New York Times discovers N.C. writers

OK, that's a little bit of hyberole. But this Sunday's New York Times book section did feature reviews on three books written by North Carolinians -- three very different North Carolinians.

Perhaps one of the most anticipated new books is Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (of Cold Mountain fame.)

"Frazier’s first novel, 'Cold Mountain,' distilled the Civil War into the alternating stories of a lone Confederate deserter, making his slow and dangerous way home through the mountains of western North Carolina, and the young woman awaiting his return," writes the newspaper. "That 1997 book won both critical acclaim, including a National Book Award, and huge popular success, with more than four million copies now in print in the United States and a film adaptation that has grossed more than $160 million worldwide. Readers and critics (including Alfred Kazin, in one of his last published reviews) embraced the novel as an American epic, much as a previous generation had embraced another book that set doomed love against a Civil War backdrop: 'Gone With the Wind.'

"Almost a decade later, Frazier revisits the same mountains to evoke another epic 19th-century journey: the forced expulsion (then referred to as the Cherokee Removal) of some 17,000 Native Americans, who set off on what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. But, as their titles should suggest, while 'Cold Mountain' was a trip across the physical landscape, 'Thirteen Moons' is more of a passage through time. When we first encounter its narrator, Will Cooper, it’s the early 20th century and he’s in his 90’s, surviving incongruously amid a world of automobiles, telephones and moving pictures."

"Kudzu" cartoonist Doug Marlette has quite the reputation as a "tell it like it is" Southern storyteller when it comes to his tomes; he pulls no punches. Marlette is back with Magic Time.

Writes the Times: "Doug Marlette, a self-aware Southern journalist and a promiscuous position-taker ... doesn’t turn tail and doesn’t have much respect for those who do. Styling himself an 'equal opportunity offender,' he’s spent decades attacking hypocrites and blowhards with his Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoons, in his 'Kudzu' comic strip and most recently in fiction. 'My talent is like a pit bull on a very long leash, and each day when I take it out for a stroll I hold on for dear life,' said the cartoonist-protagonist of Marlette’s first novel, 'The Bridge' (2001). There’s no question Marlette was talking about himself.

"In 'Magic Time,' Marlette’s second novel, he’s trying to put that dog on the scent of something big: his own vision of the South and Southerners, and, indeed, of America. Marlette wants to hunt out and attack the seminal issues — race, history, shame .... So he walks the trail back to the same moment, the early 1960’s, in a place, Mississippi, where choices were stark and, yes, very much required, yet many Southerners tried like hell not to make them."

And then there's Amy Sedaris. For quite some time she's held the title of "David Sedaris' sister." Well, after some great acting roles (both on TV, movies and on stage), Sedaris, who grew up in Raleigh, takes on the book world with I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.

"Amy Sedaris has written a book on entertaining. To my mind, the most entertaining thing this writer-actress ever did was to perform Off Broadway (in plays she wrote with her brother David) in roles for which she would tape the tip of her nose up against her face. The effect was porcine. Moreover, the elongation of Miss Sedaris’s nostrils, combined with the actress’s feral energy and freshets of filthy dialogue, was comedically intoxicating: I laughed so hard that I tasted my own bile," writes the Times.

"Sedaris’s wonderfully dizzy new book has a less galvanizing effect, but to hold anything up to her former nasal-comedic heights is only to make it look saggy and distended by comparison — less Amy Sedaris’s nose and more Nora Ephron’s neck. No, the more apt comparison is the interior designer Dorothy Draper’s 1941 classic, 'Entertaining Is Fun!' As Draper did, Sedaris starts out by telling us what her book is not, and also by acknowledging that parties don’t need to be formal or extravagant. On the first subject, Sedaris writes, 'This is not a joke cookbook.' On the second: 'Don’t think of pony kegs and loud Southern rock or cigarillos and businesswomen. Don’t think of pools and diving for loose change. Don’t think about cockfights — even though it’s hard not to.' Instead, she urges us to 'think simplicity. Because if there is one thing that I am, it’s clinically simple.'"