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Sugar Among the Freaks: Selected Stories
Introduction by Richard Howorth and foreword by the author. The incomparable Lewis Nordan's first two collections of short fiction--WELCOME TO THE ARROW-CATCHER FAIR and THE ALL-GIRL FOOTBALL TEAM--originally published in 1983 and 1986, have long been out of print in all editions. Collectors' items, these two books are now almost impossible for Nordan fans to find anywhere.To rectify that, Algonquin is delighted to announce a selection of fifteen of the best stories from the two books, newly arranged and introduced by fellow Mississippian, bookseller Richard Howorth, and with a foreword by the author. Critics have called Lewis Nordan's fiction "extraordinary" and "marvelous" and "stunning" and "scorching" and "story-telling genius." The selected stories show that genius in the making. "Characters that people the South hobble and dance across the pages of his short stories."--United Press International; "Delightfully eccentric situations and colorful language add up to a work that is even stronger than WOLF WHISTLE."--Library Journal.
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 5, 1996
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175 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Nordan
25 books74 followersFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer.
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan’s fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan’s hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist. The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success. It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena. With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi. The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes.
In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun.
Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer.
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan’s fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan’s hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist. The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success. It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena. With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi. The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes.
In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun.
Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 31, 2019
What to say about this one, what to say? A collection of short stories culled from two previous books that are now out of print, this will give you some insight into the mind of Lewis Nordan, which may or may not be a good place to be. I have read three of his novels, and enjoyed them all, but these stories have taken me to a different place altogether. The jacket blurb says "As if the worlds of William Faulkner and James Thurber had collided", but I think I would throw Flannery O'Connor in there as well. Some of these stories are funny, some are disturbing, but they are all memorable. As the saying goes, I can't unsee some of these things. The title story, which is the last one in the book, is a little masterpiece that Flannery O'Connor would be envious of.
Bottom line: if you are a person who does not care for short stories because they end abruptly and leave you hanging, you will not like this book at all. If you're a Lewis Nordan fan, you need to read this one.
I leave you with a quote: "I knew I had made a mistake when the iced tea came with a spoon sticking out of it. It's the iced tea in a place that predicts what the food is going to look like when it comes out".
Now that's a Southern writer who knows his stuff!
Bottom line: if you are a person who does not care for short stories because they end abruptly and leave you hanging, you will not like this book at all. If you're a Lewis Nordan fan, you need to read this one.
I leave you with a quote: "I knew I had made a mistake when the iced tea came with a spoon sticking out of it. It's the iced tea in a place that predicts what the food is going to look like when it comes out".
Now that's a Southern writer who knows his stuff!
May 3, 2012
Simply wonderful. Chock full of luxurious language and heartfelt emotion, like, from "One-Man Band," a story about a lonely preacher, Brother Pilkington, performing a wake while reflecting on his own mortality and the declining health of his parents (father, stroke, mother, depression):
"When he sees, in his memory, the rooster in flight, he sees also a world of bright skies and pungent catalpa beans and honey in the comb, he sees planets and suns and galaxies infinitely deep and beautiful, and he hears music. He believes every image and every song come from his sad mother and father, a tale of growth and death and resurrection, of irrevocable loss and unexpected joy in the hope of renewal" ("One-Man Band").
I'm less alone in the world after rereading this book ten years later, and reminded why I became a writer, because these stories have everything--wisdom, style, soul, vision, comedy, page-jumping characters, and "wonder," which, "whether you liked it or not, was the choppy surfaces of lakes and the mounds of fire ants and the wild peacocks in the trees. The miracle was the hunger of wild dogs and the availability and vulnerability of goats" ("The Sin Eater").
"When he sees, in his memory, the rooster in flight, he sees also a world of bright skies and pungent catalpa beans and honey in the comb, he sees planets and suns and galaxies infinitely deep and beautiful, and he hears music. He believes every image and every song come from his sad mother and father, a tale of growth and death and resurrection, of irrevocable loss and unexpected joy in the hope of renewal" ("One-Man Band").
