Since we published his first novel in 1991, Lewis Nordan has gained a devoted following for stories that are simultaneously magical, hilarious and heartbreaking. The devotion lasts well beyond his death in 2012. With the release of the never-before-published e-single, “Would You Shut Up, Please” and the new paperback edition of Music of the Swamp, we celebrating his marvelous writing with these Lucky Stars e-books for $2.99 or less!  All of the Lucky Stars books come with a free preview of Music of the Swamp. 

Lightning Song: Leroy Dearman is twelve, and he lives on a llama farm in Mississippi. Life is perfect. It’s true that his grandfather just died in the attic and that wild dogs kill a baby llama now and then, and it’s true that one little sister curses him and the other one wets her pants. But up to the day Uncle Harris moves in, life looks like it’s right out of a Walt Disney movie. No wonder the llamas greet each morning with a song. Uncle Harris arrives in a sports car, full of funny stories and new ideas. He manages to persuade Leroy’s straitlaced parents to join him for cocktails in the evening. He sets up a pretty grand bachelor pad in the Dearman attic, with a telephone, a TV set, and a stack of Playboy magazines. He is, you might say, Romance itself. Once Uncle Harris moves in, life on the llama farm takes on an entirely different flavor. Leroy discovers those magazines. Electricity fills the Dearman house. Equilibrium tilts, conversation trails off, the atmospheric pressure twists–and lightning strikes. Leroy starts seeing things he’s never seen before, like the very gifted baton-twirling teacher, and his world changes forever. Not since Portnoy’s Complaint has a novel looked so directly, hilariously, and bittersweetly at the heartbreak of puberty.

You can buy the Lightning Song e-book for $1.99 throughout June. The e-book includes a free preview of Nordan’s novel Music of the Swamp.

Sugar Among the Freaks: Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and The All-Girl Football Team – Lewis Nordan’s first two collections of short fiction – have long been out of print in all editions and almost impossible for the growing number of Nordan fans to find. Here, to rectify that situation, is Sugar Among the Freaks, a selection of the best stories from those two books. These fifteen stories are delightful evidence of how the incomparable Lewis Nordan has, from the very beginning of his writing career, plundered his own prodigiously rich stores of imagination and memory to retrieve the gold he uses in his splendid creation – the mythical town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.

You can buy the Sugar Among the Freaks e-book for $1.99 throughout June. The e-book includes a free preview of Nordan’s novel Music of the Swamp.

The Sharpshooter Blues: Lewis Nordan’s remarkable third novel, The Sharpshooter Blues, is in part a meditation on America’s love affair with blue-steel barrels and soft-tip bullets, and in part a look at the violence and loss that ensue when the guns come out to play one day in a small town. Just as his award-winning Wolf Whistle illuminated the complexity of racism, Nordan’s new novel shines the brilliant flash of gunfire on love–between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, between gay lovers, and between friends. At its heart is Hydro Raney, a boy who’s never grown up, a boy who wouldn’t hurt a soul. In The Sharpshooter Blues, Nordan once again makes us laugh; then our helpless laughter turns first into weeping and then into wonder. “A comedy at least half as divine–and dark–as Dante’s own . . . a flat-out tour de force.”–Lee K. Abbott, Miami Herald; “This is not just a good book, this is a marvelous book.”-The Village Voice.

You can buy The Sharpshooter Blues e-book for $2.99 throughout June. The e-book includes a free preview of Nordan’s novel Music of the Swamp.

Wolf Whistle: ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In Wolf Whistle, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we’re on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. “An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. Wolf Whistle will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters.”–Randall Kenan, The Nation.

You can buy the Wolf Whistle e-book for $1.99 throughout June. The e-book includes a free preview of Nordan’s novel Music of the Swamp.

Boy with a Loaded Gun: His own mother referred to him as a “nervous child,” an “odd child.” He was the class clown–the skinny kid with a cowlick, freckles, jug ears, and an overbite. He could wiggle his ears and fold his eyelids back. He was obsessed with sex, comic books, and beatniks. He tried to fly off his front porch like Superman only to land flat on his face. He was the boy who saved his money, bought a mail-order gun, and shot himself in the foot–over and over again.

How did this boy get to be the most famous son of Itta Bena, Mississippi? The floodgates of confession open in this funny, tragic, and bittersweet memoir about an awkward kid who dreamed of a world beyond his home in the Mississippi Delta.

From losing a father as a child to losing a child as a father, from the rawness of youth to the rage and redemption of adulthood, Lewis Nordan’s Boy with Loaded Gun is a powerful elegy about a hopeful boy finding his way in a seemingly hopeless world.

You can buy the Boy with a Loaded Gun e-book for $1.99 throughout June. The e-book includes a free preview of Nordan’s novel Music of the Swamp.