Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Southern Cross the Dog
    Unavailable
    Southern Cross the Dog
    Unavailable
    Southern Cross the Dog
    Ebook341 pages4 hours

    Southern Cross the Dog

    By Bill Cheng

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young man must choose between the lure of the future and the claims of the past.
     
    Having lost virtually everything in the fearsome storm—home, family, first love—Robert Chatham embarks on an odyssey that takes him through the deep South, from the desperation of a refugee camp to the fiery and raucous brothel Hotel Beau-Miel and into the Mississippi hinterland, where he joins a crew hired to clear the swamp and build a dam.

    Along his journey he encounters piano-playing hustlers, ne’er-do-well Klansmen, well-intentioned whores, and a family of fur trappers, the L’Etangs, whose very existence is threatened by the swamp-clearing around them. The L’Etang brothers are fierce and wild but there is something soft about their cousin Frankie, possibly the only woman capable of penetrating Robert’s darkest places and overturning his conviction that he’s marked by the devil.

    Teeming with language that renders both the savage beauty and complex humanity of our shared past, Southern Cross the Dog is a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9780062225030
    Unavailable
    Southern Cross the Dog
    Author

    Bill Cheng

    Bill Cheng is a Chinese-American novelist who has studied with Colum McCann, Peter Carey, and Nathan Englander. This is his first novel.

    Related to Southern Cross the Dog

    Related ebooks

    Historical Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      There’s the ones you get from cashiers,acquaintance coworkers, the husbandsof your wife’s childhood friends—they say it like tearing the last yellow pagefrom a pack of construction paper,not your first choice, the ink runs,you know whatever you do wi

      1 min read

    • Article

      Fitting In

      Oct 1, 2021

      Fitting In
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Powers That Be

      Nov 23, 2020

      The Powers That Be
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Visitors

      Mar 1, 2023

      The Visitors
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Straw Hat

      Aug 2, 2018

      The Straw Hat
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Truth Is I Never Left You

      Aug 17, 2017

      The Truth Is I Never Left You
      8 min read

    • Article

      Named

      Mar 19, 2018

      Named
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Missing Limousine

      Sep 28, 2021

      The Missing Limousine
      21 min read

    • Article

      Strange Season

      Jun 4, 2020

      Strange Season
      14 min read

    • Article

      Under The Paddling Pool

      May 5, 2022

      Under The Paddling Pool
      3 min read

    • Article

      Evening Star

      Sep 10, 2021

      A red streak of light flashed across the curtains. Robert grimaced and Grace got up to look out the window. There were two police cars pulling into the parking lot and it had started to snow again. She turned around. Robert was kneeling on the bed. H

      15 min read

    • Article

      Teddy And Roosevelt

      Jan 10, 2021

      They call it Friends Group. But there are no friends, and there is no group. Just me, a state-funded Social Worker, and another sixth grader the kids call Sweaty Teddy. We sit in a converted cinderblock office between the furnace and the chapel and l

      16 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Animal

      May 6, 2020

      Becoming Animal
      11 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Kindness of Strangers

      Apr 27, 2020

      The Kindness of Strangers
      5 min read

    • Article

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2023 Whiting Award Winners

      Mar 29, 2023

      The 2023 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Here are excerpts from their work.

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Wrong Shampoo

      Apr 10, 2022

      Brandy scoured the rows of bubble gum bright shampoo bottles. How much time had passed already? She looked to the front of the store but couldn’t see the checkout lines. She had only been to Jeff’s apartment once so far and didn’t remember what brand

      16 min read

    • Article

      A Tale Of Two Crises

      Nov 17, 2020

      A Tale Of Two Crises
      5 min read

    • Article

      Valentine’s Ghost

      Jun 20, 2020

      Valentine’s Ghost
      7 min read

    • Article

      Skein Is land

      Nov 6, 2019

      Skein Is land
      6 min read

    • Article

      Behind The Scenes

      Oct 18, 2021

      Behind The Scenes
      8 min read

    • Article

      Teddy And Roosevelt

      Jun 10, 2023

      They call it Friends Group. But there are no friends, and there is no group. Just me, a state-funded social worker, and another sixth-grader, the kids call Sweaty Teddy. We sit in a converted cinderblock office between the furnace and the chapel and

      16 min read

    • Article

      The Turn Of The Tide

      Sep 24, 2020

      The Turn Of The Tide
      4 min read

    • Article

      Watch Your Step

      Nov 19, 2020

      Watch Your Step
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Claire Cameron

      Dec 12, 2020

      This is one tiny slice of what the pandemic has taken, a bet, a glance, working from intuition, spontaneous laughter with a stranger, feeling close to someone I’ll never see again. I miss the chance to navigate other people and places in the old worl

      3 min read

    • Article

      Boats

      Aug 2, 2018

      Boats
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Southern Cross the Dog

