120 Pages
©2013
Publisher: Ampersand Books
Purchase includes: EPUB

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DIDDY-WAH-DIDDY: A BEALE STREET SUITE is a crazy-quilt mosaic about a near-mythical place located, concretely, in Memphis, Tennessee, and abstractly somewhere on the road between Rapture and Perdition. The novel is a-historic, preferring the beautiful lie to the truth as plain as a mud fence. The novel, if we can call it a novel (and we can), is peopled with musicians, conmen, strippers, magi, foreigners, storytellers, ghosts, villains, heroes, fairy-tale sons of Adam like Elvis and Santa Claus, and the imps of the perverse. Told in myriad ways, including short stories, plays, and poems, the song Diddy Wah Diddy moves from Creation to Revelation and, in the end, emerges from the smoke and circus mirrors, to stand naked under the bright, bluesy Beale Street sun.

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Esquire/Narrative4 Project and Good Poems, American Places (Viking Press, 2011). He has published six novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010), Following Richard Brautigan (2010), Gardner Remembers (2011), and Frank Comma and the Time-Slip (2012), 3 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008), Before the Great Troubling (2011), and Our Locust Years (2013), and 3 books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011) and I'll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published over a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. His fiction has received praise from John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Lee Smith, Frederick Barthelme, Greil Marcus, among others. With his wife, he runs Burke's Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country's oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.wordpress.com.