Cover to Cover

Marc Fitten has been a well-known figure on the the Atlanta literary scene for years. As the editor of The Chattahoochee Review, Fitten has infused the venerable periodical with a more international flavor and has been a force behind bringing a number of literary authors from around the world to Atlanta.

Now, the literary gadfly takes center stage with his debut novel, Valeria’s Last Stand. The book is the lead fiction title in this season’s catalogue from the esteemed literary publisher Bloomsbury. Set in post-Soviet Hungary, where Fitten spent several years in the 1990s, it is at once a love triangle (featuring characters of very advanced age) and a meditation on the changes wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Early reviews of Valeria’s Last Stand have dubbed it “subtle and brilliant” and “a beautiful debut” and the lead character “every bit as sensual and irrepressible as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.”

Before embarking on an international book tour, Fitten discussed with Cover to Cover his literary inspirations and aspirations.

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On this week’s Cover to Cover Orlando Montoya sits down with Martin Melaver to discuss his book “Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change and Restores Land and Community”… Orlando Montoya sends us this short history of Melaver’s many green endeavors…

I’ve been reporting on Martin Melaver’s career since shortly after I came to Savannah in 1998. A developer, Melaver made news by undertaking one of the nation’s first historic renovations to LEED standards. And if you don’t know what those standards are, they basically govern everything about the building process for properties that want to be certified as “environmentally friendly.” I interviewed him again when he developed a pioneering suburban strip mall to LEED standards. Now he’s involved in an “environmentally friendly” public housing project and has written a book about his journey in business. “Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change and Restores Land and Community” is really a management handbook. In this interview, he also touches on hard questions that go to the core of two of our biggest global problems — the recession and climate change — and proves why he is considered a leading thinker in Savannah’s sustainability movement.

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Valarie Edwards recently sat down with award winning author/actor Hill Harper to talk about his new book, Letters to a Young Sister. She has this preview: Following on the heels of his award winning New York Times bestseller, Letters to a Young Brother, actor and author Hill Harper delivers life-affirming messages to young women in his latest book, Letters to a Young Sister. In 2006, Letters to a Young Brother won two NAACP awards and, in 2007 was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. The award winning actor currently stars in CSI: NY. Hill Harper graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. from Brown University and cum laude from Harvard Law School. He also holds a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government.

Learn more at www.manifestyourdestiny.org

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Stan Deaton spoke with Winston Groom about his latest novel Vicksburg, 1863. He gives us this preview:

Winston Groom is a masterful storyteller, as one would expect from the man who wrote the novel Forrest Gump. Now the author of fourteen previous books of both fiction and non-fiction has brought his considerable skills to bear on retelling the story of one of the most important battle of America’s most crucial war. Vicksburg, 1863 is Groom’s latest offering, and it’s a good one. One reviewer wrote that Groom’s approach to the Civil War follows that of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, and that’s pretty good company to be in.

Groom’s got a great cast of characters to work with, and they’re all here in vivid detail: Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Jefferson Davis, Joseph E. Johnston, John Pemberton, Earl Van Dorn, along with other Americans, black and white, northern and southern, who have been lost to history. His conclusion, that the loss of Vicksburg was a turning point in the war and the Confederacy’s greatest setback, is not a surprise. But Groom takes it one step further: he argues that after Vicksburg fell in early July 1863, the Confederate high command should have realized that there was no possible way to win the war militarily, and they should have stopped fighting and sued for peace at that point, nearly two years before the war actually ended. It’s an intriguing argument, and one of history’s great “what if?” moments.

In this interview, he talks about all of this plus his years at the University of Alabama, his time in Vietnam, and the challenges of writing fiction and non-fiction.”

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