Hot Springs, Arkansasby Keith MaillardWorld War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author''s story, a tale about his family''s crumbling dynamics in troublesome times."''Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,'' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They''d never heard of Pearl Harbor."

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006 It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre--and all of America-- with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW. It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impossible to do anything, or even think straight--and if John's brains aren't addled enough by the temperature, there's the endless obsession with girls--the persistent problems of his old flame Cassandra Markapolous and her younger sister Zoë. There's also the massive Civil War novel he's been studiously not working on. And to make things worse, LBJ's starting to call up the reserves. This is John in that gruelling summer waste land, a fat, broke, horny, unemployed, draft-eligible, Buddhist Confederate, who, if he doesn't do something drastic, is going to find his fat, broke, horny ass shipped overseas to get it shot off.Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes is a delightful performance, a crackerjack novella that works on multiple levels, as intoxicating as a mint julep and as tightly wound as the spring in a homemade time-bomb.

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father's life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction—a social history often reading like a detective story—as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father's absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, and following a trail that takes him from Vancouver to Montreal to his native Wheeling, West Virginia, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.

Hot Springs, Arkansasby Keith MaillardWorld War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author''s story, a tale about his family''s crumbling dynamics in troublesome times."''Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,'' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They''d never heard of Pearl Harbor."

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006 It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre--and all of America-- with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW. It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impossible to do anything, or even think straight--and if John's brains aren't addled enough by the temperature, there's the endless obsession with girls--the persistent problems of his old flame Cassandra Markapolous and her younger sister Zoë. There's also the massive Civil War novel he's been studiously not working on. And to make things worse, LBJ's starting to call up the reserves. This is John in that gruelling summer waste land, a fat, broke, horny, unemployed, draft-eligible, Buddhist Confederate, who, if he doesn't do something drastic, is going to find his fat, broke, horny ass shipped overseas to get it shot off.Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes is a delightful performance, a crackerjack novella that works on multiple levels, as intoxicating as a mint julep and as tightly wound as the spring in a homemade time-bomb.

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father's life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction—a social history often reading like a detective story—as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father's absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, and following a trail that takes him from Vancouver to Montreal to his native Wheeling, West Virginia, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.