Best of
Southern

1993

Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader


Harry Crews - 1993
    From Simon & Schuster, Classic Crews is a collection of works from the master Harry Crews, including his memoir and short stories.Collected here is the best of Harry Crews: his astoundingly beautiful memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place; two if his most memorable novels, Car and The Gypsy's Curse; and three masterly essays, "Climbing the Tower," "The Car," and "Fathers, Sons and Blood," as well as a new introduction to these works by Crews himself.

Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook


Fannie Flagg - 1993
    Now, she joyfully shares those recipes, in what may well be the first cookbook ever written by a satisfied customer rather than a cook! Inside you'll find wonderful recipes for:* Skinless Fried Chicken * Pork Chops with Apples and Sweet Potatoes * Baked Ham and Pineapple Rings * Baked Turkey with Traditional Cornbread Dressing * Black-eyed Peas * Fried Okra * Creamed Onions * Broccoli Casserole * Southern Cream Gravy * Fried Catfish * Scalloped Oysters * Down Home Crab Cakes * Beaten Biscuits * Corn Pones * Lemon Ice Box Pie * Kentucky Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie * And much more!The recipes in Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook are all for delicious hearty happy food that comes with all sorts of things, from gravies to hot sauces (very often the secret's in the sauce). But most of all this food, and this book, comes with love.

Blue Willow


Deborah Smith - 1993
    Back in the small town of her childhood, Lily MacKenzie rekindles old flames with Artemas Colebrook, a boyhood friend and a family enemy.

Billy


Albert French - 1993
    "A work of art . . . Billy never lets up, not for one minute. . . . magnificent".--New York Daily News.

Charms for the Easy Life


Kaye Gibbons - 1993
    Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.Sophia, Margaret, and Charlie Kate find strength in a time when women almost always depended on men, and their bond deepens as each one experiences love and loss during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life is a passionate, luminous, and exhilarating story about embracing what life has to offer, even if it means finding it in unconventional ways.

Passalong Plants


Steve Bender - 1993
    These botanical heirlooms, such as flowering almond, blackberry lily, and night-blooming cereus, usually can't be found in neighborhood garden centers; about the only way to obtain a passalong plant is to beg a cutting from the fortunate gardener who has one. In this lively and sometimes irreverent book (don't miss the chapter on yard art), Steve Bender and Felder Rushing describe 117 such plants, giving particulars on hardiness, size, uses in the garden, and horticultural requirements. They present this information in the informal, chatty, and sometimes humorous manner that your next-door neighbor might use when giving you a cutting of her treasured Confederate rose. And, of course, because they are discussing passalong plants, they note the best method of sharing each plant with other gardeners. Because you might not spy a banana shrub or sweet pea in your neighborhood, the authors list mail-order sources for the heirloom plants described. They also give tips on how to organize your own plant swap. Although the authors live in and write about the South, many of the plants they discuss will grow elsewhere. from the book Amid the clamor of press releases touting the newest, improved versions of this bulb or that perennial, what keeps people interested in old-fashioned plants? Nostalgia, for one thing. It's hard not to feel a special fondness for that Confederate rose, night-blooming cereus, or alstroemeria lovingly tended by your grandmother when you were a child. Such heirloom plants evoke memories of your first garden, of relatives and neighbors that have since passed on, of prized bushes you accidentally annihilated with your bicycle. Recall the time you first received a particular plant, and you'll recall the person who gave it to you.

Wolf Whistle


Lewis Nordan - 1993
    The two white men responsible were tried— and acquitted— in a Mississippi town near Lewis Nordan’s boyhood home. These events changed him forever. In this extraordinary novel, Nordan transforms one of America’s most notorious racial killings into a magical mystery ride of hilarity and horror that you will never forget.“An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. Wolf Whistle will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters.” —Randall Kenan, The Nation

I Took a Lickin' and Kept on Tickin': And Now I Believe in Miracles


Lewis Grizzard - 1993
    That's the classic credo of the funnyman. And that's just what Georgia's favorite son -- and one of America's best-loved humorists -- has done right here. Whether he's taking pointed potshots at blood-stealing orderlies, guffawing in the face of mortality, or talking poignantly about family, friends, and lovers, Lewis Grizzard makes his exit with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a poke in the ribs, a slap on the back, and a promise that his irresistible sense of humor and humanity will always keep on tickin'."Imagine Andy Rooney with a Georgia accent . . . and a sense of humor." -- The Houston Post"A natural-born storyteller with a deft hand for reducing everyday occurrences into uproarious nuggets of prose." -- The Orlando SentinelFrom the Paperback edition.

