Year: 2013

Brambleman is actually selling over in the UK! The very proper Mrs. Helen Painter gives Brambleman four stars and writes: “I really enjoyed this book, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, so I was very pleasantly surprised! If you want a story that is long, funny, strange and weird then this is the book for you!!!” See original review. If you want to buy the book here in the states, you’re in luck, because Brambleman is on sale now, by the way. Kindle and Nook versions are only $6.99. That’s $2.00 the regular price. Grab the eBook today!  Best price on the paperback is here. Regardless of what the Brits think, Brambleman won the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for…

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  For more about Brambleman and the Benjamin Franklin Award, click here.  

News from Thornbriar Press Brambleman, Jonathan Grant’s gritty, supernaturally-tinged tale of redemption and revenge in Forsyth County, Georgia has won the Independent Book Publishers Association 2013 Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction. The Franklins were presented at the IBPA’s annual meeting in New York City on May 29 in a prelude to Book Expo America. Brambleman tells the story of down-and-out writer Charlie Sherman, who has no idea what madness awaits when a stranger convinces him to finish a dead man’s book. Charlie’s work on the manuscript—about the mob-driven expulsion of 1,000 blacks from Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912—leads him to a more recent crime that has enriched a Forsyth County family.  Charlie becomes convinced that he’s been chosen by a…

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Emory University President James Wagner has come under increasing fire for lauding the “three-fifths compromise” in the U.S. Constitution. This measure allowed slave states increased power in the federal government by counting slaves in federal censuses and assigning representation in Congress based on three-fifths of their numbers. In other words, for every 100,000 slaves within its borders, Georgia was credited with having 60,000 citizens. Meanwhile, the slaves themselves had no rights as citizens, being treated as chattel property. The South wanted all the slaves counted; Northern interests wanted none of them coutned. So Southerners pretty much got their way. Nowadays, the three-fifths compromise is not considered an example of  good governance.  Instead it is widely seen as dishonest pandering to a great evil. Now, here’s what Wagner originally wrote in Emory Magazine: One instance of constitutional compromise…

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From Politico: President Obama was just in Atlanta this week, but will be back in May to deliver the commencement address at Morehouse College, the White House confirmed to POLITICO. “Morehouse College, one of the nation’s leading Historical Black Colleges and Universities, is among the best and brightest institutions of higher education in the country,” the White House said in a statement. Commencement is scheduled for May 19. “Known for its high standard for excellence in learning and social consciousness, Morehouse is home to a long list of notable alumni that spans the last three centuries,” the White House added. Alumni of the all-male liberal arts college include Martin Luther King, Jr., Spike Lee and Maynard Jackson, the first African-American mayor of…

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It takes a special kind of person to father a black child and then go on to become a very successful professional bigot, but the South was filled with them back in the day. Essie Mae Washington Williams, daughter of late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, has died.  Thurmond who spent much of his long political career as an arch-segregationist, never publicly acknowledged his “other” daughter’s existence during his lifetime.  Thurmond, who even ran as a third-party Dixiecrat in 1948 to combat President Harry S. Truman’s liberal policies, is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the South’s modern-day GOP.  He died in 2003 at the age of 100. I saw Strom Thurmond once, in the summer of 2001. I was with…

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