I'm less alone in the world after rereading this book ten years later, and reminded why I became a writer, because these stories have everything--wisdom, style, soul, vision, comedy, page-jumping characters, and "wonder," which, "whether you liked it or not, was the choppy surfaces of lakes and the mounds of fire ants and the wild peacocks in the trees. The miracle was the hunger of wild dogs and the availability and vulnerability of goats" ("The Sin Eater").
March 27, 2014
There is no greater joy than discovering a new writer, for it justifies the thumb’s mileage, the ho-hum trudge through lifeless prose. There are those missteps, those false glimmers of promise and then the inevitable dissatisfaction. There is a lot of mediocrity and pretension out there. One of life’s cruelties for the reader is the uncertainty that they will ever find their writer. A second cruelty – and I’m saying this as a writer – is that they do meet their writer. In my experience of the latter type of cruelty, I have encountered a select few writers, writers who convey a language and experience so alien to me, so admirable, that I know that I could never write something like that, or would want to, and that’s fine by me. But then I learn, to my dismay, that they are longer with us. It happened to me with Michael Dibdin, with Larry Brown, and it happened again recently; it’s bittersweet. Meet Lewis Nordan.
I don’t know how or why, but the American South has produced some of the most astonishing writers. I don’t know whether it is some occult confluence of stars and soil and water, along with the awful legacy of slavery that has given us blues and spirituals, but there is no escaping the fact that southern writers, especially from Mississippi, use the English language in provocative ways. It could be hereditary: William Faulkner and Walker Percy were both from distinguished literary families. Just consider this list of living writers from Mississippi: Ace Atkins, Howard Bahr, Fredrick Barthelme, Richard Ford, Tom Franklin, Ellen Gilchrist, John Grisham, Charlaine Harris, Thomas Harris, Beth Henley, Greg Iles – and I haven’t even reached the midpoint of the alphabet. Let us state the obvious: every writer from Mississippi contends with the shadows of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. It’s unavoidable. Nordan was compared to them, Erskine Caldwell, and James Thurber.
Southern writers seem to turn phrases of the Queen’s English in ways that are odd, exotic and yet truthful. “There’s not a nickel’s worth of taste in a fly, even if you do happen to eat one” is one such phrase from the late Mr. Nordan. There is authenticity, economy, the simplistic and impish in that phrase. “Old as dirt and rich enough to burn a wet bull and all he can think to do is devil a bunch of children” is another one that makes the head cock. The wisdom that bubbles up throughout Nordan’s prose appears deceptive, homespun and eccentric, but it is wisdom borne out of attention to daily behavior, from a determination to laugh at no matter what life slings. Faulkner terrifies, O’Connor unsettles, but Nordan, like Welty, creates laughter, although he can write about the macabre. Eunuchs, a suppository-wielding attendant, midgets, a sin eater, wild dogs, and other freaks populate his fiction.
Mississippi. It has an ugly, ugly history: Till’s murder in 1955; the disappearance and subsequent murders of the three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Medgar Evers in his driveway in 1967. The Confederate Stars and Bars remain on the state flag. In 1964, Nina Simone provided the public with an angry, but accurate, portrait of Mississippi’s racial violence. Lewis Nordan befriended Emmett Till’s mother and he knew the men who killed him. He had said in an interview that it took him a long time to be able to write about violence. His novel Wolf Whistle from 1993 revisits the infamous murder. While not quite the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez or the Shakespearean sprawl of Faulkner, Whistle has talking vultures that witnessed the Civil War, a murder trial, town drunks, and a teacher who takes her fourth-grade class on a tour of a funeral home. It is not easy reading.
