Author: Bernie Schein Novelist Walker Percy once said that the only remaining unexplored territory in southern literature was the Jewish southerner. Famous all over Town, the first novel from southern storyteller Bernie Schein, stakes a claim on Percys unexplored terrain with a comically candid multigenerational account of two Jews, a lowcountry native and a northern transplant, at the epicenter of momentous events in the sleepy southern coastal hamlet of Somerset, a fictitious stand-in for Scheins native Beaufort, South Carolina. Scheins diverse and memorable cast includes southern Jewish lawyer Murray Gold and his foil, displaced New York psychiatrist Bert Levy; emotionally scarred USMC drill sergeant Jack McGowan and his alluring and unconventional wife, Mary Beth; corrupt and adulterous sheriff Hoke Cooley, his deeply conservative wife, Regina, and their violent son, Boonie; African American madam and later city councilwoman Lila Trulove (also Hokes mistress), her brilliant daughter, Elizabeth, and her conflicted Harvard-bound son, Driver; fallen southern belle turned voice of a generation Arlanne Palmer; remorseful Vietnam veteran and flamboyant transvestite Royal Cunningham; and inspirational schoolteacher Pat Conroy. Famous all over Town also uses its web of interconnected storylines to make its setting, the eponymous town itself, a central character with a personality and an arc as complete as that of any other member of the deftly rendered cast. Delving beneath the surface of the southern status quo, Scheins tale follows these interconnected lives through the private and public upheavals in small-town life from the turbulent 1960s to the eve of the new millennium, confronting the ramifications of the civil rights era, Vietnam, Watergate, andcloser to homea deadly version of the infamous Ribbon Creek incident. Somersets colorful citizens also confront their own repressed memories, conflicted identities, burgeoning ambitions, and romantic entanglements. Even as events unfold to often-uproarious effect, Scheins novel holds true to a deeply realized sense of intimacy and authenticity in the interactions of its myriad characters as revelations expose how these disparate lives are conjoined in surprising ways. Shifting points of view place readers squarely in the mindsets of many of Somersets key citizens as Schein lovingly and laughingly invites us to reconsider what it means in the modern south to be white, black, Jewish, Christian, military, civilian, sane, insane, old, young, male, female, gay, and straightand to be of a place rather than merely in it. Best-selling southern novelist and self-described Florida cracker Janis Owens, author of American Ghost, The Cracker Kitchen, and other books, provides a foreword.

Author: René Pedro Garay Through a formalist, structuralist analysis, Rene Pedro Garay defines the Vicente comedias against their socio-historical backdrop, and the literary milieu that witnessed their creation. By doing so, Garay defends the un-Aristotelian medieval tradition, tracing the theory behind Vicente's comedies through Dante and the pre-sixteenth Century Iberian tradition, and placing it in the trajectory towards the birth of the Renaissance. He then charts this humanist comedic structure in two plays, the Comedia de Rubena and Comedia do viuvo, corroborating Vicente's role in determining the form of subsequent comedic drama in Spain.