ADVANCE READERS HAVE called The Gentler Gamester "Shakespeare set in a watermelon patch" and "Shakespeare with Spanish moss." The main character, an out of luck young man in Lowcountry Carolina, finds Dame Fortune's favor. In a series of unexpected events, she is ever turning her wheel; and a cast of characters experience life's unpredictability.
The Rodger and Loutrell subplot provides comic counterpoint to a serious tale of one man's redemption. The plot conveys a message of hope that in the darkest moments, the possibilities of grace are more nearly perceived.
The work is set where the world of folk myth intersects modern reality. It is a world in which the most unlikely of miracles still happen.
James Kibler is best known for his Fellowship of Southern Writers Award winning Our Father's Fields, which has now become something of a classic. This fiction has garnered praise from George Garrett, Ron Rash, Fred Chapell, Robert Morgan, among others. The Gentler Gamester is Kibler's sixth work of fiction.
PRAISE FOR KIBLER'S FICTION SERIES
"The Education of Chauncey Doolittle is a plaintive, yet also humorous, rendering of a vanishing way of life. is ne novel should have an honored place on the same shelf as the novels of Andrew Lytle and Wendell Berry." - Ron Rash
"The Education of Chauncey Doolittle is the perfect companion for the December reside and the July streamside, a book to be sipped and never gulped." -Fred Chappell
"Scholar and critic Kibler is clearly one of our nest fiction writers." -George Garrett
"In Walking Toward Home, Kibler shows his mastery of a time and place, an idiom and a people. He is a writer of humor and tradition, fun and folklore, and his stories unfold at the point where the present and timeless intersect." -Robert Morgan
On Memory's Keep: "Anyone who likes the smell of newly turned April dirt, of green elds simmering in summer heat, of freshly planed walnut, will love every page of this fondly authored book." -Fred Chappell
"In Memory's Keep, "Kibler stands with Wendell Berry as an inheritor of Caroline Gordon's mantle for preeminent Agrarian interests. Kibler's Clay Bank County is becoming as bountiful, and pleasantly correcting, a fictional locale as Berry's Port William." -James Cantrell
"In Memory's Keep, Kibler's brilliance shines through. Rather than centering on division and dichotomy, he chooses unity... Even amid great changes, there are those who remember traditions and keep memories alive. Kibler's novel serves as a reminder of the importance of balance in worldly progress." -Brian Stokes, Bloomsbury Review
"Memory's Keep is wise and bright with poetry rooted in life observed and felt... A poetic celebration of agrarianism." -Sam Pickering, Sewanee Review
