Events

Sunday, November 20th 2pm   with special guest, John Casey                December 1, 1955. Floodgates are poised to slam shut on a concrete dam straddling the Oogasula River, creating a lake that will submerge a forgotten crossroads and thousands of acres of woodlands in rural Georgia. Fall Line unfolds in one day's action, as viewed through the eyes of Elmer Blizzard, a troubled ex-deputy; Mrs. McNulty, a lonely widow who refuses to leave her doomed shack by the river; her loyal, aging dog, Percy; and a rapacious politician, State Senator Aubrey Terrell, for whom the new lake is named. A story of land grabs, wounded families, bitterness, hypocrisy, violence, and revenge in the changing South, Fall Line is populated by complex characters who want to do the right thing but don't know how. Starnes's novel is a memorable, beautiful, and heartbreaking tale of a backwater hamlet's damaged people and transformed landscape.     Joe Samuel Starnes is a native of Alabama who grew up in Georgia and has lived in New Jersey and Philadelphia for the past decade. His first novel, Calling, was published in 2005, and his journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and various magazines. He has also published essays, short stories, and poems in literary journals. A graduate of the University of Georgia and Rutgers University, he was awarded a fellowship to the 2006 Sewanee Writer's Conference. Starnes lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.      John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel, Spartina, won the 1989 National Book Award for fiction. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Henry Hoyns Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia.