Description

Joseph Anthony's fine historical novel A Wounded Snake presents a compassionate, yet unsentimental, study of race, politics, law, and lawlessness in the near-South, turn of the 20th Century city of Lexington, Kentucky. Local information about events and personalities is set up as precisely as lead type placed, letter by letter, onto a printing press, to reveal line by line, in stark black and white, how a century ago "a good truth....did more than a fist in the face could ever do." In today's atmosphere of renewed racial tension, A Wounded Snake serves to remind the reader that "we cannot be in this place we�ve been." For although "forgetting is what we do best in the South," it's time to remember and change.

--Christina Lovin, author of A Stirring in the Dark and Echo: Poems