This Month

This month we go a little bit country with a bevy of books that will transport you far from the concrete jungle. There's a surprisingly gripping account of the world's biggest trees and the people who love them, as well as a new history tome that exhumes a neglected chapter of the Civil Rights movement, and a memoir by a pair of Canadian writers who decided to mini-size their diet by only eating locally. In the fiction department, Sherman Alexie charts cycles of violence in his new novel, while Norwegian writer Per Petterson plumbs the dark echoes of a pastoral past, and novelist Matthew Sharpe won't let history be, imagining a post-apocalyptic Jamestown. Equally marvelous is a monograph of stunning landscapes and interiors by Swedish painter Mamma Andersson. We conclude with an interview with Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Books, who edited and published the last, unfinished novel by the late Southern fiction titan Larry Brown.