Nordan’s literary career began at age forty-five with the publication of his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, in 1983. His second collection, The All-Girl Football Team, appeared in 1986. Before Nordan died in 2012 at the age of seventy-two he had written four novels, one memoir, and two volumes of short stories, which are difficult to find, but a selection from them exists in Sugar Among the Freaks (1996) from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. In the introductory essay to Sugar, Richard Howorth describes Nordan’s narrative strategy as “inverted truth”. In “Rat Song” a daughter’s affection for two pet rats unsettles her father because he perceives rats as nasty, disease-bearing vermin. Dad struggles. Domesticated rats are affectionate and loyal pets, so I have been told, but I also have a vivid memory of my grandfather doing battle with a feral black rat that stood on it hind legs ready to box with a shovel. Is “Rat Song” a metaphor for prejudice? In another story, “One-Man Band,” a preacher arrives at a wake and confronts a grieving young man who finds no solace in religion. Again, it is the adult versus the child. Pilkington assumes that the boy doesn’t understand grief, but at the end of the story Preacher realizes that he has spent his entire life avoiding grief. Lewis “Buddy” Nordan shares with T.C. Boyle the predilection for the way-out-there and the subversive.
In “The All-Girl Football Team,” Nordan reverses cultural and gender stereotypes. A young boy and his father – another prevalent theme throughout his works – like to cross-dress. The father, a real man’s man, educates his son on exfoliation, bras, makeup, dresses and slips, and wigs. In the fictional town of Arrow Catcher men dressing in drag is accepted and, during football season, girls are on the football team while the boys are on the sideline as cheerleaders in skirts and pom-poms. The girls are coarse, insensitive jocks, and our cheerleader boy pines and lusts for them at first, until he realizes that what he desires is Beauty, to feel beautiful. He envies womanhood. In one hilarious scene, he finds himself attracted to the football coach because the man exudes authority, charisma, and the tragic, when the team loses. Our young hero panics and thinks he is a lesbian! As the story progresses – and Nordan’s prose is evocative for anyone who had football games in their childhood – there is this realization that what adults know is the essence of childhood captured in amber:
Suddenly I knew that my father was right, that I did feel beautiful, except that now beauty had a different meaning for me. It meant that I was who I was, the core of me, the perfect center, and that the world was who it was and that those two facts were unchangeable. Grief had no sting, the future was not a thing to fear, all things were possible and pure.
Martha Lacy Hall discovered Nordan, and saw to it that Louisiana State University Press published him; but sales languished, although praise and prizes slowly mounted. Hall shuttled Nordan over to Vintage Contemporaries but the sales just did not happen. Serious praise from critics and a respect from other writers made Lewis Nordan the writer few people knew or read. Nordan wrote about underdogs because he was one. He kept writing. He was teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh when his son committed suicide. Nordan would write his way through depression and publish again. Then, death came. In the short space of three months, the American South lost three talented writers: Harry Crews and William Gay in February 2012, and Lewis Nordan, in April. The following words could have been his epitaph:
I was a boy in costume for one night of the year, and I was my father’s child and the child of this strange southern geography, I was beautiful, and also wise and sad and somehow doomed with joy.
I don’t know how or why, but the American South has produced some of the most astonishing writers. I don’t know whether it is some occult confluence of stars and soil and water, along with the awful legacy of slavery that has given us blues and spirituals, but there is no escaping the fact that southern writers, especially from Mississippi, use the English language in provocative ways. It could be hereditary: William Faulkner and Walker Percy were both from distinguished literary families. Just consider this list of living writers from Mississippi: Ace Atkins, Howard Bahr, Fredrick Barthelme, Richard Ford, Tom Franklin, Ellen Gilchrist, John Grisham, Charlaine Harris, Thomas Harris, Beth Henley, Greg Iles – and I haven’t even reached the midpoint of the alphabet. Let us state the obvious: every writer from Mississippi contends with the shadows of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. It’s unavoidable. Nordan was compared to them, Erskine Caldwell, and James Thurber.
