My Bright Midnight
By Josh Russell
About the Book:
Walter Schmidt’s life isn’t simple: His wife Nadine wants to live next door to her dead first husband’s mother, the Mississippi River is three blocks down the street, and rising dangerously, FDR is dead, and the war seems like it will never end—but for the most part, things are going Walter’s way. Then one bright April morning in 1945, Waltercomes home early from work to find Nadine in bed with his best friend, Sammy. Shocked into silence, when she then calls him kraut, Walter becomes even more confused. True, he’s a German immigrant, but he’s lived in New Orleans for almost 20 years, and an hour before he thought he was a happy American—baseball fan, reader of pulp novels, lover of gangster movies. Suddenly Walter wonders if Nadine’s right, if he’s more German than American, more enemy than friend. When Sammy later offers him $1,000 as an apology for sleeping with his wife, Walter accepts, desperately hoping to hurt his friend, but instead setting in motion a series of events more dangerous than betrayal and petty revenge. Set against a backdrop of a nation exhausted by war, in a decadent city that for years has been denied its butter, sugar, and Mardi Gras, My Bright Midnight is a novel about the complications of loyalties to country, to friends, and to those we love.
About the Author:
Josh Russell was born Thanksgiving Day, 1968, in Carbondale, IL, and raised in Normal. He received an MFA in Creative Writing form Louisiana StateUniversity and was a writing instructor at LSU while pursuing his MFA. He now makes his home in
Georgia, where he lives with his wife and daughter,
and teaches creative writing at Georgia State
University in Atlanta. His first novel, Yellow Jack
(W.W. Norton, 1999), was shortlisted for the Barnes & Nobel Discover Great Writers Award. His second,
My Bright Midnight, earned hima National
Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in
Prose. A third novel is forthcoming in 2012 from
Dzanc Books. Russell’s work has appeared in many
anthologies, including New Stories from the South:
The Year’s Best, French Quarter Fiction, and
Not Normal, Illinois, and in numerous
literary magazines, most recently Epoch, Black
Warrior Review, and Copper Nickel.
Reviews:
In Josh Russell’s clear, evocative prose, beneath its engaging panorama of the losses, guilt, suffering, doubt, and fear that marks and gives meaning to our lives, is a love story. My Bright Midnight is a compelling invocation of the way people build, from the truth of their lives, something they can live with—the endless possibility of beginnings.”
—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard
My Bright Midnight is a wonderfully engrossing tale that packs in a love story, friendship, family, murder, and a dash of crime, all lovingly set against the colorful backdrop of New Orleans. But the true star here is Josh Russell’s clean and elegant prose, and how truly he renders the voice of his main character, Walt, a German immigrant haunted by his dark past while trying to earn a place for himself in America. I ended up reading this book in one day—pick it up and you won’t be able to put it down.
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers
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