Crazy in Alabama


Mark Childress - 1993
    Peejoe and his older brother Wiley move on to their Uncle Dove's home in Industry, Ala., where racial conflict brings frightening bloodshed as well as oratory from George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, on the road and in California, the newly emancipated Lucille brings every ounce of her desirability and determination to bear on her quest for stardom. Childress tells his story through the masterfully crafted voice of the adult Peejoe reminiscing from his home in present-day San Francisco. He depicts each character with convincing detail and all the vividness of childhood memory; there is magic in his mixture of humor and pathos, boyish candor and time-earned understanding. The narrative has a unique gentleness that tempers even the most extreme horrific or comic events without dismissing or oversimplifying them. Terrible crimes go unpunished, and good people face tragedy--not always nobly--but this remains a tale of laughter and great hope, one not easily forgotten.

Party Receipts from the Charleston Junior League


Linda Glick Conway - 1993
    The third Charleston Junior League cookbook reveals more secrets of the city's legendary hospitality.

Among the Mushrooms


Bailey White - 1993
    Her tales evoke a rural America populated by folks like Uncle Jimbuddy, a cabinetmaker with an unfortunate proclivity for chopping off his fingers; Aunt Belle, who teaches an alligator to roar on command; and White's ferocious, arthritic mother, Rose, who keeps worms in her kitchen for amusement.

Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living


Bailey White - 1993
    "Bailey White's sketches evoke a sort of real-life Lake Wobegon."--The New York Times.

Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews


Jack Nelson - 1993
    Well assimilated within the white population, Jews had been diffident about voicing support of black civil rights. When violence erupted and Jewish voices began crying out for action, the Klan scapegoated Jews in a campaign of terror.Jack Nelson, himself a Mississippian and in the 1960s Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, had lost no time in coming home to write page-one reports on the civil rights struggle. In Terror in the Night he re-creates the chilling experiences of investigating the Klan's campaign against the Jews. He reports on the bombing of a Jackson synagogue, the dynamiting of a rabbi's house, and the Klan's marking select Mississippi Jews for execution. He reports how law enforcement's clandestine investigations, bankrolled by Mississippi Jews, helped bag the terrorists in a nearly disastrous shootout.

Rapture in His Arms


Lynette Vinet - 1993
    Yet even as he sweated and toiled on the exotic shores of a faraway island, he swore that someday he would be a free man until he became the chattel of a rich Virginia planter and his alluring, aqua-eyed young bride. Consumed by a fiery hunger he could neither explain nor deny, Donovan vowed that before another sultry night had passed, the chaste Mrs. Cameron would be his prisoner of passion in every way!Prisoner of Love All alone in the world after her father died, Jillian Cameron had wed to gain protection. But hers was a marriage in name only, and when, on a visit to Bermuda, she glimpsed her golden-haired new servant--all bronzed, sinewy muscle--the searing flames of red-hot desire blazed through her innocent body. Though she knew it was wrong to love him, Jillian couldn't resist Donovan's heated caress and now all she longed to do was surrender over and over again to this rapturous lover whose soaring passion had enslaved her very heart!

Old Spanish Trail


Leroy R. Hafen - 1993
    Frémont, and Kit Carson; with packers, home seekers, and mail couriers; and with horse thieves and enslavers of Indian women and children.

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith


Margaret Rose Gladney - 1993
    Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people--white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Her best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killers of the Dream (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer. Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume. Arranged chronologically and annotated, they present a complete picture of Smith as a committed artist and reveal the burden of her struggles as a woman, including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling. Gladney argues that this triple isolation--as woman, lesbian, and artist--from mainstream southern culture permitted Smith to see and to expose southern prejudices with absolute clarity.