Southern writers seem to turn phrases of the Queen’s English in ways that are odd, exotic and yet truthful. “There’s not a nickel’s worth of taste in a fly, even if you do happen to eat one” is one such phrase from the late Mr. Nordan. There is authenticity, economy, the simplistic and impish in that phrase. “Old as dirt and rich enough to burn a wet bull and all he can think to do is devil a bunch of children” is another one that makes the head cock. The wisdom that bubbles up throughout Nordan’s prose appears deceptive, homespun and eccentric, but it is wisdom borne out of attention to daily behavior, from a determination to laugh at no matter what life slings. Faulkner terrifies, O’Connor unsettles, but Nordan, like Welty, creates laughter, although he can write about the macabre. Eunuchs, a suppository-wielding attendant, midgets, a sin eater, wild dogs, and other freaks populate his fiction.
Mississippi. It has an ugly, ugly history: Till’s murder in 1955; the disappearance and subsequent murders of the three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Medgar Evers in his driveway in 1967. The Confederate Stars and Bars remain on the state flag. In 1964, Nina Simone provided the public with an angry, but accurate, portrait of Mississippi’s racial violence. Lewis Nordan befriended Emmett Till’s mother and he knew the men who killed him. He had said in an interview that it took him a long time to be able to write about violence. His novel Wolf Whistle from 1993 revisits the infamous murder. While not quite the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez or the Shakespearean sprawl of Faulkner, Whistle has talking vultures that witnessed the Civil War, a murder trial, town drunks, and a teacher who takes her fourth-grade class on a tour of a funeral home. It is not easy reading.
Nordan’s literary career began at age forty-five with the publication of his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, in 1983. His second collection, The All-Girl Football Team, appeared in 1986. Before Nordan died in 2012 at the age of seventy-two he had written four novels, one memoir, and two volumes of short stories, which are difficult to find, but a selection from them exists in Sugar Among the Freaks (1996) from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. In the introductory essay to Sugar, Richard Howorth describes Nordan’s narrative strategy as “inverted truth”. In “Rat Song” a daughter’s affection for two pet rats unsettles her father because he perceives rats as nasty, disease-bearing vermin. Dad struggles. Domesticated rats are affectionate and loyal pets, so I have been told, but I also have a vivid memory of my grandfather doing battle with a feral black rat that stood on it hind legs ready to box with a shovel. Is “Rat Song” a metaphor for prejudice? In another story, “One-Man Band,” a preacher arrives at a wake and confronts a grieving young man who finds no solace in religion. Again, it is the adult versus the child. Pilkington assumes that the boy doesn’t understand grief, but at the end of the story Preacher realizes that he has spent his entire life avoiding grief. Lewis “Buddy” Nordan shares with T.C. Boyle the predilection for the way-out-there and the subversive.
In “The All-Girl Football Team,” Nordan reverses cultural and gender stereotypes. A young boy and his father – another prevalent theme throughout his works – like to cross-dress. The father, a real man’s man, educates his son on exfoliation, bras, makeup, dresses and slips, and wigs. In the fictional town of Arrow Catcher men dressing in drag is accepted and, during football season, girls are on the football team while the boys are on the sideline as cheerleaders in skirts and pom-poms. The girls are coarse, insensitive jocks, and our cheerleader boy pines and lusts for them at first, until he realizes that what he desires is Beauty, to feel beautiful. He envies womanhood. In one hilarious scene, he finds himself attracted to the football coach because the man exudes authority, charisma, and the tragic, when the team loses. Our young hero panics and thinks he is a lesbian! As the story progresses – and Nordan’s prose is evocative for anyone who had football games in their childhood – there is this realization that what adults know is the essence of childhood captured in amber:
Suddenly I knew that my father was right, that I did feel beautiful, except that now beauty had a different meaning for me. It meant that I was who I was, the core of me, the perfect center, and that the world was who it was and that those two facts were unchangeable. Grief had no sting, the future was not a thing to fear, all things were possible and pure.
