank Russell. Although he is eager to enlist in the Confederate army, he is not allowed. He is too young, too skinny, too weak. After all, he's just "Shanks," the baby of the Russell family. War has a way of taking things away from a person, mercilessly. And this war takes from Frank a mighty sum. It's nabbed his Pa and older brother. It's stolen his grandfather, his grandmother. It has robbed Frank of a simpler way of life, food, his boyhood. And gone are his idealistic dreams of heroic battles and hard-fought victories. Now all that replaces those images are questions: Will I ever see my father and brother again? Why are we fighting this war? Are we fighting for the wrong reasons? Will things ever be the same around here?

When Warhol Was Still Alive is a funny, poignant novel about the women's magazine industry and life in New York in the eighties. It's about love and friendship, memory and dreams, the struggle to stay close and learning how to say goodbye.