Matthew Guinn

A medical student faces an ethical difficulty when he is asked to be part of a cover-up after a remodeling project on campus literally digs up bones of dissected African American slaves, once used for anatomy training. 15,000 first printing.

The Resurrectionist: A Novel

Investigating a series of murders targeting post-Civil War Atlanta's wealthiest black entrepreneurs, a disgraced former detective partners with the city's first African-American officer in a case marked by fierce racial, political, and personal tensions.

a novel

The scribe

The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.

Fiction of the Contemporary South

After Southern Modernism

Detectives Canby and Underwood hunt down a serial killer in this “heady mix of history, sizzle, punch, and danger” (Steve Berry, New York Times best-selling author of The Patriot Threat). Disgraced former detective and Civil War veteran Thomas Canby partners with Atlanta’s first African American police officer, Cyrus Underwood, to track down a serial murderer who seems to be targeting the city’s wealthiest black entrepreneurs. Even after the killer is revealed, his astonishing ability to elude capture raises the question: is there such a thing as supernatural evil at loose in the world? Matthew Guinn draws readers into a vortex of tense, atmospheric storytelling, confronting the fears of both old South and new, compelling the reader through a breathless, disturbing finale. A Los Angeles Public Library Best Book of the Year and a Finalist for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize.

Matthew Guinn

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