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Latest Release

Crossing Lake Pontchartrain

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A tequila debacle leaves a forty-year-old Mississippi man sorting his mid-life mess of unemployment and a collapsing marriage. But after a beautiful Argentine painter calls out Larry Winstead’s inner artist then a new job in the fast-paced janitorial services industry zips him to post-Katrina New Orleans, a cadre of artsy, worldly strangers help him discover who he is, and who he isn’t.

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Reviews

Previous Publications

Amazon link to my 2017 novel, What The River Wants as well as two short stories, Kitten Raylan and Under the Lights:   https://amzn.to/3K2vD6j

A sampling of Amazon verified customer reviews:

https://amzn.to/3M5C7mX

https://amzn.to/3t9dZY1

https://amzn.to/3hlJQ27

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Perspective

Literary fiction feeds the soul. Human bonds, man's relationship to nature, and travels into the wilderness of the human consciousness frame the experiences of ordinary life for writers detailing what it means to be alive.

My first novel published in 2017, What the River Wants, follows a Mississippi family struggling to piece itself together after loss and separation. A grandfather withdraws to a river bank to grapple the vagaries of creeping time and grief. A teenage grandson explores young adulthood as a school genealogy project binds him to his grandfather. Family stories awaken the boy to a family lineage revealing hints of his own capabilities. And a middle-aged daughter studies the faltering marriage filling her with doubts as she questions her own life. A story of friendship and love, treachery and loss, these characters of Southern fiction live ordinary lives awakened by the potency of human connection. The River was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2017 Great Southeastern Book Festival.

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Story of arthurbyrdbooks.com

These days I call myself a Southern Yankee. South Mississippi for 24 years, Oklahoma for 8 years, and now New Jersey for 39 years, I've been a college/high school English teacher, a technology consultant and CEO, and for 15 years even a real estate agent in the Dominican Republic selling beachfront property (even doing a few HGTV shows). And now, a writer of Southern fiction

It’s not that I can’t keep a job but rather that every few years I get the urge to molt out of myself and grow a different direction. But always deep inside I carry two things: a love of nature and a love of words. I scribbled poetry and a few essays in my youth, all kept secret. In Oklahoma as I prepared to exit my teaching career,

A Byrd's-Eye View

A blog about life and literature 

“Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.”

― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

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Arthur Byrd Firebird Book Award Winner

Author Interview

Quote

Akira Kurosawa, filmaker

“To be an  artist  means never to avert one’s eyes.”

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