Dispatches from Pluto (Grant) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[Grant] succeeds, and with flair. His empathic manner, reportorial talent and eye for the unexpected detail make this a chigger-bitten trip that entertains as much as it informs.
New York Times Book Review

Readers with an appetite for a deep-fried version of A Year in Provence will find much to sate them here.... [Grant is] like a deeper and way funkier version of Peter Mayle...it’s the individual voices and anecdotes he records that give Dispatches from Pluto its dissonant lilt and outre charm.
Jonathan Miles - Garden & Gun


One of the best books to have been written about this part of Mississippi. Richard Grant has done something completely different from previous forays into this fascinating and frequently vilified part of America. … Grant’s book strikes a good balance between being partly A Year in Provence, Mississippi-style, and partly a searching investigation of the local culture. This is a man who has done his homework, asked hard questions, and made a point of getting to know everybody, white and black alike.
New Criterion


This book’s great virtue…is how it sets aside assumptions to look with clear, questioning eyes. Mississippi’s landscape, with its ‘crated little town(s)’ and ‘primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture,’ is refreshed by Grant’s lovely prose.
Jackson Clarion-Ledger

Grant writes with an admiration and tenderness for his new home and neighbors. The book’s often riotously funny, particularly when describing real-life crime stories in Greenwood and elsewhere. But Grant’s also thoughtful and earnest in trying to understand race relations in modern-day Mississippi… Grant’s insights as an outsider trying to decipher a new world make this book compelling and also challenging. He’s confronting tough truths and asking hard questions, but from a place of genuine respect and love.
Mississippi Business Journal


Richard Grant gets it. Many authors that write about the Delta may come and stay a few months, then go back to their comfortable hometowns to burn or scathe the Delta’s mores, customs and culture. Richard bought an old plantation house here to become a part of the Delta and he writes about it in a way that brings laughter, astonishment, complexity and perplexity.
Hank Burdine - Delta Magazine


A likely hit with fans of memoirs or travel fiction as well as those who enjoy a well-told story, this is a surprisingly humorous yet insightful read. Grant's writing is relaxed and familiar in the way of great storytellers.—Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal


[Grant] takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church..., a school..., and a local political campaign.... But the issue that repeatedly emerges...is race.... An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
Kirkus Reviews