Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Echoes of the fatal shots fired in Dallas on November 22, 1963 reverberate in this collection of seven stories set in Louisiana during the civil rights era. For a varied cast of characters--the artist in the title story who tells the tale of his sojourn at LSU during Kennedy''s "brief and shining moment" through a retrospective of his paintings; the schoolteacher soon to be married grieving with her mother over the shattered dream of a charmed and happy First Family''s life; the disabled man witnessing the killing of Oswald on the TV screen with a growing premonition of the coming darkness in the world; the lawyer, son of a Southern-born mother and a Yankee father, reliving the loss of his beloved wife in mourning the nation''s loss; the African-American wife of a preacher praying to the ghost of her dead mother for solace; the woman who, in moving her family away, feels the place reach out and pull them back; the young couple transplanted from the Midwest entranced by the fairy-tale beauty and amusements of their new life who become caught up in the social upheaval of the times--the violent death of our youngest President is a crucible for the dawning of historical consciousness in the wake of the nation''s loss of innocence. An Afterword traces the genesis and the thirty-three-year journey to the publication of this book of stories.