Forsyth County Archives – Page 2 of 2

Georgia fiction: Read a sample of the award-winning Brambleman

BRAMBLEMAN A Novel by Jonathan Grant Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Popular Fiction Print and eBoook versions available wherever books are sold KINDLE edition only $6.99! Download the Prologue and Chapter One of Brambleman to read at your leisure. PLOT DESCRIPTION: Down-and-out Atlanta writer Charlie Sherman has no idea what madness awaits him when a mysterious stranger convinces him to finish a dead man’s book about a horrific crime that’s gone unpunished for decades. What Charlie inherits is an unwieldy manuscript about the mob-driven expulsion of more than 1,000 blacks from Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912. During the course of his work, Charlie uncovers a terrible secret involving a Forsyth County land grab. Due to its proximity to Atlanta, the stolen farm…

5-Star Review of Brambleman: Neil Gaiman meets Flannery O’Connor

Here’ s a review of Brambleman by G.D. Brennan, a Chicago author who gives it five stars. I’m flattered, of course, and I’m especially gratified when a reader gets out of the book what I was certain I put into it. Brennan’s observation echoes my feelings. When I was pitching the book, I said, “Imagine Neil Gaiman and Joseph Heller collaborating on To KIll a Mockingbird.” Close enough, G.D. To see the original review, click here. To purchase a copy of Brambleman, click here. G.D. Brenna writes: Imagine Neil Gaiman and Flannery O’Connor collaborating on a story about the legacy of a true-life ethnic cleansing in rural Georgia. Better yet, imagine that story being told by someone with both of those…

Brambleman wins major publishing award

News from Thornbriar Press (orig. pub. June 3, 2013) Strange Tale of Georgia County’s Ethnic Cleansing Claims Prize Brambleman, Jonathan Grant’s gritty, supernaturally-tinged tale of racism, redemption, and revenge in Forsyth County, Georgia, has won the Independent Book Publishers Association’s 2013 Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction. Franklins, which honor excellence in editorial and design, are considered among the highest national honors for small presses and independent publishers. This year’s awards were presented at the IBPA’s annual meeting in New York City on May 29 in a prelude to Book Expo America. Brambleman (Thornbriar Press, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-9834921-2-2) tells the story of homeless Atlanta writer Charlie Sherman, who is tricked by a stranger to finish a dead history professor’s book about one…

About Brambleman, a novel

The story: Down-and-out Atlanta writer Charlie Sherman has no idea what madness awaits him when a mysterious stranger convinces him to finish a dead man’s book about a horrific crime that’s gone unpunished for decades. What Charlie inherits is an unwieldy manuscript about the mob-driven expulsion of more than 1,000 blacks from Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912. During the course of his work, Charlie uncovers a terrible secret involving a Forsyth County land grab. Due to its proximity to Atlanta, the stolen farm is now worth $20 million—and a sale is pending. When he finds the land’s rightful owner, Charlie becomes convinced he’s been chosen by a Higher Power to wreak justice and vengeance on those who profit from evil. Brambleman is…

MLK Day in Georgia 1987: Hosea Williams marches on Forsyth County

Above: Some of the 25,000 who came for the second march on Jan. 24, 1987 Excerpt from The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant and Jonathan Grant. All rights reserved. The most startling event during the 1987 King holiday celebration grew out of a “march for brotherhood” at the Forsyth County seat of Cumming on January 17, when a small group of marchers led by Hosea Williams was attacked. Forsyth, just north of Fulton County, was home to thirty-eight thousand people, all of them white. It had a reputation as a racist enclave ever since whites had driven out virtually all the county’s eleven hundred blacks in 1912 after a lynching and orgy…

“I was nine years old when they ran us out”

Jacket copy “I was nine years old when they ran us out of Forsyth County in 1912. My father let me take one thing, a baseball he’d bought for me in the spring. I gripped it tight as we pulled away from our house. My mother was expecting my sister then, so she laid down in the back of the wagon. White men on horseback watched us with their rifles pointed in the air. Pop stared forward with the reins in his hands. ‘This is what they do, son,’ he told me. I heard glass break and turned to see a torch fly in our front window. Pop grabbed my head and twisted it so hard my neck hurt. ‘Boy, don’t look…

Brambleman

Georgia politics, history, and other stuff

Tag: Forsyth County