Three murders, two lynchings, a history of racial violence, and very little sense. Thankfully we have a writer like Hollars, a Tuscaloosa native, willing to brave these maddening depths, to relive his home state’s darkest nightmares, and, against all odds, combat illogic with a rational, literary consciousness.

Ira Sukrungruang’s memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy is a work firmly cemented in the in-between. This first-person account of Sukrungruang’s “adventures” as a Thai-American coming of age in the suburbs of Chicago offers ample opportunity for cultural comparison, a subject fully explored through the retrospective lens of a child version of the author.

both writers recognize the unavoidable aspects of sensationalism in their subjects; they alternately mock and embrace it. Despite the similar titles, however, no one would mistake one for the other.