“Have you had your fix of southern fiction yet?” Sonny Brewer asked as I drifted past the MacAdam/Cage booth with novelists David Francis and Mark Sarvas late Sunday morning, handing us a copy of Twilight, a novel by William Gay. At first, I thought I was talking to a marketing exec I didn’t recognize, but then I spotted his nametag, and I realized this was the author of Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, a beautiful, “mostly true” story about his efforts to locate a runaway pet. So we got to talking about Brewer’s efforts to handsell Gay, a Tennessee writer who prefers to avoid the spotlight. (Although he can’t be that shy; apparently he broke into publishing by cold-calling Cormac McCarthy after reading one of his novels and discovered that somebody really might publish the kind of stories he wanted to tell.) Brewer used to encourage Gay to go out and do more to promote his work, he said, until one day their mutual publisher pulled him aside and told him to stop bugging Gay and just let him write.
Brewer also regaled us with an account of his 30-hour cross-country drive from Fairhope, Alabama, to Los Angeles, where he was taking some meetings with film people in addition to hanging out at BookExpo America. “I saw a roadrunner, a tarantula, and two dead coyotes,” he reported. Being local writers, Sarvas and Francis ended up taking copies of Twilight; I’m getting one sent to me now that I’m back in New York, and I’m looking forward to seeing The Long Country whenever MacAdam/Cage has advance copies of that November release available…