ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In WOLF WHISTLE, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. "An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. WOLF WHISTLE will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters."--Randall Kenan, The Nation.**

Leroy Dearman is twelve, and he lives on a llama farm in Mississippi. Life is perfect. It's true that his grandfather just died in the attic and that wild dogs kill a baby llama now and then, and it's true that one little sister curses him and the other one wets her pants. But up to the day Uncle Harris moves in, life looks like it's right out of a Walt Disney movie. No wonder the llamas greet each morning with a song. Uncle Harris arrives in a sports car, full of funny stories and new ideas. He manages to persuade Leroy's straitlaced parents to join him for cocktails in the evening. He sets up a pretty grand bachelor pad in the Dearman attic, with a telephone, a TV set, and a stack of Playboy magazines. He is, you might say, Romance itself. Once Uncle Harris moves in, life on the llama farm takes on an entirely different flavor. Leroy discovers those magazines. Electricity fills the Dearman house. Equilibrium tilts, conversation trails off, the atmospheric pressure...

"If you call yourself a serious reader but still haven't discovered Lewis Nordan, shame on you." —The Seattle TimesLewis Nordan's cult following began in 1991 when Algonquin published his first novel, Music of the Swamp. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, was inspired by one of the nation's most volatile and notorious racial incidents. Nordan was fifteen years old at the time, and living in Mississippi, just down the road from where young Emmet Till was murdered for daring to whistle at a white woman. Wolf Whistle was hailed by Randall Kenan in The Nation as "an immense and wall-shattering display of talent." It was Nordan's most acclaimed work and winner of the Southern Book Award. He published four more books with Algonquin, including Lightning Song, The Sharpshooter Blues, Sugar Among the Freaks, and a memoir, Boy with Loaded Gun. His fictional works, all set in the American South, have...

ALA Notable Book; Mississippi Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Nordan's fiction invents its own world, a world populated by madly heroic misfits. In MUSIC OF THE SWAMP, he focuses his magic and imagination on a single theme—a boy's utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father. ""Lordy, Lordy, can Lewis Nordan write!""—Los Angeles Times Book Review; ""It is absolute ballad put to page.""—Southern Living.