Eating Mississippi - Tapa blanda

Fiction. Scott Ely's latest novel is the chronicle of two down-river journeys, disparate in time, but oddly merging in intensity, and finally, intent. When Robert Day discovers a French diary written by an ex-slave named Octavius-who fled to Haiti after murdering his master, and his lover, for initiating plans to take a wife-he immediately decides to imitate Octavius' journey down Pearl River to the Gulf of Mexico, driven by his own grief over his murdered wife. But as Robert travels, and translates the diary, he learns just how terribly violent Octavius' escape was. And that violence soon emerges not only in Robert's life, but in the lives of the three men accompanying him on the journey.

Scott Ely was born in Atlanta, Georgia but moved at an early age to Jackson, Mississippi where he received his MA in English from the University of Mississippi. Later he received an MFA from the University of Arkansas. He now teaches fiction writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Ely has published two novels, Starlight and Pit Bull, with Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Penguin. He has published two collections of short stories: Overgrown with Love from The University of Arkansas Press and The Angel of the Garden from The University of Missouri Press. One of his stories has been included in New Stories from the South. A story will be included in a forthcoming University of Georgia Press anthology, After O'Conner: Contemporary Georgia Stories. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy.