Winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction Winner of Silver Award for Fiction, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards After a death at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque journey, he sweeps through society, revealing the highest and lowest in human nature and only slowly coming to self-understanding. He searches the points of the compass for what will help, groping for a place where he can feel content, certain that he has no place where he belongs and that he rides the rails through a great darkness. His difficult path to collect enough radiance to light his way home is the road of a boy struggling to come to terms with the cruel but sometimes lovely world of Depression-era America. On Marly Youmans' prior forays into the world of the past, reviewers praised her "spellbinding force" (Bob Sumner, Orlando Sentinel), "prodigious powers of description" (Philip Gambone, New York Times), "serious artistry," "unobtrusively beautiful language," and "considerable power" (Fred Chappell, Raleigh News & Observer), "haunting, lyrical language and fierce intelligence" (starred review, Publishers Weekly.) Howard Bahr wrote of The Wolf Pit, "Ms. Youmans is an inspiration to every writer who must compete with himself. I had thought Catherwood unsurpassable, but Ms. Youmans has done it. Her characters are real; they live and move in the stream of Time as if they had passed only yesterday. Her lyricism breaks my heart and fills me with envy and delight. No other writer I know of can bring the past to us so musically, so truly." The first chapter is available to read or download at the Scribd site.
Author
"Youmans (pronounced like 'yeoman' with an 's' added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers." —John Wilson, editor, Books and Culture MAZE OF BLOOD (Mercer University Press, 2015.) Novel. Inspired by the life of Robert E. Howard. Profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Literary / fantastic. "...A haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose." —Midori Snyder GLIMMERGLASS (Mercer University Press, 2014) IndieFab BOTYA Finalist. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Novel. "It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird. Glimmerglass shimmers on the boundaries of the real and the unreal, of poetry and prose, of the ordinary and the fantastic. It’s down to the caprice of the individual reader, therefore, to decide exactly what sort of story it’s trying to tell. It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39)." -Tom Atherton, "Strange Horizons" A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (Mercer University Press, 2012) The Ferrol Sams Award for 2012; Silver Award in fiction, The ForeWord BOTYA Awards. Novel. "It is seldom that a novel from a small university press can compete with the offerings from the big houses in New York. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage may be the best novel this reviewer has read this year. Its quality and story-telling remind one of The Adventures of Roderick Random, Great Expectation and The Grapes of Wrath among others. The winner of the 2012 "Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction," A Death has the potential to become a classic American picaresque novel. / One wishes, however, that this novel will not get shunted into the regional box and be seen only as a Southern novel. Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience." 30 July 2012 ABOUT.COM Contemporary Literature, John M. Formy-Duval. THALIAD (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) Post-apocalyptic long poem combining elements of the novel and the epic. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse——though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time. —novelist Lee Smith THE FOLIATE HEAD (UK: Stanza Press, 2012.) Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Collection of formal poetry. THE THRONE OF PSYCHE (Mercer University Press, 2011.) Collection of formal poetry. "Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry." Greg Langley, Books editor, The Baton Rouge Advocate, October 2, 2011 VAL/ORSON (P. S. Publishing, 2009.) Novel. "Book of the Year" for 2009 Books and Culture Magazine INGLEDOVE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) Fantasy, y.a. CLAIRE (Louisiana State University, 2003) Collection of poetry. THE WOLF PIT (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.) The Michael Shaara Award. Short list, Southern Book Award. CATHERWOOD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.) LITTLE JORDAN (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1995.)
