Sugar moves next door to Pearl, who is still grieving for the daughter who was murdered fifteen years before. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women's lives--and the life of an entire town.Sugar brings a Southern African-American town vividly to life, with its flowering magnolia trees, lingering scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, and white picket fences that keep strangers out--but ignorance and superstition in. To read this novel is to take a journey through loss and suffering to a place of forgiveness, understanding, and grace.  McFadden is the author of the novels Gathering of Waters, Glorious, and This Bitter Earth.

    Bloodworth has returned to his home - a forgotten corner of Tennessee - after twenty years of roaming. The wife he walked out on has withered and faded. His three sons are grown and angry. Warren is a womanising alcoholic; Boyd is driven by jealousy to hunt down his wife's lover; and Brady puts hexes on his enemies from his mother's porch. Only Fleming, the old man's grandson, treats him with respect and sees past all the hatred, realising the way it can poison a man's soul. It is ultimately the love of Raven Lee, a sloe-eyed beauty from another town, that gives Fleming the courage to reject his family's curse.In a tale redolent with the crumbling loyalties and age-old strife of the post-war American South made familiar to us by Cormac McCarthy, Gay's characters inhabit a world driven by blood ties that strangle as they bind. A coming of age novel, a love story, and a portrait of a family torn apart, Provinces of Night introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction and a superb cast of characters.

    Through the hardships of the era, through birth and death, tragedy and triumph, a young woman seeks to hold on to faith and family; and a lonely man seeks family and faith.

    Not since Huck Finn rafted down the Mississippi has there been a coming-of-age story like this, told in such an utterly authentic unlettered American voice. From a charming encounter with first love in the Canciennes' corn patch to an adventurous paddle through wild and timeless places little explored, Ken Wells has cooked up a zesty gumbo of a book--rich, poignant, and often hilarious.* An American Library Association/YALSA best book of the year

    She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay. There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster with money for a night or two on the town. There's a strip-joint bouncer who deals on the side. And in the end, there are five dead bodies stacked in Fay's wake. Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers -- honest, courageous, unflinching."

    A collaborative work by the Mississippi author and his photographer son, David Rae Morris; the book illustrates in photos and text the country beloved by both men.

    Why should Uncle Stephen send it to me? The Remember Box was Aunt Kate's private place, the one we were sternly forbidden to open. Suddenly I was reluctant, even fearful--a modern Pandora, about to let out our own lost world. That box held one year I'd spent a lifetime trying to forget.Summer in Job's Corner meant big trees, cool grass, and sweltering afternoons stretching endlessly under the Southern sun. Those were the days without plastic, microwaves, television, or air conditioning, a time when clocks ticked comfortingly in the night and a cool breeze was a gift. But as the long sultry summer of 1949 comes to an end, events will transform this sleepy Southern crossroads.After losing her mother to polio, eleven-year-old Carley Marshall comes to Job's Corner to make a new start, along with her Aunt Kate and Uncle Stephen Whitfield and her cousins Abby and John. The family is welcomed warmly by this small North Carolina community as Stephen takes up the post of pastor to Bethel Church, a Presbyterian congregation. But their welcome begins to wear thin and covert criticism runs rampant as Stephen challenges age-old beliefs and traditions.As Job's Corner confronts national struggles for civil rights, coal strikes, and hysteria over Communism, Stephen's voice of reason gets lost in the growing hostility of a vocal minority. Though this quintessential Southern community seems to be filled with people who are the salt of the earth, secrets and lies are hidden beneath the easy-going surface--and the truth must be revealed before an innocent man is convicted of murder.With the dawning of a new decade, Carley learns to face her own family secrets. And discovers that we all must make the journey to truth alone.

    Still, he refused to shut down his Chicago healing rooms and instead continued to practice his anointing openly. Disgusted with the evil he saw in Chicago, he often railed against the city's sinfulness. Following a desire for a pure Christian society, he eventually built his own city, Zion, just north of Chicago. Discover the motivation behind this amazing and controversial man.

