Lisa Howorth presents “Flying Shoes” at Malaprop’s, June 23

From a press release:

Lisa Howorth Presents Flying Shoes on 7 PM June 23 OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

“Flying Shoes braids a love knot of new South, old South, and haunted South that catches at the reader’s heart, even as the humor and sadness of her rollicking prose has us slipping off our own shoes and moving to the music of her voice. Flying Shoes is exhilarating and brave, full of love and grief and the journeys we all make from past to present.”
—–Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Lark and Termite

“Lisa Howorth’s dazzling verbal wit almost stops you in your tracks while you are flying along in this delicious prose. It is a scream—also heartbreaking, saucy, sassy, poignant and triumphant. Mary Byrd is a bold, kooky, quirky character I won’t forget. It has been a long time since I read a novel with such charm, generosity, humor, daring and brilliance. It is just splendid.”   —–Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret

“Like all great stories from Mississippi, Flying Shoes, never proceeds in a straight line. It twists and turns in order to notice what matters most in life, and then delivers us to exactly where we need to be. Those of us who have waited a long time for this book celebrate its arrival.”
—–Ann Patchett

FLYING SHOES
A Novel
By Lisa Howorth

The much anticipated debut by Lisa Howorth, co-founder of Oxford’s legendary Square Books, is a remarkable novel based on the real-life, long-unsolved murder of her young stepbrother.

With a cast of quirky characters only a small town could produce, Flying Shoes also traces the still-unsolved molestation and murder case of Lisa Howorth’s nine-year old stepbrother, a crime that shook her community on Mother’s Day 1966 and made the front page of the Washington Post. Set 30 years later in a Mississippi town not unlike Oxford (or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County for that matter), Flying Shoes is a candid, provocative story and a gimlet-eyed snapshot of the South. A place where even calamitous weather can be a character; the kind of insular community where everyone has a story (and perhaps a secret), and all are inextricably entwined. With a flamboyant cast, splendid dark humor, a potent sense of history, and a shocking true story at its heart, Flying Shoes is a rich colorful novel that announces a fresh new voice.

LISA HOWORTH lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she and her husband, Richard, opened Square Books (Publishers Weekly’s 2013 Bookstore of the Year) in 1979. Lisa received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1996 and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2007. Here non-fiction has appeared in Garden & Gun and The Oxford American.