While she may have left her home in Alabama, married a New Yorker, forgotten how to drive, and abandoned the puffy headbands of her youth, Helen Ellis is clinging to her Southern accent like mayonnaise to white bread, and offering readers a hilarious, completely singular view on womanhood for both sides of the Mason-Dixon.Making a marriage magically tidy --Topeka three-way --How to stay happily married --Free to be...you and me (and childfree) --Room of one's own (that's full of gay men) --Other woman's Burberry coat --Peggy Sue got marijuana --What every girl should learn from ABC's The bachelor --Ghost experience --Party foul --Today was a good day --Straighten up and fly right. --Halloween people --Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1979 --How to be the best guest --When to write a thank-you note --An Emily Post for the apocalypse --How I watch pornography like a lady --Dumb boobs --Young ladies, listen to me --Seven things I'm doing instead of a neck lift --Serious women --That kind of woman

    On a scorching day in August 1954, thirteen-year-old Jubie Watts leaves Charlotte, North Carolina, with her family for a Florida vacation. Crammed into the Packard along with Jubie are her three siblings, her mother, and the family's black maid, Mary Luther. For as long as Jubie can remember, Mary has been there cooking, cleaning, compensating for her father's rages and her mother's benign neglect, and loving Jubie unconditionally. Bright and curious, Jubie takes note of the anti-integration signs they pass and of the racial tension that builds as they journey further south. But she could never have predicted the shocking turn their trip will take. Now, in the wake of tragedy, Jubie must confront her parents failings and limitations, decide where her own convictions lie, and make the tumultuous leap to independence.Infused with the intensity of a changing time, here is a story of hope, heartbreak, and the love and courage that can transform us from child to adult, wounded to indomitable.

    Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive.

    Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce’s black majorettes. From the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South’s relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a southerner in the 21st century. With writing from Cinelle Barnes, Jaswinder Bolina, Regina Bradley, Jennifer Hope Choi, Tiana Clark, Christena Cleveland, Osayi Endolyn, M. Evelina Galang, Minda Honey, Gary Jackson, Toni Jensen, Aruni Kashyap, Latria Graham, Soniah Kamal, Frederick McKindra, Devi Laskar, Kiese Laymon, Nichole Perkins, Joy Priest, Ivelisse Rodriguez, and Natalia Sylvester.

    An FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission. A young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed, nightly, into a deer. Two strangers become lovers and find themselves somehow responsible for the resurrection of a dog. A woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but cannot help riddling that new life with lies. Thirteen pregnant teenagers develop a strange relationship with the Founding Fathers of American history. A lonely woman’s fertility treatments become the stuff of science fiction.Magic intrudes. Technology betrays and disappoints. Infidelities lead us beyond the usual conflict. Our bodies change, reproduce, decay, and surprise. With her characteristic unguarded gaze and offbeat humor, Hunt has conjured stories that urge an understanding of youth and mortality, magnification and loss, and hold out the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world.

    Revolving around the electrification of rural northeast Georgia shortly after the end of World War II, the novel has become a classic coming-of-age story. Kay, now an acclaimed writer with an international following, has reread the novel with the eyes of a seasoned storyteller. Cutting here and adding there, Kay has enriched an already highly comical and poignant work. The Year the Lights Came On is ready to find its place in the hearts of a new generation.

    Easter finds her life in the Pentecostal Holiness church and its music, while Anneth dances and drinks in less-than-holy honky-tonks. Will the differences in their young lives and in their very natures tear them apart or will the bond of the sisters prevail? In lucid prose with an ear for the voice of the sisters’ time and place, Silas House brings readers a rich and moving story of coal country.This novel was named The Appalachian Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, Clay’s Quilt and A Parchment of Leaves. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

    Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves.David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic.Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.2 hrs 56 mins

    Parson's Pleasure is a country tale, A Piece of Cake, a wartime reminiscence, Lamb to the Slaughter a story of vengeful murder, and the remaining two, The Bookseller and The Butler, are on favorite themes of greed and snobbery.

    In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, her highly anticipated follow-up, she has crafted another provocative, keenly observed, and wickedly smart work of fiction that maps America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day.In these eight darkly funny linked stories, Schappell delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother— to explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In “Monsters of the Deep,” teenage Heather struggles to balance intimacy with a bad reputation; years later in “I’m Only Going to Tell You This Once,” she must reconcile her memories of the past with her role as the mother of an adolescent son. In “The Joy of Cooking,” a phone conversation between Emily, a recovering anorexic, and her mother explores a complex bond; in “Elephant” we see Emily’s sister, Paige, finally able to voice her ambivalent feelings about motherhood to her new best friend, Charlotte. And in “Are You Comfortable?” we meet a twenty-one-year-old Charlotte cracking under the burden of a dark secret, the effects of which push Bender, a troubled college girl, to the edge in “Out of the Blue into the Black.” Weaving in and out of one another’s lives, whether connected by blood, or friendship, or necessity, these women create deep and lasting impressions. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell, with dazzling wit and poignant prose, has forever altered how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

    In each of these "weird and wonderful stories" (Boston Globe), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts" (New York Newsday), Watson's vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality—yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Pinckney Benedict praises Watson's writing as "crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence," and Fred Chappell calls his stories "strong and true to the place they come from." This powerful debut collection marks Brad Watson's introduction into "a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford" (The State, Columbia, South Carolina).

    A collection featuring three classic horror stories, read by actor Earl Hammond: "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Black Cat".

    Gómez, Raymond Mungo, Rachel Shteir, Philip Spitzer, and Thad Ziolkowski.FROM THE INTRODUCTION by Jonathan Santlofer: "Like film, literature has been no stranger to marijuana and hashish, going back to Charles Baudelaire's 1860 Artificial Paradises, in which the French poet not only describes the effects of hashish but postulates it could be an aid in creating an ideal world. The pleasures, pains, and complexities of marijuana are more than hinted at in works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Thomas Pynchon, to name just a few, and I hope this anthology will add to that legacy and keep the flame of pot literature burning bright . . ."This diverse group of writers, poets, and artists makes it clear that there is no one point of view here. Each of them approaches the idea of marijuana with the sharp eye of an observer, anthropologist, and artist, and expands upon it. Some writing projects are difficult; this one was smooth and mellow and a continual pleasure . . . I hope you will sit back, relax, and enjoy these wide-ranging tales of the most debated and discussed drug of our time. Though, according to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, 'That is not a drug, it's a leaf.'"

    Combining biographical detail with expert criticism, Eby delivers a rich and evocative tribute to the literary South.

    A plantation owned for generations by a rich family. So much history. And a dead body.Just after dawn, Caren walks the grounds of Belle Vie, the historic plantation house in Louisiana that she has managed for four years. Today she sees nothing unusual, apart from some ground that has been dug up by the fence bordering the sugar cane fields. Assuming an animal has been out after dark, she asks the gardener to tidy it up. Not long afterwards, he calls her to say it's something else. Something terrible. A dead body. At a distance, she missed her. The girl, the dirt and the blood. Now she has police on site, an investigation in progress, and a member of staff no one can track down. And Caren keeps uncovering things she will wish she didn't know. As she's drawn into the dead girl's story, she makes shattering discoveries about the future of Belle Vie, the secrets of its past, and sees, more clearly than ever, that Belle Vie, its beauty, is not to be trusted. A magnificent, sweeping story of the south, The Cutting Season brings history face-to-face with modern America, where Obama is president, but some things will never change. Attica Locke once again provides an unblinking commentary on politics, race, the law, family and love, all within a thriller every bit as gripping and tragic as her first novel, Black Water Rising.