Texas writer James Lee Burke, author of 30 or so books (his Dave Robicheaux novels no doubt being the most well-known), and winner of two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year, likes to tell the story of submitting his novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie 111 times over nearly a decade. When it was finally published in 1986, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

His latest narrative, Rain Gods (Simon & Schuster), gives us former Korean War POW Hackberry Holland, a sheriff in a dusty southwest Texas county. Holland is tracking down the murderous nexus responsible for the massacre of nine Asian prostitutes who were unearthed with balloons of heroin in their abdomens; in the process, he tries to save a badly war-scarred Iraqi war vet and bring a sociopathic machine-gun-wielding killer to justice. To belabor the obvious, there’s a lot going on. Not the least are Holland’s ruminations, both personal and sociological. Here he describes images of his childhood:

…a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor league baseball game with his father the history professor…the adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and 19th century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch wings and each afternoon at five p.m. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of stairs with the eye of a marksman…more important than that long ago American moment was the texture of the light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with contagions of deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one’s foolish faith that both season and one’s youth were eternal.

And he broadens his vision here:

Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 30, 2009

With nearly 30 books of novellas, novels, stories, essays, poetry, and food and travel writing under his ample belt, one might expect Jim Harrison’s name to have to have wider currency, at least among smart folks that read books. Yet, despite being translated into more than 20 languages and selling well, I rarely meet other readers of Mr. Harrison’s. Living in New England could explain that—Harrison once told me he had a reading here, attended by a smattering of people—the next night in Jackson, Miss., there was an audience of a few hundred appreciative souls. For his large and largely invisible audience I am pleased to note Harrison’s new novel, The English Major (which is not about a British soldier), which has 60-year-old Michigan farmer Cliff, recently divorced from real estate broker wife Viv, still grieving over the passing of his 13-year-old Labrador mix Lola, embarking upon a road trip around America, using a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. as a template as the itinerary for his voyage—at one point vowing to rename the states and their state birds as a gesture against some unidentified banality.

One of the pleasures of reading Harrison is that his character’s first-person ruminations are honest and sage and frequently amble to the funny side. For example, sex—which is still (I hope) a vital part of the human experience—is given its proper, deep-breathing due. In this case, even for a 60-year-old geezer. Throughout, Harrison scribes a lively balance between the way English major/mentor Cliff observes and comments on both his outer and inner peregrinations.

By the way, here are some of the renamed states: New York/Iroquois, Georgia/Creek, Oklahoma/Cherokee, Florida/Seminole, South Dakota/Lakota, Wyoming/Cheyenne.

You get it, right?

Speaking of road trips and road books—the quintessential American activity since de Tocqueville, whose 1830s trip has since been reiterated by Richard Reeves (American Journey) in the 1980s and recently by Bernard-Henri Lévy (American Vertigo) in the 21st century, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, claiming inspiration from the New Deal’s WPA’s state guides, corralled 50 writers to write about the 50 states for State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America—including a wonderful bonus of a conversation with Edward P. Jones on Washington, D.C.

I leave it to you to ponder the odd couplings, but my vote goes to Dagoberto Gilb writing on Iowa. It should not go unnoted that in 1922 The Nation launched a series of articles on each state, written by a diverse and contentious gaggle of writers—Edmund Wilson (New Jersey), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), H.L. Mencken (Maryland), W.E.B. DuBois (Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska), and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota)—which was anthologized in two volumes in 1923 and 1924 as These United States. In 2003 The Nation repeated that project, edited by John Leonard, with the likes of Frank Conroy, James Lee Burke, Luc Sante, Mike Davis, Ana Castillo, Jim Grimsley, Rosario Ferré, Larry Watson, Elizabeth Benedict, and Donald Hall.

All this leaves me wondering when someone will get the bright idea for the Last American Road Trip… —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 27, 2008

Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series anthologies is not far behind. What started in 1915 as simply The Best American Short Stories now has every stripe of superlative excessive collections, including the imaginative and contrived The Best American Nonrequired Reading. But the 21st century is all about exploiting Brand, right? So let me move on. If not the “best” stories, Pelecanos’s 19 selections are certainly quite wonderful, as he is certain to upset purists by including fine writers like Elizabeth Strout, Alice Munro, Thisbe Nissen, James Lee Burke, Robert Ferragamo, Michael Connelly, Chuck Hogan, and Joyce Carol Oates. My favorites are a poignant, flashback-filled story by Kyle Minor (“A Day Meant to Do Less”), Scott Phillips’s well-modulated nostalgia (“The Emerson, 1950”), and Stephen Rhodes’s Wall Street morality tale (“At the Top of His Game”).

For many years, Shannon Ravenel edited the New Stories From the South anthology; she’s turned over the reins to Kathy Pories and yearly guest editors: Alan Gurganis in 2006, Edward P. Jones in 2007, and Z.Z. Packer in 2008. As expected, these anthologies do feature many of the South’s favorite sons and daughters (which, if you are out of touch with that region’s rich literary tradition and culture, is a major public service); in this instance, Packer’s introduction is an intriguing, smart, and provocative essay entitled “The Double Indemnity of the South”:

And as backward as we’ve been portrayed—or as backward as we’ve sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first.

Kudos to Dan Wickett and Dzanc Books for finding a need and filling it well with the initial Best of the Web 2008. The volume’s editor, Nathan Leslie, writes:

This anthology does not attempt to capture some very vital aspects of the online experience—no multimedia experience, no interactive texts, no surfing here. We limited ourselves to four genres—poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. There are others; this isn’t our attempt to build Rome in a day… Rome will come. It will take time. For now I simply hope you like the anthology we put together. Read, enjoy, savor.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 21, 2008

James Lee Burke is a fine crime-story writer, and this is another one of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Most of them were set in New Orleans—which was an important character in this series—for obvious reasons, Dave and family have decamped for Montana and naturally run into thugs, gangsters, and short-fingered vulgarians. It’s vintage Burke—which, if you are a devotee of series, will be good news. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008