Year: 2013

An old friend posted his review of Brambleman on my facebook timeline, and I wanted to memorialize it on Brambleman’s website before it was carried down the river and disappeared.  Dr. Louie Crew is an emeritus professor of English Literature at Rutgers University. A prominent voice for reform in the Episcopal Church, Louie was and is a crusader for LGBT rights—from back in the days of Easy Rider in the Deep South! The Review I just finished Jonathan Grant’s novel, Brambleman and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a sustained, up-close, and dramatic look at racists, especially those in Forsyth County, Georgia, as well as a look at a few community organizers in greater Atlanta and their difficulties in opposing it. Narrator Charlie Sherman…

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Here’s a link to a wire-service version of the Jim Auchmutey article that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February 1994 about finishing Dad’s book. The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia went on to win Georgia’s “Book of the Year” award that year and was selected as Editor’s Choice at American Heritage magazine. If you want to know more about this remarkable and monumental achievement (80 percent of it Dad’s work), click here. Here’s a link to the magazine article I wrote on the same subject a few months later for the University of Georgia Alumni Record: “Finishing Dad’s Book: Not just a job, it’s and Indenture.” I went on to raise a couple of kids and write a…

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At Kindle Fire Department. Check it out! Meanwhile, here’s the scoop on Brambleman, along with news about the major award it recently received.  

From the Tucker Patch: A book by author Jonathan Grant has won an award from the Independent Book Publishers Association. The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction was bestowed on Brambleman at IBPA’s annual meeting in New York City on May 29. The novel is about a mob that expelled 1,000 African-Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia early last century and is a sequel to The Way It Was in the South. “Winning meant a lot because I put so much into that book,” Grant told Patch. “It took ten years to write, and from conception to awards ceremony, nearly two decades. When my category came up and they announced that the winner was Brambleman, I kind of froze. Then I told…

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Note: Brambleman recently received the Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction, and to celebrate this honor, Thornbriar Press has put the Kindle version on sale through June for only $6.99 — $2 off the regular price. * * * Forsyth County, Georgia is the site of one of the most infamous acts of ethnic cleansing in American history.  In late 1912, white mobs and nightriders drove out more than 1,000 black residents from the community.  Their success was remarkable in its completeness, and Forsyth, in the shadow of the black Mecca of Atlanta, remained lily-white for nearly a century afterward. I first came up with a primordial idea for Brambleman in 1993 and started writing something resembling this book in 1998. Ten years later, I finished the manuscript.…

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Prepared for the Ashbrooke Book Club, Forsyth County Georgia, Oct. 22, 2012