A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who’ve wound up on the road of poor choices
Michael Farris Smith in conversation with John T Edge for the launch of Lay Your Armor Down, a “prophetic, propulsive tale” of a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, told in Smith’s trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose.
About the book
“Michael Farris Smith possesses a conductor’s mastery and a lead singer’s swagger, and Lay Your Armor Down demands that you pay attention.” – Wright Thompson
An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into
the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the
wood draws her to a campfire with two strange,
dangerous men, one young and one old, who are
there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate
purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are
hunting something precious but have only been told:
you’ll know it when you see it. When they arrive at
the place, an abandoned church cellar in the
burned-out countryside, they find an answer they never could have predicted. Now, the job feels dubious, one that’ll surely bring them to ruin. Yet if they’re to go against orders, no step can be undone, and nothing can be taken back.
In spare, Beckett-like prose, Lay Your Armor Down reduces the epic to its most elemental. It charts the course of several broken people, all outrunning danger’s dark fingers, and all brought together for one last chance at redemption.
About the author
Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, Book Riot, and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. As a screenwriter, he scripted the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. With his band MFS & The Smokes, Smith wrote and released the record Lostville, which was produced by Grammy nominee Jimbo Mathus. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.
About the conversation partner
John T Edge is the author of The PotLikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. For twenty-two years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American, and for three years he wrote the United Tastes column for the New York Times. He is director of the Mississippi Lab in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, where his projects include the launch of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on a parcel of land outside Oxford where William Faulkner once raised mules. From 1999 through 2021, he was director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is also the host of the television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, and Hulu. He lives here in Oxford.
