But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past. To the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms. To the only place she can truly call home.

    Each one a small miracle of storytelling and compassion, these stories are a joyous confirmation of Tim Gautreaux's rare and generous talent.

    Gay's remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude , longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.

    Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths.

    Bordering the Mississippi, these antebellum landmarks were once the epitome of gracious living in the Deep South. Over the past century, these grand dwellings have slowly succumbed to time, humidity, and the reclamation of the land: first by nature, then by real-estate developers who built subdivisions, oil refineries, and strip malls where curtains of Spanish moss once swayed from the live oaks. This collection—featuring over 200 haunting color photographs with extensive captions explaining the architectural significance and history of each structure—is a beautiful elegy for a rapidly disappearing landscape and its ghosts.

    Now, in Myra Sims, we hear Myra's story in her own voice as she evolves from voiceless victim to survivor. Janis Owens offers a rare literary opportunity to experience the same story from different characters' perspectives. Either book stands on its own, but anyone who has read one will want to read the other. In the end, you will, as both Gabe and Myra do, love Michael.

    His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

    The entire community of Hemingway, South Carolina, shared responsibilities, helped raise all of the children, and worked side by side together every day in the bean fields. Perhaps most important, the community shared its food and recipes. When Sylvia set out to write this cookbook, she decided to hold a cook-off back home in Hemingway at Jeremiah Church. Family and friends of all ages shared their favorite dishes as well as their spirit and love for one another. The recipes offered at the cook-off were then compiled to create this incredible collection, along with many of Sylvia's and the Woods family's own recipes.Here are the kinds of recipes you'd find if you visited the Woods family's home. Sylvia's daughter Bedelia is well known for her Barbecued Beef Short Ribs, which are as sassy and spicy as Bedelia herself. Kenneth, Sylvia's youngest son, has loved to fish ever since he was a child, spending his summers by the fishing hole in Hemingway. Now Kenneth's son, DeSean, enjoys fishing, too. Kenneth's Honey Lemon Tilefish, DeSean's favorite, is just one of Kenneth's special recipes presented here.And there are many, many other wonderful dishes, too. In this remarkable cookbook, Sylvia has gathered more than 125 soul food classics, including mouthwatering recipes for okra, collard greens, Southern-style pound cakes, hearty meat and seafood stews and casseroles, salads, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and more. These recipes are straight from the heart of the Woods community of family and friends. Now Sylvia gives them to you to share with your loved ones. Bring them into your home and experience a little bit of Hemingway's soul.

    

    Unwed, unemployed, and over thirty, she's flat broke and about to lose the family plantation. Not to mention being haunted by the ghost of her great-great-grandmother's nanny, who never misses an opportunity to remind her of her sorry state--or to suggest a plan of action, like ransoming her friend's prize pooch to raise some cash.But soon Sarah Booth's walk on the criminal side leads her deeper into unladylike territory, and she's hired to solve a murder. Did gorgeous, landed Hamilton Garrett V really kill his mother twenty years ago? And if so, what is Sarah Booth doing falling for this possible murderer? When she asks one too many questions and a new corpse turns up, she is suddenly a suspect herself...and Sarah Booth finds that digging up the bones of the past could leave her rolling over in her grave.

    That invitation was the start of a career that spanned half a century and culminated with Martin's induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Honor. Always an enigmatic figure, Martin was as famous for his temper as he was for his talent. On assignment from the Oxford American magazine, fiction writer and music critic Tom Piazza drove from his home in New Orleans to Nashville to interview Martin and found himself pitched headlong into a world he couldn't have anticipated. Martin's mercurial personality drew the writer into a series of escalating encounters (with mean dogs, broken-down cars, and near electrocution), culminating in a harrowing and unforgettable expedition, with Martin, to the Grand Ole Opry.Though, or perhaps because, visits to the Opry like the one Piazza recounts were common for Martin, and though he frequently played on its stage and always hoped to become a member, he died before seeing his dream fulfilled. True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass is the funny, scary, and powerfully poignant portrait of one of the legends of American music.Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press

    

    Tells the story of two nearly forgotten secrets and the elderly, Southern women whose lives have been governed by the secrets for over fifty years.

    It covers the broad sweep of Tate's critical concerns: poetry, poets, fiction, the imagination, language, literature, and culture.

    . . has the art of storytelling . . . and that's one reason it is such a pleasure to read this book. --Newsday In this definitive cookbook, Ronni Lundy taps her Kentucky roots and the recipes and food passions of fellow Southerners--including both home cooks and professional chefs--she met in her travels through the region. As she cooks her way through succulent purple-speckled butter beans, lady cream peas, corn, greens, muscadines, peaches, figs, mayhaws, and other bounty from the Southern garden, she passes along a trove of easy-to-follow recipes that will delight both Southerners who are rediscovering their cuisine and newcomers to it.

    In fact, this book shows that the nominally conservative institutions of small-town life—home, church, school, and workplace—were the very sites where queer sexuality flourished. As Howard recounts the life stories of the ordinary and the famous, often in their own words, he also locates the material traces of queer sexuality in the landscape: from the farmhouse to the church social, from sports facilities to roadside rest areas.Spanning four decades, Men Like That complicates traditional notions of a post-WWII conformist wave in America. Howard argues that the 1950s, for example, were a period of vibrant queer networking in Mississippi, while during the so-called "free love" 1960s homosexuals faced aggressive oppression. When queer sex was linked to racial agitation and when key civil rights leaders were implicated in homosexual acts, authorities cracked down and literally ran the accused out of town.In addition to firsthand accounts, Men Like That finds representations of homosexuality in regional pulp fiction and artwork, as well as in the number one pop song about a suicidal youth who jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge. And Howard offers frank, unprecedented assessments of outrageous public scandals: a conservative U.S. congressman caught in the act in Washington, and a white candidate for governor accused of patronizing black transgender sex workers.The first book-length history of the queer South, Men Like That completely reorients our presuppositions about gay identity and about the dynamics of country life.

    The images in this book, all taken by Maude Schuyler Clay between 1993 and 1998, are the result of the first such undertaking."Delta Land," she says, "is a photographic project which involves the recording and preservation of the Mississippi Delta landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures: mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations."Moving back in 1987 to the Delta (Tallahatchie County), where I am the fifth generation to live here, allowed me to view the endemic and ordinary landscape as a disappearing way of life. With this work, begun in 1993, I feel I have completed an artistic and educational body of photographs that show the landscape and culture of this particular place; that I have preserved through photography the communities of both whites and African Americans of the Delta region."In an introductory essay that populates Clay's almost people-less settings, Lewis Nordan tells how these photographs evoke his Delta boyhood. Like her images, his memories are in black-and-white, "the color of grief and all its metaphors." As he recalls the scrappy farms and flaking towns swallowed by the vast flatlands, he writes of his mother's maverick dog and its need of a country home. In Clay's terrains, Nordan sees the Delta land that is at once memorable, familiar, and astonishing.

    

    This breathtaking book will thrill anyone interested in Hollywood's rich past and become a treasured cornerstone in the library of every movie buff.