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A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake
Diane Ladd
A Collection of Ten Short Stories
Inkwell Productions
February 2013
On Sale: January 23, 2013
152 pages
ISBN: 0988356899
EAN: 9780988356894
Kindle: B00B52KYWQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
Southern writers have a unique talent for feel, touch,
smell, and taste that doesn t seem to exist anywhere else.
Truman Capote had this extraordinary gift. So did Flannery O
Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee
Williams among others. They felt the snow, smelled the
honeysuckle, heard the wind through the loblolly pines,
tasted the sweet tea. And they got it down on paper with a
wrenching sensitivity that turned into literature. Diane
Ladd has it, too as an actress, as a humanitarian, and as a
writer of prose that makes cracker barrel talk as down-home
unpretentious as a buttermilk biscuit suddenly sound
downright patrician. The characters in these stories laugh,
cry, bleed and leave behind a legacy not easily forgotten.
They come from Mississippi towns called Meridian,
Poplarville, and Tupelo, and end up in cities called
Chicago, San Francisco, and Manhattan, but no matter how
they learn or lose or love, they never cease to cherish a
Porsche 911 GT2 or a cold bottle of Orange Crush with equal
relish. Diane Ladd is one of them. From the Mississippi
Delta to Broadway and Hollywood, she has forgotten nothing
and retained everything. What a thrill to read what she
knows in the words of characters as rich and colorful as
fields of sunflowers: a man whose homophobia backfires
because he s wearing an orange jacket, a garden that
flourishes from the bodies of mercury-poisoned miners in the
cemetery underneath, a statuesque mulatto on her first day
at Juilliard. You can t learn this stuff in a writing class.
You absorb the stories you hear, hold them close, stamp them
in your memory. Then on a bad afternoon for a piece of cake,
you write them down and tell them to the world, the way they
were told to you. And you become a Southern writer, on your
way to a new adventure. How blessed we are to share this one
with Diane Ladd.
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