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Sonny Brewer is the author of the novels, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac - The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and The Widow and the Tree. Brewer also edited the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon Café and Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit.
Brewer wrote and self-published three books: Rembrandt the Rocker, an illustrated parable on aging that poses as a children's book; A Yin for Change, a book of "dime-store" philosophy; and a ghost-written biography of Clarence Darrow. He founded Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope and its annual literary conference, Southern Writers Reading. He is also founder of the non-profit Fairhope Center for Writing Arts.
Brewer is the former editor-in-chief of Mobile, Alabama's city magazine, Mobile Bay Monthly; he also published and edited The Eastern Shore Quarterly and edited Red Bluff Review. His training as a writer began with his first real job at 15, where he flipped burgers as a short-order cook at Woody’s Drive-In in Millport, Alabama. His story-telling education continued as service station attendant, pants folder, folk singer, used car salesman, sailor and electronics technician in the U.S. Navy, tugboat deckhand, traveling used tire salesman, carpenter, building contractor, real estate salesman, purveyor of collectible automobiles, magazine editor, newspaper columnist, teacher, lecturer, coffeehouse manager, bookseller, publisher, and, lately, novelist.
From the author's website
As of late 2011, Sonny Brewer is editor-in-chief of independent publishers Macadam Cage.
About This Biography
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A CONVERSATION WITH SONNY BREWER
Interviewer John Evans is the owner of Lemuria Books, an independent bookstore in Jackson, Mississippi.
It was actually after reading The Poet of Tolstoy Park that I learned your novel was inspired by real events, and, more important, by a real person. Just what was your starting point for this book?
In 1982, I was looking for a job that gave me more free time to write during the day, and real estate sales seemed a good choice. When I showed up for my first class at an office complex just north of my hometown of Fairhope, Alabama, I was surprised to find an odd, round, domed structure made of concrete sitting squarely in the middle of the parking lot. It had six small windows and a door. Shaded by a droopy live oak tree and splotched with moss clinging to its mortared block walls, it looked dropped there from some ancient time, seeming all the more out of place with asphalt crowding it on three sides. The door opened within six feet of the office buildings at its west side. I forgot all about my real estate classes, and snooped around this weird little hut. When another car showed up, I begged to know the background on the hobbit house. The woman driving the car ...
Elif Batuman is a staff writer for the New Yorker and writer-in-residence at Koc University in Istanbul.
Her first book, The Possessed, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, not to mention a runner-up for ...
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If you enjoyed:
The Poet of Tolstoy Park
Try:
The Possessed
by Elif Batuman
Adam Foulds was born in 1974, graduated Oxford University, took a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia, and now lives in South London.
His book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, was shortlisted for a ...
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If you enjoyed:
The Poet of Tolstoy Park
Try:
The Quickening Maze
by Adam Foulds
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