    Are you ready for a cookbook that brings the spirit and food of "The Andy Griffith Show" to life? Prepare yourself to enjoy 300 of the most mouth-watering recipes (including the recipe for Kerosene Cucumbers) served by Aunt Bee and others in Mayberry.From good old-fashioned, down-home cooking to some of Mayberry's more unusual meals, you'll discover favorite Mayberry-style dishes for all you personal occasions?from holidays to community potlucks to birthdays to family dinners––inspired by Aunt Bee's unsurpassed talents in the kitchen and her special love for her family and friends.Aunt Bee's Mayberry Cookbook is also packed with wonderfully rare photographs from "The Andy Griffith Show" and offers entertaining glimpses into "the friendly town." Many of the recipes are favorites from members of the show's cast and crew.The special collection of recipes includes (but is not limited to)...Betty’s Breakfast Grits CasseroleCrooner’s Shrimp CreoleBarney’s Hot Plate ChiliHelen’s Honor RollsAunt Bee’s Fried ChickenOpie’s Carrot-Top CakeThelma Lou’s Very Chocolate CheesecakeAnd so much more!No matter what time is it––breakfast, lunch, or dinner––it's always a great time to be in Mayberry surrounded by friends, family and great food!

    When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common, until they meet a runaway -- a girl-woman named Lottie Parker -- on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness.Foster will marry her and father her son.Ben will escort her home.And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets, from the day she runs away until she finally finds the place where she belongs.

    

    Beneath this country girl memoir, Genevieve Peterkin tells a story that deals with the struggle for racial equality in the South and the sometimes painful adventures of marriage and parenthood with inner struggles for faith and acceptance of God's mysterious ways.

    Using material from his email newsletter, along with responses from its nearly 40,000 subscribers ("reMarkable,"www.marklowry.com), Lowry underscored the idea that God tirelessly loves and looks after his believers, no matter how quirky we are!

     Struggling to survive in an ancient mountain landscape that alternately thwarts their efforts and infuses them with joy and vitality, the strong-limbed and strong-willed people of the Blue Ridge Mountains undergo the transition from ploughshares to bulldozers -- from the Indian skirmishes of the post-Revoluationary War era to the trailer parks of the present day. In these eleven first-person narratives, Morgan visits the themes that matter to all people in all places: birth and death, love and loss, joy and sorrow, the necessity for remembrance and the inevitability of forgetting. This is a moving tribute to that which is universal and eternal -- the majestic immutability of the earth and the heroic human struggle to live, love, and create new life.

    Included are the sumptuous vegetable and fruit dishes and baked goods that have traditionally graced Southern tables. and tucked in between are remembrances of life in the South that will take you back to a time and place where the pace is slow and friendly, close to the earth, and full of good food.

    Concealed spiral binding. Printed two-color throughout. Index.

    Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

    An unemployed Vanderbilt graduate who's temporarily taken up residence with his mother and her live-in boyfriend, Jason is adrift in the summery haze of suburban Knoxville. The narrative spans four months in Jason's life shortly after his return from a disillusioning journey to Australia in search of himself. Compounding his sense of undefined gloom is a recent ill-timed acid trip that has left him estranged from old friends, wary of their intentions toward him. Two generations off the farm, living in what he calls a “strip mall world,” Jason grapples with his past as he searches for a way to make sense of the present and recapture his old confidence. In a witty, subversive voice, Jason traces the limits of the frayed formality of the New South, casting light on youthful aspirations lost and found. Fast-paced and funny, Majors's debut novel explores a twenty-something's reading of fractured family relationships, the raveling edges of friendships, and what's left of traditional spirituality in his life.

    The book features a letter written by Butch Cassidy and sent to Matt Warner along with three photographs in 1937, providing a convincing argument that Butch returned from South America and lived out his life in the United States.

    In The Map That Lies Between Us, she shares with us the magic of the places she has been, the things she as done, and the people she has loved. Her style is simple and unpretentious, the touch of a master.

    The 30 poems in this collection show Dave Smith turning from the work of an accomplished past to new formal practices that highlight a poetry autumnal in its recognition of life's limits.

