Ralph Bland's debut novel tells the story of Amy Martin and how her life and death affects five of her contemporaries. Told in first person narrative from multiple characters, the novel unfolds a rambling tale of how the recently deceased Amy is nowhere close to being dead and gone in the hearts and minds of the people left behind in her wake. Spanning her just-completed life, this novel is a slapstick tragedy and a bittersweet hike into the past, present, and future psyches of a group of people still struggling to get their acts together.

It is Ralph Bland's love for his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, that connects the stories in NOT DEAD AGAIN. Whether the setting is occupied by an adolescent girl pondering the effects her parents' divorce will have on her life or a fifty-five year-old man realizing that death comes to everyone, the scene is always surrounded by Nashville with its gleanings of the past, present, and a foreboding sense of what the future might bring. These are Southern people whose lives collide with love and death, remembrances both bittersweet and harrowing, and the everyday moments of existence that...