Book excerpt: This sweeping comic novel examines the public and private upheavals of life in a small Southern town from the Civil Rights era to the new millennium. Famous All Over Town, the first novel from Southern storyteller Bernie Schein, is a comically candid multi-generational account of two Jews, a lowcountry native and a Northern transplant. Their lives interweave through the momentous events of a sleepy coastal hamlet based on Schein’s native Beaufort, South Carolina. Schein’s cast includes Southern Jewish lawyer Murray Gold and his foil, displaced New York psychiatrist Bert Levy. There’s also an emotionally scarred drill sergeant and his alluringly unconventional wife; a corrupt sheriff and his violent son; an African American madam and her two brilliant children; a fallen Southern belle; a transvestite Vietnam veteran; and many others. With their conflicted identities, burgeoning ambitions, and romantic entanglements, they live through the turbulent 1960s into the 1990s, confronting the ramifications of the civil rights era, Vietnam, Watergate, and—closer to home—a deadly version of the infamous Ribbon Creek incident. Foreword by Janis Owens.