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Mission Statement:


Virginia Living strives to highlight Virginian authors who were born here as well as those who have decided to call the commonwealth home. We also endeavor to promote some of the best Southern Writing around. Homegrown authors like William Styron, Edward P. Jones, Ann Beattie, and Claudia Emerson join literary legends like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mark Twain (among others obviously) and rub elbows with their Southern contemporaries—such as Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Jesmyn Ward, and Tayari Jones (etc. etc. etc.).

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We also want to show our support for local bookstores: Chop Suey Books in Richmond, Peach Street Books in Cape Charles, McKays Used Books in Manassas, Old Town Books in Alexandria, Bluebird Bookstop in Crozet, Too Many Books in Roanoke, New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, and so many more. Furthermore, we are teaming up with bookstore employees as well as graduate students from Virginia university programs to publish online reviews twice a month.

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We are currently reviewing: prose, poetry, and nonfiction.

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Kingsolver-2

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

2022 / Harper / pp.560 / $31.50


Among her 17 bestselling books, Barbara Kingsolver’s ninth—The Poisonwood Bible—became both a Pulitzer Prize nominee and Oprah Book Club pick. So it was no surprise when her latest set bookstores buzzing. “It just flew off the shelves,” says James, a manager at a Richmond Barnes & Noble, of Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver’s modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. “We couldn’t restock it fast enough.”

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Womens Prize for Fiction, and named one of the “10 Best Books of 2022” by The New York Times, Demon Copperhead was inspired by Kinsolver’s visit to Bleak House—where Dickens wrote Copperfield—now an inn. With the owners’ approval, Kingsolver sat at Dickens’ desk to ponder her next project. She found herself communing with the author’s creative spirit. 

I just heard him talking to me saying, ‘You have to do this.’ And the tip Dickens gave me was ‘you let the child tell the story.’” With that, her Copperfield counterpart, the Appalachian boy Demon Copperhead was born. “I started hearing his voice,” she says, “and I started writing this novel at that desk right there, and I brought him home with me.”

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Full Article: HERE


Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including Unsheltered, The Lacuna, and The Bean Treesas well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Her work has been translated into over 20 languages, earning awards and a devoted readership. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.


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