Modern Baptists [Paperback]

Praise for James Wilcox:

‘Wilcox is a highly polished comic performer.’
Observer

‘Wilcox has a sophisticated control of pace, his humour the chill of home truth, and his squibs at the expense of small-town America are rarely off-target.’
Jim Crace, TLS

‘It’s not easy to write a really original novel… Yet Wilcox manages to do just that in his very funny book, MODERN BAPTISTS.’
Daily Telegraph

A brilliantly observed, hilarious and poignant social satire. Wilcox’s Tula Springs novels have the narrative litheness of Armistead Maupin and the tragi-comic insights of Anne Tyler.

When Bobby Pickens’s half-brother, F.X. – ex-con, ex-actor and ex-husband (3 times) – moves in with Bobby in Tula Springs, Louisiana, things just seem to go wrong. It’s only a matter of weeks before Bobby finds himself involved in a theft, a hit-and-run collision, a nervous breakdown, unemployment, assault and battery, a number of fouled up romances, and charges of degeneracy brought by the lunchroom attendant at Tula Springs High. It finally takes a Christmas Eve party in a cabin in a poisoned swamp to sort out the tangled affairs of Tula Springs and, in the process, to reveal to Bobby and his friends the pain and sweetness of living life with a full heart and a generous spirit.

Modern Baptists is one of five novels either set in or involving characters from Tula Springs, Louisiana, a fictional town James Wilcox has made as real as Barbara Pym’s North Oxford or Armistead Maupin’s Barbary Lane.

James Wilcox’s stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Avenue and Louisiana Literature. He is the author of Modern Baptists, North Gladiola, Miss Undine’s Living Room, Sort of Rich and Guest of a Sinner. He is a graduate of the Yale University and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.