Johnny Redd

Johnny Redd grew up amidst the poverty of rural Tennessee, where graduating from high school was the greatest ambition many could hope for. But now he has the chance to change everything. Helped by friends of his murdered father, Johnny is on his way to Chicago for a job as a right-hand man in the national labor movement. In escaping from poverty, will he also have to abandon morality, and give up on his hope to make things better for the friends and family he left behind?

A superb collection, Mr. Personality brings together the best of Mark Singer’s profiles and “Talk of the Town” pieces from The New Yorker (1977–1989). In these thirty-three witty and offbeat pieces, Singer presents a slice of New York and its citizens in a way that only he can. From prolific filmmaker Errol Morris and a family of superintendents to one of the last great zipper-fixers, a court buff in Brooklyn, and Mr. Personality himself, these remarkable portraits offer something for every reader.

It is June 1925, the dawning of a new, spectacular riverboat season, and Noble Princes Red-Hot Rhythm Band is set to play hot jazz on the Mississippi! Walter Von Bulow, the owner of the Morning Queen, has recently discovered Lucinda Lucky Martinson. Luckys a talented young jazz singer. Von Bulow hires her in the year 1925, to sing in Princes band. But shes in New Orleans for other reasons: Lucky Martinsons on a personal quest to reconcile her past. Luckys left Harlem and her boyfriend Tolliver Williamsa fellow jazz musician Luckys in love with. Shes put her personal and professional life at risk in traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana to unbury truths and lies. Luckys sucked further into New Orleanss network of mystery and intrigue once she uncovers these family secrets in a historical city where voodoo and superstition co-exist, and can destroy the people you love. Noble Prince nurtures Luckys singing ambitions, but Victor Malreauxa young, dynamic trumpet player in the Prince bandnurtures her soul. Victor falls in love with Lucky. But Victor Malreaux as well as Noble Prince are in for a rude awakening from Lucky Martinson; each for diff erent reasons.

Authors such as Hunter Thompson, Robert Pirsig, and Mark Singer have written about the motorcycle, that icon for outlaws, rebels, thieves, and beat poets. This collection of motorcycle tales features the best of the vast collection of motorcycle writing created since old Gottlieb Daimler first bolted a crude internal-combustion engine to his wooden two-wheeled Einspur in 1876. In addition to essays from Thompson and Pirsig, The Devil Can Ride features works by Peter Egan, T.E. Lawrence, James Stevenson, Jamie Elvidge, John Hall, and Kevin Cameron.

At the end of a bloody trail, Johnny Redd finds an incredible secret. While struggling with a bullet in his chest, he crawls along the ground until he finds himself surrounded by a maze of quaint carnival tarps. Inside is a world of color, costumes, false hair, nails, eyelashes -- and a man who dresses like a woman. It’s a world of trickery, deception, and lies. Johnny makes it just inside the tent when his strength fails and he faints dead away. When he awakes, he’s reminded of the bizarre reality that surrounds him. It’s that he learns he has been taken care of by a man – er. woman -- by the name of Frenchy Starr. The name rolls from the tongue of this fallen angel, this princess of darkness, this twilight queen. She’s a mystery, a dangerously beautiful mystery, and Johnny slowly becomes ensnared in the trap which she sets. After one night of incredible love, a jealous fan shoots Frenchy. Thinking her dead, Johnny’s heart is broken and he leaves in search of something to fill the hole she left in his heart. Enter Kit Dalton.

Perhaps it was divine providence and not chance that Beaufort, South Carolina, was to witness the onset of the Civil War-occupation of the Union Army, and unlike its southern counterparts, spared the kindle torches of Sherman's determination to destroy the Confederacy. As a result, it preserved its natural beauty of live oak trees, picturesque homes, and cultural beliefs and customs generic to the Sea Islands. The plantation lifestyle was serene, ornate, and beautiful for the white slave master, but laborers on them did not enjoy the same fate. A midwife on the Rices' plantation delivered a black slave baby through uncanny and unconventional techniques. The child grew up to challenge the prescribed norms and expectations of a slave, subsequently transcending outmoded ideas. He became the administration officer of farming affairs during reconstruction. Other short stories depict and describe the West African influence in customary beliefs and social norms, delineating the flavor of the low-country Southern lifestyle.