    3/5

    46 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      is a place where two railroad lines—the U.S. Southern and the Yazoo Delta—cross in Moorhead, Mississippi.Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng photo southern cross the dog_zpseaz5iqgm.jpgWhich should have been wonderful, since I really love railroads. But this book is a debut centering on the Great Flood of 1927 along the Mississippi, a tragedy that killed 246 people and left countless families homeless. The flood led to the great migration of African American families toward other states, and Bill Cheng’s first novel hones in on one fictional family whose experiences seem to represent an endless cycle of grief and loss.This was a chance for a rich history lesson for me but, I don’t know, maybe I was just getting worn out again with the sorting and packing. I was greatly disappointed. 2½ stars
    • 5/5
      After losing everything in the Great Flood of 1927, Robert Lee Chatham ventures throughout the Deep South, settling in brothels, swamps and labor camps. His life is changed when he meets a blues piano player who teaches him to keep his evil contained. Still, wherever his journey carries him, Robert refuses to abandon his belief that the devil is close behind, marking him for death since childhood.

      The world Bill Cheng has created in this novel is incredibly well developed, which is quite a feat considering its size. Spanning over a decade and dozens of locations, readers are shown a gritty, beautifully visualized landscape. Though Robert's travels jump back and forth in time and place, the imagery makes location an easy mark.

      I started smiling when I read the first few lines of the prologue to Southern Cross the Dog and was almost giggling over how good it was by its end. It is Cheng's way of raising a flag, letting readers know that he has entered the genre. I imagine you'll see few reviews of Southern Cross the Dog that don't at least mention William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor, as Cheng has written a novel that almost seamlessly fits into the Southern Gothic canon. Yet, somehow, he's branded the work with a style that feels uniquely modern - much like poppy, vibrant colors on the cover of a rather haunting story.

      Southern Cross the Dog is another case where I am awed by the ambition and vision of a debut novelist. I have a feeling you'll be hearing much more from Bill Cheng.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure which book some of the other reviewers read who are making comments such as, I didn't get it and no plot. Bill Cheng's first novel reads more like a masterpiece that should be assigned to college lit students. Southern Cross the Dog (which for some reason confused a lot of people)refers to Moorehead Mississippi, where the Southern railroad crosses the Yazoo line railroad line that the locals called the "Yellow Dog." It is the heart of the delta, the embodiment of the Blues. Cheng's prose is also the embodiment of the Blues, taking you inside the lives of the people who lived the lives that are the stuff of great tragedies but were seldom chronicled. Let's get this Asian American from Brooklyn writing about Black and Cajun lives during the 20's stuff out of the way. No one who writes in settings other than their own has lived the experience. It is the thing that makes this book remarkable in that the author disappears and the characters and their lives are so believable that they become real egos in your mind. Read this book if you love Southern fiction, the Blues, reading, great writing and the incredible promise of a new writer.
    • 2/5
      Southern Cross the Dog. Bill Cheng. 2013. A southern novel written by a non-southern author. It takes a while to realize that it is the Mississippi River that has flooded, and that the main character is Black, not that this matters but you much read a while to figure out where the story is taking place and who is who. We follow the main character who is a boy when the river floods to a camp for survivors, a house of ill repute, to a job working on clearing land for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and to an Indian family that will be displaced by the TVA. Didn’t see the point.
    • 3/5
      I received this book for a review and it's probably not one I would normally choose.

      However I did enjoy it although I found the jumping from one time period to another and different character perspectives confusing at times.

      It tells the story of Robert who as a child is caught up in the Mississippi flood of 1927 and how his life develops from then and the situations he gets into. Knowing nothing about either the time or the area I found the narrative very moving and it felt realistic to me anyway. As a black man his life was made even more difficult by the attitudes of the time and this comes across well.

      The sex scenes howver were unnecessarily excessive and added noting to the story.
    • 4/5
      Bill Cheng has written a really good book about disposed people in Mississippi and how they were affected by the 1927 flood. And as most know by now, he did it without ever having set foot in the state.The smells, the sounds, the lives that were lived, all ring true. And that’s the beauty of fiction; whatever happened during that time, Cheng has made it his own.Cheng thanks “all the late great bluesmen” in his acknowledgments and it’s a fine thing to see how a genre of music was able to inspire such a book.
    • 4/5
      Amazing debut. Cheng draws you into a southern gothic world full of larger than fire characters and events
    • 2/5
      I like Southern noir and most books that take place in the south or when the author is from the south, that being said I have no idea how this book has gotten the rave reviews that it has. The story doesn't ever seem to go anywhere. At no time did I care about any of the main characters in the book, and the book just dragged on and on. The author can write , he writes very poetic and lyrical, but it all seemed like it was an exercise assigned in a creative writing class. The author is an Asian American born and raised in Queens New York, why he felt compelled to write a book about African Americans in the south during the 1920's through 1941, I have no idea.