Best of
Southern

2005

Wrapped in Rain


Charles Martin - 2005
    You got to fight it with your heart."An internationally famous photographer, Tucker Mason has traveled the world, capturing things other people don’t see. But what Tucker himself can’t see is how to let go of the past and forgive his father.On a sprawling Southern estate, Tucker and his younger brother, Mutt, were raised by their housekeeper, Miss Ella Rain, who loved the motherless boys like her own. Hiring her to take care of Waverly Hall and the boys was the only good thing their father ever did.When his brother escapes from a mental hospital and an old girlfriend appears with her son and a black eye, Tucker is forced to return home and face the agony of his own tragic past.Though Miss Ella has been gone for many years, Tuck can still hear her voice—and her prayers. But finding peace and starting anew will take a measure of grace that Tucker scarcely believes in.

Sweetgrass


Mary Alice Monroe - 2005
    But Sweetgrass -- named for the indigenous grass that grows in the area -- is in trouble. Bulldozers are leveling surrounding properties. And the Blakelys could be forced to sell the one thing that continues to hold their disintegrating family together. For some of the Blakelys, the prospect of selling Sweetgrass is bittersweet -- for others, it is completely unimaginable. But as they find the strength to stay and fight, they realize that their bond as a family is all they need to stay together.

They Tell Me of a Home


Daniel Black - 2005
    Yet fate and a Ph.D. in black studies force him back to his rural origins as he seeks to understand himself and the black community that produced him. A cold, nonchalant father and an emotionally indifferent mother make his return, after a ten-year hiatus, practically unbearable, and the discovery of his baby sister's death and her burial in the backyard almost consumes him. His mother watches his agony when he discovers his sister's tombstone, but neither she nor other family members is willing to disclose the secret of her death. Only after being prodded incessantly does his older brother, Willie James, relent and provide Tommy Lee with enough knowledge to figure out exactly what happened and why. Meanwhile, Tommy's seventy-year-old teacher--lying on her deathbed--asks him to remain in Swamp Creek and assume her position as the headmaster of the one-room schoolhouse. He refuses vehemently and she dies having bequeathed him her five thousand-book collection in the hopes that he will change his mind. Over the course of a one-week visit, riddled with tension, heartache, and revelation, Tommy Lee Tyson discovers truths about his family, his community, and his undeniable connection to rural Southern black folk and their ways.

The Color of Light


Karen White - 2005
    Jillian had experienced her best childhood memories here-until her best friend Lauren Mills disappeared, never to be found. At the time, Linc Rising, Lauren's boyfriend and Jillian's confidant, had been a suspect in Lauren's disappearance. Now he's back on Pawleys Island-renovating the old Mills house. And as ghosts of the past are resurrected, and Jillian's daughter begins having eerie conversations with an imaginary friend named Lauren, Jillian and Linc will uncover the truth about Lauren's disappearance and about the feelings they have buried for sixteen years.

Deep South


Sally Mann - 2005
    Sally Mann came to the attention of the public in 1992, with a series of intimate portraits of her children and her reputation has risen since then.

Dorothea Benton Frank Collection: Sullivan's Island \ Plantation \ Isle of Palms \ Shem Creek


Dorothea Benton Frank - 2005
    Contents:Sullivan's IslandPlantationIsle of Palms

Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster's Market: A Cookbook


Sara Foster - 2005
    Flavorful. Unpretentious. Food this good doesn't need much of an introduction, and the inspired, down-home fare served at Foster's Market speaks for itself . . . and keeps the locals coming back day after day.In Fresh Every Day, Sara Foster continues the tradition of soulful, seasonally inspired cooking, with more than two hundred of the New Southern recipes made famous at her eponymous markets. She adapts the skills and secrets of a successful professional kitchen for dishes and flavors that speak to the way we really cook at home, from slow-cooked stews and roasted chicken to burgers and salad meals born of leftovers. No elaborate techniques or esoteric ingredients here--just good home cooking elevated to company fare. Cornbread Panzanella with Avocado. Pan-Roasted Halibut with Cherry Tomatoes and Butternut Squash. Fall Off the Bone Baby Back Ribs. Molasses Sweet Potato Pie. "Take these recipes," Sara invites, "take everything you know and feel about food, and have fun cooking."A cookbook for all seasons bursting with recipes easy enough for any day of the week, Fresh Every Day brings new meaning to comfort food.

The Pleasure Was Mine


Tommy Hays - 2005
    "She said yes to me between bites of a slaw burger all-the-way." A college graduate and daughter of a prominent lawyer, Irene was an unlikely match for Prate, a high school dropout. He lived his married life aware of the question on people's minds: How in the world did a tall, thin, fair-skinned beauty and one of the most respected high school English teachers in all of Greenville County, in all of South Carolina for that matter, wind up married to a short, dark, fat-faced, jug-eared house painter? That their marriage not only survived for fifty years, but flourished, is a source of constant wonder to Prate. Now he faces a new challenge with Irene.From the author of In The Family Way, a novel the Atlanta Constitution called "an instant classic" and the Charlotte Observer praised as "a lovely, moving book," comes a powerful story of hard-earned hope. The Pleasure Was Mine takes place during a critical summer in the life of Prate Marshbanks, when he retires to care for his wife, who is gradually slipping away. To complicate things, Prate's son, Newell, a recently widowed single father, asks Prate to keep nine-year-old Jackson for the summer. Though Prate is irritated by the presence of his moody grandson, during the summer Jackson helps tend his grandmother, and grandfather and grandson form a bond. As Irene's memory fades, Prate, a hardworking man who has kept to himself most of his life, has little choice but to get to know his family.With elegance and skillful economy of language, Tommy Hays renders an unforgettable character in Prate Marshbanks. The Pleasure Was Mine is at once a quietly wrenching portrayal of grief, a magical and romantic story about the power of love, and an unexpectedly moving take on the resilience of family.

