When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Catherine Landis set out to do something to protect her own brain. She had just turned 60. Hoping to avoid a similar fate, she went searching for brain exercises and landed on math. Considering herself innumerate, she was flustered by the mere word. Could she relearn it? Could this source of embarrassment become an opportunity? TWO TRAINS LEAVE THE STATION: A Meditation on Aging, Alzheimer’s, and Arithmetic, is the story of how Catherine relearns math while grappling with her mother’s illness and her own inevitable aging.
This coming-of-late-middle age memoir is like sitting down to tea with a dear friend and trying to make sense of a crazy world together. Written with humor and tremendous honesty, Landis shares her heart and head with luminous detail, beauty, and candor. For anyone who has raised kids and parents and themselves to wake up one day and think, what the hell? This is one beautiful book. -- Kerry Madden, author of OFFSIDES, GENTLE’S HOLLER, and UP CLOSE: HARPER LEE
A PLAGUE OF GODS reimagines nine Greek and Roman myths and the Epic Of Gilgamesh as stories set in the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic. These stories are not retellings of the old myths, rather, each story contains an essence of the original, a seed embedded, to offer a mythic framework for this profoundly strange and anxious time. With one exception, they are told from the point of view of women who, in the original myths, were reduced to the roles of goddesses, monsters, or beautiful maidens. The themes are eternal: hope, struggle, isolation, confusion, longing, pride, misunderstanding, rage, and death. Everything is changed, and yet, nothing is.
The collection concludes with a modern interpretation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, also from the point of view of two women. The original Gilgamesh is a poetic composition about a young, partly-divine, king of a Sumerian city-state who learns that he must shed childish delusion and wishful thinking if he hopes to grow up. It is a hero’s tale, a journey, begun in grief and madness, to hunt down the nature of death. A global pandemic screams for a new story of an old story about death.
Catherine Landis’s pandemic era re-imaginings of classic myths are as smart and funny and powerful as the women who populate these pages. Inventive, rhythmic, full of heat. This is the most fun I’ve had reading short stories in a good long while. - Michael Knight, author of THE TYPIST and EVENINGLAND
These books can be purchased wherever books are sold. If, however, you can support a local independent bookstore, please do.
Ruth Ritchie thinks that she has found her ticket out of Tennessee by eloping with a stereo salesman, but when he "gets religion," Ruth leaves. When she faints from hunger in a North Carolina five-and-dime, Rose, a feisty elderly reporter, rescues her, beginning a friendship stronger than family ties. With spirited humor and empathy, Landis intertwines the stories of Rose, who is in denial of her terminal illness, and Ruth, who embodies the energy of Rose in her younger days. For all her bravado, Ruth cannot quite disguise her need for a mother's love. In Ruth, Rose finds someone who refuses to see old age as a handicap and gives her life new purpose.
St. Martin's Press, 2002
"A remarkable tale of a special friendship ... told here with a refreshing new voice ... (Ruth) could be a distant family relation of Huck Finn, who went looking for the meaning of life." - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With a history of childhood loss, Arliss Greene grows up to love his cattle more than his family. The memory of his family's displacement, due to TVA's construction of Norris Dam, stays with him as he struggles to make a living farming. While his son, Daniel, tries to distance himself, Daniel's wife, Leda, ends up working with Arliss. Decisions are made, with repercussions that reverberate throughout their lives, the lives of their children, and the life of the farm as it evolves from the 1930 to the beginning of the new century.
Thomas Dunn Books/ St. Martin's Press, 2004
"One of the most memorable character studies to appear in recent Applalachian fiction. In HARVEST, Catherine Landis delivers a complicated, compelling, character-driven novel and a meditative mourning on one rural East Tennessee family farm." - Appalachian Heritage