Come Again No More — David Wesley Williams

Meet Charley Hull, erstwhile newspaper reporter, the latest casualty of a dying industry, and the voice of David Wesley Williams's most personal and poignant novel yet. Come Again No More is an elegy with heart and gallows humor, told in Charley's lyrical and oft-profane voice. It begins with a wake and ends with a rebirth, and in between, we see Charley confront the man who fired him, comfort himself with entirely too much bourbon and song, and cope with what's left of a life given to a job he's loved and lost. Along the way we meet Charley's colleagues, from the old columnist Madison, a bulldog of a reporter who wrote-and drank-like an Irish poet, to the talented young James Ricketts, whom Charley fears will do something romantic like throw himself into the Mississippi River. One will die by his own hand, but Charley bottoms out and gets back up, with the help of old friends and a new love. Come Again No More is Southern literature with shades of Charles Portis (like Charley Hull, and the author, a former Memphis newspaper reporter), but also with a whiff of the Irish to it-think the playful language and place-as-character of Joyce's Ulysses (Good puzzle would be cross Memphis without passing a barbecue joint.) or the riotous blasphemy of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown books.