The Tilted World: A Novel - Softcover

Franklin, Tom; Fennelly, Beth Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062292765 ISBN 13: 9780062292766

Publisher: William Morrow, 2013

Synopsis

Set against the 1927 flooding of the mississippi river, The Tilted World is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine—and a man and a woman who find unexpected love—from Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly

As rains swell the Mississippi, the river threatens to engulf all in its path, including the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, where federal agents Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson are headed on the trail of two missing agents and a local bootlegger—and instead stumble across an abandoned baby.

Ingersoll finds a home for the infant with local woman Dixie Clay Holliver, unaware that she's the best bootlegger around. Dixie Clay knows better than to trust an agent, but when they learn of a deadly new peril, these natural enemies will be forced to come together to survive.

About this title

Review

Author One-on-One: Joshilyn Jackson and Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin

Joshilyn Jackson is the best-selling author of six novels, including Gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.

Joshilyn Jackson: Dixie Clay’s relationship with the orphan who falls into her care captures the visceral experience of Baby Love. My own kids are 11 and 16 now, but reading those passages, I had an almost physical response, a wave of something stronger than nostalgia. Can you talk about how you created this relationship?

Beth Ann Fennelly: Short version: I got knocked up. Tommy and I enjoyed a romantic trip to Provence, and I came home with food poisoning. After three weeks of not shaking the bug, it dawned on us—my “food poisoning” was a fetus. Sweet baby Nolan re-immersed us into the joys of the hands-on, every minute parenting of an infant (by then our “bigs” were turning ten and six). The physical rituals of feeding and bathing and diapering him synced me with Dixie Clay’s bodily rhythms. Mothers, I think, are hungry to see motherhood portrayed accurately in books. I know I am. And writing about a baby gave me an excuse to do what I really wanted to do anyway—study the marvelous creature that we’d somehow created.

JJ: The Tilted World is set against the dynamic backdrop of The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. I’d never heard of it until I read your book. Why do you think it’s such a lost part of our history? How did you find it?

BAF: I think because so many of the people affected were poor Southerners—many of them black sharecroppers—the scale of the tragedy wasn’t registered by those who write history. But folks still talk about it here, and after Katrina, it was on a lot of people’s minds. There’s also an amazing nonfiction book about the flood called Rising Tide, by John M. Barry.

JJ: Music, especially blues and jazz, plays an important role in The Tilted World. How important is music in your own lives?

Tom Franklin: We both love music of all kinds (we recently saw Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg perform in the same month), but especially enjoy Mississippi blues. During the flood, the blues was more than entertainment—it was soul-affirming. So many people were thrown together on the levee with nothing to do besides stare at the water—blues gave them a way to grieve and dream.

JJ: A married couple—both successful writers with very different visions and distinct voices—decides to write a novel together. It sounds like a recipe for divorce, disaster, or both. Yet here you are, you’re still best friends, and the book is wonderful. How did the collaboration come about?

TF:When my cousin heard we were writing a book together, he said, “High stakes poker, Tom.”

But it wasn’t. Instead, it turned out to be one of the best writing experiences of our lives. What happened was we’d written a collaborative short story, and after it was published, our agent, Nat Sobel, saw the story in a magazine and called me. “You should expand this story for your next novel,” he told me. “And you two should write it together.” Beth Ann took some convincing. As a poet, she’d always joked that fiction was a “lower art,” but after enough wheedling she decided to try it. It was fun to write together, fun to inhabit that world with her. We were almost sad when the book was finished. Now I have to see if I can convince her to write another.

About the Author

Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0062292765
• ISBN 13: 9780062292766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320