Where the River Runs


Patti Callahan Henry - 2005
    All that changed when the boy she loved was killed in a tragic fire. Since then, she alone has carried the burden of a terrible secret. Now, years later, married to a wonderful man and mother of a teenage son, she is shocked to learn that a childhood friend is being blamed for that long-ago fire. Fearful but determined, Meridy returns to the South Carolina Lowcountry and summons the courage to make a decision that may destroy her well-ordered life, her family's reputation, her contented marriage, and everything she's worked so hard to protect...including her heart."Brilliant. Powerful. Magical. Do not miss this book."--New York Times bestselling author Haywood Smith

Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Florida Narratives


Work Projects Administration - 2005
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking: Over 600 Essential Recipes Southerners Have Enjoyed for Generations


Louis Van Dyke - 2005
    Containing more than 500 recipes in every imaginable category, The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking is a staple in kitchens of everyone who appreciates classic Southern cooking.

Girls Just Don't Do That


Natalie Simone - 2005
    Jayne is gorgeous and she is just Delia's type, if she weren't so straight, homophobic and a bitch! Shavonne is getting beaten on a regular basis by her live-in girl freind, Tracy, and Delia doesn't know. She also doesn't know that Shavonne has a secret crush on her. Then there is Stacy, rich, beautiful, goal-oriented and in a relationship with a hamsome man. Her life is perfectly planned until she spots Kendal, handsome, laid-back and sexy. Kendal would be Stacy's type if she wasn't already involved and if she wasn't a girl!

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory


W. Fitzhugh Brundage - 2005
    Indeed, today's controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honour all Southerners or only select groups. For more than a century after the Civil War, elite white Southerners systematically refined a version of the past that sanctioned their racial privilege and power. In the process, they filled public spaces with museums and monuments that made their version of the past sacrosanct. Yet, even as segregation and racial discrimination worsened, blacks contested the white version of Southern history and demanded inclusion.

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train: Stories


Brad Vice - 2005
    Ranging widely in place and time - small-town Texas or Disney's Magic Kingdom, the Great Depression or some future, postpetroleum economy - Vice's stories are likewise rich in their variety of characters: a grieving but well-to-do cookbook author, an aged farmer with dirt under his nails and black magic in his soul, a software engineer dabbling in corporate espionage. In Tuscaloosa Knights, an infidelity unfolds along an Alabama back road. Inside the car Marla, an out-of-place northerner, trysts with Pinion, a local lawyer and friend of her husband. Outside, unreason rules - and it's robed in white. The woods are alive both with revved-up Klan members just back from a cross burning and with mental patients escaping a nearby state asylum. pregnant daughter injured in a car wreck, a brood of purple martin chicks, a favored son lost in a hunting accident - to portray a poor southern family falling apart even as it regenerates itself. In Report from Junction, a football scholarship to Texas A&M is Kurt Schaffer's best hope to escape a life spent riding fence lines under the killing sun. However, the Aggies have just appointed a new coach, Paul Bear Bryant (who moves in and out of a number of these stories, both in body and in spirit). Daily news dispatches of the Bear's brutality leave Kurt wondering what else life may offer but pain and hardship. Plenty, would be Brad Vice's reply. But, as the Bear would advise, don't get too comfortable, and keep looking over your shoulder.

Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity


James C. Cobb - 2005
    In this insightful book, writtenwith dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America.As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated theCavalier myth into the cult of the Lost Cause, which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of Southern Renaissance as well as their AfricanAmerican counterparts in the Harlem Renaissance--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-imageunderwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the Southern way of life--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South?Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Cottonlandia: Poems


Rebecca Black - 2005
    Cottonlandia conjures a proto-continent where fashionable golems pose for antique photographs and nineteenth-century naturalists wander into the melee of the civil rights struggle in the South.By turns haunting and comic, Black's poems describe the archaeology of the apocalypse. Countesses leave behind poisonous snapshots, lovers examine their shapes in the mirror, and Seminoles return for skeletons arranged illegally in exhibits, even as floods force antebellum coffins to rise.In the title poem, reproduced on this page, the lines of a spiritual splinter and circle through a loose narrative, evoking the delirium of class and race in the author's Georgia hometown. Throughout the volume, poems quarrel with primal forces, threading the needle of historical oblivion with a dark, intelligent, and incantatory voice.

Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes


Mark F. Sohn - 2005
    Sohn's classic book, Mountain Country Cooking, was a James Beard Award nominee in 1997. In Appalachian Home Cooking, Sohn expands and improves upon his earlier work by using his extensive knowledge of cooking to uncover the romantic secrets of Appalachian food, both within and beyond the kitchen. Shedding new light on Appalachia's food, history, and culture, Sohn offers over eighty classic recipes, as well as photographs, poetry, mail-order sources, information on Appalachian food festiv

Born Colored: Life Before Bloody Sunday


Erin Goseer Mitchell - 2005
    Bloody Sunday--March 7, 1965--was the day that 200 troopers beat 500 peaceful marchers with billy clubs, whips and tear gas as they attempted to walk from Selma to Montgomery. Mitchell's book captures this "boiling over" which she sees as the result of years and years of emotional and physical injuries. By simply telling the truth, she captures the tyranny upon which the Movement was built.