About The Book

Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X.-ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over-moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown-it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter. Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the past forty-five years, and among Toni Morrison's "favorite works by unsung writers" in U.S. News and World Report.

Reviews

‘Wilcox is a highly polished comic performer.’ Observer

‘Wilcox has a sophisticated control of pace, his humour the chill of home truth, and his squibs at the expense of small-town America are rarely off-target.’ Jim Crace, TLS

‘It’s not easy to write a really original novel… Yet Wilcox manages to do just that in his very funny book, MODERN BAPTISTS.’ Daily Telegraph

This title is enjoying a renewed interest after the New Yorker article on the author. "Mr. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful," wrote Anne Tyler in the New York Times Book Review.

About The Author

James Wilcox (b. 1949 in Hammond, Louisiana) is an American novelist and a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge.

Wilcox is the author of eight comic novels set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Wilcox's first book Modern Baptists (1983) remains his best known work. His other novels are North Gladiola (1985), Miss Undine's Living Room (1987), Sort of Rich (1989), Polite Sex (1991), Guest of a Sinner (1993), Plain and Normal (1998), Heavenly Days (2003), and Hunk City (2007). Wilcox is also the author of three short stories that were published in The New Yorker between 1981 and 1986, three of only four short stories that the author has published. He has written book reviews for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, and two pieces for ELLE. He was the subject of an article by James B. Stewart in The New Yorker's 1994 summer fiction issue; entitled "Moby Dick in Manhattan", it detailed his struggle to survive as a writer devoted purely to literary fiction.

Wilcox, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, has held the Robert Penn Warren Professorship at Louisiana State University since September 2004. He is also the director of the university's creative writing program.