In this short story prequel to Michael Farris Smith’s widely acclaimed novel Rivers (a Best Book of 2013 in BookRiot, Daily Candy, and Hudson Booksellers), a series of catastrophic hurricanes along the Gulf Coast prompts the government to institute “The Line,” a boundary between the coastal region and the rest of the country, effectively creating a lawless no-man’s land without electricity, resources, or basic services.Those left behind include Aggie, a snake-handling prea...

'Exceptional' — Crime Review on The FighterA crooked nose. Scar slices across his forehead. Jack Boucher, he whispered and he shook his head. You ain't nothing but a broken down dirty dog.Le Boucher, he said to himself in the rearview mirror. The butcher.Jack Boucher, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, is battling against decades of drug and alcohol abuse when he returns home to find his world in ruins.Set against th...

In Michael Farris Smith's latest gritty epic, a young woman returns home with her child, to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the storm-ridden territory to find the girl who may hold the key to the region's apocalyptic future.There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and j...

"Michael Farris Smith is one of the best writers of his generation, and this very well may be his best work" — Tom FranklinIn the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, Desperation Road is set in a rough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect and collide.For eleven years, the clock had been ticking for Russell Gaines as he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the...

Critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this exhilarating imagination of his life before The Great Gatsby.Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's world, he was at the centre of a very different story - one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I.Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick delay...

A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who've wound up on the road of poor choices, a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, all drawn together by Michael Farris Smith's trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose.An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-inde...

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts and twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past s...

In the tradition of The Stranger and The Old Man and the Sea, this masterful novella by critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith explores the human spirit and its capacity for faith and forgiveness in an imperfect world and begs the question: how do you survive when hope is lost? Jon and Estelle walk the picturesque Paris streets but are living through the cruelest of realities: the disappearance of their nine-year-old daughter, Jennifer, abducted from the Musee...

For fans of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, “a wonderfully cinematic story” (The Washington Post) set in the post-Katrina South after violent storms have decimated the region.It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn’t rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land.The Gulf Coast ...

**One of NPR's Books of the YearA "prophetic, propulsive" tale of one mysterious, messianic child with untold powers who draws three desperate souls into acts of mercy and mayhem. (Scott Blackburn)**An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to...

A critically acclaimed novelist pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this "masterful" look into his life before Gatsby (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls and Chances Are).Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's periphery, he was at the center of a very different story-one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I.Floundering in the wake...

In this timeless, mythical tale of unforgiving justice and elusive grace, rural Mississippi townsfolk shoulder the pain of generations as something dangerous lurks in the enigmatic kudzu of the woods.The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself -- when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believe...