His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.

    Here, for the first time, are the collected Rhoda stories - including two new ones - offering a full-blown portrait of a woman worth waiting for: one of contemporary literature's most enchanting characters, in all her wicked glory.With a high libido and reckless courage to match, Rhoda is one of those irresistible people who never hold back or take convention too seriously. In these twenty-three stories, arranged chronologically, we follow Rhoda from a precocious kid with a movie-star complex to a coed who makes love to a fraternity boy, and the next week elopes with him, to a middle-aged writer looking for a fling in the age of AIDS.

    Reprint.

    This heartbreaking novel from award-winning Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan is a meditation upon guns and love, all kinds of love -between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, gay lovers, friends.

    Introduction by the Author.Contents:Isis by Zora Neale HurstonEconomics by Elizabeth Seydel MorganSarah by Tina McElroy AnsaStar in the valley by Mary Noailles MurfreeUgliest pilgrim by Doris BettsMusic by Ellen GilchristWide net by Eudora WeltyAfter Moore by Mary HoodWhite rat by Gayl JonesDare's gift by Ellen GlasgowFirst dark by Elizabeth SpencerShiloh by Bobbie Ann MasonGood country people by Flannery O'ConnorEveryday use by Alice WalkerYellow ribbons by Susie MeeTongues of fire by Lee SmithGospel song by Dorothy AllisonNew life by Mary Ward BrownGrave by Katherine Anne PorterAnd with a vengeance by Margaret GibsonThird of July by Elizabeth Cox

    But de la Valdéne is also a naturalist at heart, and as he planted trees and divided fields, he found that running the farm compelled him to operate as both hunter and preservationist, predator and protector. De la Valdéne structures his reflections around a year in the life cycle of the bobwhite quail, from one generation's birth through mating and the raising of their young. Along the way, he gets pulled along on some side trips: to a masterpiece of controlled burning performed by a Vietnam veteran in a helicopter with 300 gallons of napalm, and to his own adventures when he improvises some dam-raising to fill his pond. For a Handful of Feathers reconciles a passion for hunting with a deep sentiment for the wild. Learning early on that while his work on the farm may awe his friends, he can never impress nature, de la Valdéne tries, with sensitivity and patience, to find his, and perhaps society's, place in the natural world. "A classic that compares well with Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook . . . simply and beautifully written."-The Bloomsbury Review; "For a Handful of Feathers is an American classic . . . a book as unapologetic as it is thoughtful about blood sport . . . . the verbal spark and pace of a fine novel."-Gray's Sporting Journal; "A gem that will appeal not only to hunters but to all readers who love the land."-Publishers Weekly.

    Dori Sanders' recipes include not only new interpretations of old-time favorites such as Spoon Bread, Chicken and Dumplings, Corn Bread, and Buttermilk Biscuits, but also her "Cooking for Northerners"—original dishes such as Winter Greens Parmesan, Roasted Mild Peppers, Fresh Vegetable Stew—and, of course, great recipes for peaches. A Literary Guild and a Rodale Press Book Club selection.

    Ranging from hilarity to despair—innocent children bewildered by their elders’ behavior, a writer living on Xanax, and a socialite seeking a health cure only to find romance instead of rest—Gilchrist’s high-spirited characters always tend to find themselves in outrageous situations. The beloved and feisty Rhoda Manning returns, fighting the lure of the bottle while relentlessly going after her dream of becoming a famous writer. And while the restraint of family and society continues to haunt Gilchrist’s characters, they prove fearless and deliciously carve their own chaotic paths toward survival. Set in Fayetteville, Arkansas and New Orleans, Louisiana, the tales are artfully fashioned, providing tastes of marvelously trouble-prone people at every stage of life. Packed with humor, sexuality, and ever true to human weakness, this collection is romantic and full of passion—a treat in which readers will happily indulge.

    This is the latest collection of National Public Radio's(r ) commentator and South Georgia teacher Bailey White's delightful and insightful essays from the bestselling Sleeping at the Starlite Motel.

    In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgotten—until now. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont—among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries—Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or popularized a five-string, wooden-rim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows. By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genre—the banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands.The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentieth-century literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.

    

    Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund pull together from a variety of published and archival sources Bartram's observations on Southeastern Indians, particularly the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokees. . . . With this comprehensive compendium, the scope of Bartram's contributions to the fields of ethnohistory, anthropology, and historical archaeology can finally be understood."-Mississippi Quarterly "An exemplary work. . . . Waselkov and Braund have given scholars and fans of Bartram an invaluable source of his writing on the southeastern Indians and the tools and information with which to interpret and use his work."-American Indian Culture and Research Journal William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians is essential reading for anyone interested in the Native American Southeast. . . . As a primary source, the book is an invaluable collection of information; as a scholarly work, it is unparalleled in its informed presentation and critical review of Bartram's writings."-North Carolina Historical Review Gregory A. Waselkov is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Old Mobile Archaeology and the coeditor (with Bonnie L. Gums) of Plantation Archaeology at Riviere aux Chiens, Ca. 1725-1848. Kathryn E. Holland Braund is an associate professor of history at Auburn University and the author of Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 (Nebraska 1993).

    "Angela Ball is a poet wise enough to describe love as 'a double appetite for seeing.' Her poems are suffused by a wary disappointment in romantic excitement, but with the piqued attention that accompanies desire she makes the world, so far as this can be done, the object of her desire."--Williams Matthews