Review
"Read this novel to find, from Europe and the past, characters who represent some of the best aspects of our Southern heritage. A story of great appeal in prose lean and clean. Congratulations to Roy Hoffman for his fine work."--Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird
"Roy Hoffman takes us where few writers have been, into the subconscious imagination of the Jewish immigrant South. Chicken Dreaming Corn is a tale of sensuality told in the lush language of a southern Jewish writer who spans both worlds and—what is so rare about this book—honors them both."--Eli Evans, author of The Provincials
"I am especially impressed with the international demographic dimension of this strongly evocative Gulf Coast-area downhome novel. These old downtown Mobile bargain stores are as much a part of my memories of my boyhood years out near the Magazine Point Loop of the old Wilson Streetcar Line as are Bienville Square, Hammels Department Store, the corner of Dauphin and Royal, the Battle House, the old L & N Railroad Station near the waterfront at the foot of Government Street. Not to mention the truck-farm produce from across the bay and the moss-dripping trees along the route to those old annual church picnic beaches down the bay! And yet, the narrative that unfolds in this local-color-rich visual setting is nothing if not another element of the natural history of mainstream USA."--Albert Murray, author of Train Whistle Guitar
"Roy Hoffman writes like a dream. He has found an underexplored literary corner of the southern experience—the life and assimilation of immigrant Jews—and records their odyssey, interior and exterior, with heart-breaking exactitude."--Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama and the Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
“[Hoffman's] story bears testimony to the struggle that any first generation immigrant goes through. In [his] deliberate and skillful hands, their story becomes universal."--Bill Aron, author of Shalom Y'all: Images of Jewish Life in the American South
"Like all great books, Chicken Dreaming Corn enriches the reader's understanding of his own humanity and advocates our tolerance and love for one another. In bursts of generosity, with all their warts and shortcomings visible, the characters seize their own lives and a piece of the reader's heart. I only wish I could adequately express what a moving and fulfilling experience reading Chicken Dreaming Corn was for me."--Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife
"Hoffman blends his family's hand-me-down Romanian emigre experiences with Alabama folkways. Swirls and eddies of life-giving soil wash downstream into the bottom lands of his tales. In between floods of tearful life-and-death episodes flow verdant growth and the upward mobility of generations.”--Anniston Star
"[Chicken Dreaming Corn] connotes the high hopes and expectations of this immigrant generation. Inspired by stories about his own grandfather, novelist Roy Hoffman captures the texture of one Jewish family's experience in the deep south as well as the personality of its dedicated, indomitable patriarch."--Reform Judaism Magazine
About the Author
Roy Hoffman is the author of the novel Almost Family, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, and the nonfiction collection, Back Home. A native of Mobile, Alabama, he worked in New York City for twenty years as a journalist, speechwriter, and teacher, before returning to the South as staff writer at the Mobile Register. Hoffman's reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Southern Living, and other publications. He lives in Fairhope, Alabama, and travels to Louisville, Kentucky, where he teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
