Matthew Guinn – författare

At South Carolina Medical College, Dr Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career—working in the university’s public relations department—takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves are unearthed on campus.In the nineteenth century, Nemo ("no man"), a slave purchased for his unusual knife skills, becomes an unacknowledged member of the surgical faculty by day—and by night, a "resurrectionist", responsible for procuring bodies for medical study.With exceptional storytelling, pacing and skill, Matthew Guinn relates a gothic tale of shocking crimes and exquisite revenge, a riveting and satisfying moral parable of the American South.

After leaving Atlanta in disgrace three years before, detective Thomas Canby is called back to the city on the eve of Atlanta’s 1881 International Cotton Exposition to partner with Atlanta’s first African American police officer, Cyrus Underwood. They are assigned a chilling case: a serial murderer who seems to be violently targeting Atlanta’s wealthiest black entrepreneurs.After Canby’s arrival the murders become increasingly disturbing and unpredictable, and his interference threatens to send the investigation spinning off in the wrong direction. Canby must face down enduring racism, and his own prejudices, to see clearly the source of these bloody crimes. Meanwhile, if he can restore his reputation, he might win back the woman he loves.

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.