Martha Lacy Hall discovered Nordan, and saw to it that Louisiana State University Press published him; but sales languished, although praise and prizes slowly mounted. Hall shuttled Nordan over to Vintage Contemporaries but the sales just did not happen. Serious praise from critics and a respect from other writers made Lewis Nordan the writer few people knew or read. Nordan wrote about underdogs because he was one. He kept writing. He was teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh when his son committed suicide. Nordan would write his way through depression and publish again. Then, death came. In the short space of three months, the American South lost three talented writers: Harry Crews and William Gay in February 2012, and Lewis Nordan, in April. The following words could have been his epitaph:
I was a boy in costume for one night of the year, and I was my father’s child and the child of this strange southern geography, I was beautiful, and also wise and sad and somehow doomed with joy.
December 6, 2018
thinking back on the stories in this book, I feel like I should not have liked them as much as I did— after all, what kind of weirdo enjoys stories about a couple who starves a pack of wild dogs, a guy who faints while swimming because a lamprey attaches itself to him, a boy who attends to a man in a wheelchair (he even gives him suppositories and has to clean up his shit in the middle of the night), and stories about Sugar, a kid who shot at his dad, the dad that enjoys dressing up like a woman once a year for the Womanless Wedding, and Sugar’s attractiveness to various kinds of freaks.
I enjoyed these so much, even though they seem downright cruel (the dogs— which reads more like a fable than anything) and nonsensical (everything else). Nordan is just such a good writer and I felt myself just accepting and going along with the flow of these stories. I will definitely be seeking out the collection The All-Girl Football Team after reading this, because I definitely need more Sugar Mecklin stories now.
I enjoyed these so much, even though they seem downright cruel (the dogs— which reads more like a fable than anything) and nonsensical (everything else). Nordan is just such a good writer and I felt myself just accepting and going along with the flow of these stories. I will definitely be seeking out the collection The All-Girl Football Team after reading this, because I definitely need more Sugar Mecklin stories now.
December 28, 2023
Masterpiece!
February 4, 2008
i wrote a whole genius-blurb on this book, then lost it. that tends to happen to me. i love this book. the freakiness and lyricism could remind me of lynda barry, i suppose. however it has the Southern/MS connection that touches my heart, in addition. key moments: the kid on his back porch fishing for chickens, using seed-corn hooked on a fishing pole; then, crazier yet, he catches one. #2, the momma's fancy-occasion dinner dish of spaghetti cooked solid, log-shape, from the package. crazy joyous writing.
January 28, 2011
I've read these stories before, having read Nordan's other collections of short stories, but that didn't lessen my enjoyment in reading this collection. Nordan has such a strange comically tragic outlook on the universe that I can read his stories over and over and never get bored. I think that is a true test of a wonderful story, whether it is as good reread as it was the first time through. Nordan's stories are definitely of that caliber.
July 26, 2010
I love Nordan's Music of the Swamp, so it's no surprise that I love this book, which focuses on some of the same characters. This book will make you laugh out loud! It also may disturb you. Probably my favorite short story in the world is "Sugar Among the Chickens," where the little boy, Sugar, is fishing for chickens in his back yard. Hilarious!
March 2, 2011
Lewis Nordan. How has he been left behind on the great American authors list? His stories are dark but in a deep rich, complex way that only the finest craftsman can manage. A recent discovery for me, and I can't wait to read more of his work.
This is a great place to start as its an anthology of his first short story collections and some of his characters for longer novels are being developed.
This is a great place to start as its an anthology of his first short story collections and some of his characters for longer novels are being developed.
September 12, 2008
This book was especially amusing, but dealt with topics I typically am not comfortable with. I had a few chuckles, and than other times wondered what would ever possess the author to write about masturbation so openly. Oy!
April 6, 2013
Hit and miss. Some of the characters and stories are enthralling - some are a bit jarring and out of place.
September 25, 2014
I usually love his dark humor, but some of the stories were just dark & a little unsettling.
December 17, 2016
This book was slightly disturbing and freaking amazing!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews