LSU Press Blog

The News & Observer spotlights Yellow Shoe Fiction

The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) recently ran a great feature on LSU Press and its Yellow Shoe Fiction series.  Click here to read the full article.

Telegraph lists "Confederacy" in 50 Best Cult Books

The LSU Press Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces was named as one of the 50 Best Cult Books by British newspaper, Telegraph.  Click here to view the entire list.

Oprah Book Club Author McCarthy Explored in New Book

This week, Oprah chose Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her immensely popular book club. Check out CNN's recent feature for the scoop.

Gary M. Ciuba, professor of English at Kent State University, has recently published a groundbreaking study of McCarthy and several other celebrated southern authors titled Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. In his book, Ciuba explores the roots of violence in southern culture by analyzing protagonist Lester Ballard in McCarthy’s Child of God. Desire, Violence, and Divinity would make the perfect compendium piece for those readers interested in delving deeper into the raw emotions that permeate McCarthy’s fiction.

Third Book in Yellow Shoe Fiction Series Selected

The Animal Girl: Stories, by John Fulton, has been selected as the third title in LSU Press's Yellow Shoe Fiction Series. To be published this fall, the stories in The Animal Girl explore the complexity of both mid-life romance and adolescent rage with humor and insight. While the characters in these stories are overwhelmed by grief, they are also forced to accept loss when confronted with the need and desire to connect with those around them. Fulton's rich and unobtrusive language is just right for conveying the emotional and narrative complexities of these stories.

Yellow Shoe Fiction is an original-fiction series edited by Michael Griffith, author of the novel Spikes and the short-fiction collection Bibliophilia. Griffith was also an editor at the Southern Review literary quarterly for more than a decade and now teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Regarding the aims of the Yellow Shoe Fiction series, Griffith has said: "I'll be looking first and foremost for literary excellence, especially for good manuscripts that have fallen through the cracks at the big commercial presses. In today's publishing world, despite the proliferation of fiction titles in recent years, those cracks seem like yawning crevasses, and I'm confident that we'll be able to find worthy novels and story collections—whether by new writers on the way to big careers or by critically acclaimed veterans frustrated by New York's endless hunger for youth and novelty." The first two books in the series are If the Sky Falls: Stories by Nicholas Montemarano and Uke Rivers Delivers: Stories by R. T. Smith.

John Fulton is the author of two books of fiction: Retribution, which won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award and the novel More Than Enough, which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Boston.