    Nowhere is this more evident than in Utah's redrock canyon country, which is among the most spectacular terrain not only in America but in the world. These extraordinary lands lie at the heart of the Colorado Plateau -- 130,000 square miles of uplifted rock sitting like a huge island in an earthly continental sea, surrounded on all sides by the remnants of once-active volcanoes. Although the Colorado Plateau includes portions of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, in no other part of any other state are its complexity and time-constructed beauty illuminated more brilliantly than in southern Utah. Tourists and outdoor enthusiasts by the millions visit and revisit the area because there is no place else on earth quite like it.In The Redrock Chronicles, T. H. Watkins, one of America's best-known and award-winning writers on the environment and history, focuses on southern Utah's unprotected lands in a loving testament to its warps and tangles of rock and sky. Combining history, geography, and photography, the author reports the full story of the region -- from its violent geologic beginnings to the coming (and going) of pre-Puebloan peoples whose drawings still adorn rocks and caves there, from the Mormon settlement of the 1840s and 1850s to the great uranium boom of the 1950s, from the beginning of tourism and parkland protection in the 1930s to today's controversial movement to preserve millions of acres of wild Utah land in the National Wilderness Preservation System. Indeed, the account of that revolutionary movement is told here in all its color and complexity for the first time.Writing from his own personal experience and extensive research, an appreciative Watkins takes readers on a tour of the Grand Staircase of plateaus, moving from the utterly wild triangle of Kaiparowits Plateau, with its erosion-sculptured mesas, tablelands, benchlands, and canyons, to a more welcoming kind of verdant wilderness that sits northeast, across the rolling desert scrubland of Harris Wash, in the red-walled canyon of the Escalante River. The author has spent much time hiking and camping here among the isolated buttes and mesas, and he draws a vivid portrait of the area's highlights: Comb Ridge, a 90-mile wall of 600-foot cliffs; Waterpocket Fold, an even more spectacular monocline to the northeast of the Escalante River, stretching a hundred miles; the Henry Mountains; Hump of Bull Mountain; Cataract Canyon; and the San Rafael Swell, an enormous oval some 2,200 square miles which rises just north of Capitol Reef National Park.But The Redrock Chronicles is not simply a celebration. Watkins concludes with a spirited call for the preservation of the unprotected wilderness that gives the land its character and color. He offers the legislative device of wilderness designation as the necessary means of saving this plateau country that is not marked by one or two or even three or four scenic marvels but by an enormous kaleidoscope of geological diversity whose impact on the senses can set the mind to reeling with every turn.

    . . why Mississippi is so distinctive. You know, we have our failings, but we're coming along all right. But as to why Mississippi is so artistic and athletic I always say there is something in the quality of two things: memory . . . and the sour-mash bourbon."During the three decades since the London Sunday Times trumpeted North Toward Home as "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain," southerner Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books, including a second well-received volume of autobiography. Throughout his lengthy literary career, which began when he contributed his first sports column to a local newspaper at the age of twelve, he attained national prominence as a journalist, nonfiction writer, novelist, editor, and essayist.In Conversations with Willie Morris, the first collection of interviews and profiles devoted to this American author, Jack Bales compiles twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations (some never before published) with a man who for over forty years confronted the turbulent issues of his generation. "I have no alternative to words," Morris occasionally replied when asked about his far-reaching career. And throughout his life he unceasingly spoke out on matters that concerned him, writing at various times with outrage, humor, sadness, and affection -- but always with passion and candor.The diverse topics covered in this collection reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. As he speaks with journalists, public radio and television hosts, social historians, and even a professional comedian, he candidly discusses his own life and literary career, sports, other authors, the 1960s, politics, the Civil War, dogs, the complexities of race relations, and, of course, the South and his beloved Mississippi.After reviewing the author's Homecomings some ten years ago, a Boston Globe writer concluded, "There's damn fine life left in this man's prose." As is evident by Willie Morris's eighteen books, countless essays, and the insightful profiles and interviews gathered here, there is little doubt that this man's prose will be remembered as fresh, lively, and thought-provoking.

    A collection of fruitcake recipes by Truman Capote's great aunt

    Stairs to the Roof is a rare and different Williams' work: a love story, a comedy, an experiment in meta-theater, with a touch of early science fiction. Tennessee Williams called Stairs to the Roof "a prayer for the wild of heart who are kept in cages" and dedicated it to "all the little wage earners of the world." It reflects the would-be poet's "season in hell" during the Depression when he had to quit college to type orders eight hours a day at the International Shoe Factory in St. Louis. Stairs is Williams' revenge, expressed through his alter ego, Benjamin Murphy, the clerk who stages a one-man rebellion against the clock, the monotony of his eight-to-five job, and all the dehumanizing forces of an increasingly mechanized and commercial society. Ben's swift-moving series of fantastic adventures culminate in an escape from the ordinary that is an endorsement of the American dream. In 1941 with the world at war and civilization in danger of collapse, Williams dared to imagine a utopian future as Ben leads us up his stairs towards the Millennium. Stairs to the Roof was produced only twice, once at the Playbox in Pasadena, California, in 1945, and subsequently at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947. Now, in an edition meticulously prepared by noted Williams scholar Allean Hale, Williams fans can share this play of youthful optimism.