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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

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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