Ralph Bland's eleventh novel, Lockhart, is the picaresque tale of Thomas Lockhart from his college days in the 1970s to his landing spot thirty years later in his hometown of Rhodes, Tennessee. Escaping from a dark past and a disreputable present, Tom Lockhart returns to Rhodes to confront the ghosts and demons of his past and somehow carve out a place to stand his ground against age, time, and the worst of all his enemies: himself. From a haunted incident to a shattered romance and the pr...

From drinking sweet tea on a beloved grandmother's porch to playing army to witnessing prejudice and violence or receiving the lash, these stories illustrate growing up in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, what it felt, tasted, and looked like through the eyes of the boys who lived it.

Corvettes and Thunderbirds are parked next to Studebakers, Beetles, and, in some cases, cars that may defy description of any kind in this collection of twenty-six original essays and stories about first cars, family cars, and even dream cars that traveled the highways and backroads of the authors' lives. Often hilarious, sometimes bittersweet, the stories are about growing up--although for some of us, where cars and trucks are concerned, we never quite do.

Ralph Bland's thirteenth novel, Fast Car, is the story of the friendship shared between an older man in his fifties and a young man closing fast on his thirties in current day Nashville, Tennessee. The two meet while working as automobile mechanics for an elite foreign car repair shop that caters mostly to the wealthy; the younger, Leonard Wright, is the nephew of the owner and a recent rehabilitation graduate from a bout with drugs and theft of company funds from his previous place of emp...

Lamb White Days is a magical realism trilogy in the Thomas Wolfe tradition about a young man's adventures and character development from three stages of his life. Beginning in 1962 and ending in 1970, the novel concerns the coming of age of Robinson Bell, a Southern boy the reader first meets at the age of twelve. From this opening part of the trilogy, Robinson progresses to age fifteen and eventually to his senior year of high school, chronicling his break from his family and familiar sur...