Appalachee Red: Brown Thrasher Books

Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews's Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing.

Andrews's first novel, "Appalachee Red," is one of hard labor in the midday sun and sweet jukebox nights, of howling passion and gunpoint negotiations, of a mean white sheriff and of the enormous red-skinned black man who changed it all.