His father runs a methodically organized meth ring, with local authorities on the dime to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Having dropped out of high school and cut himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for this father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town.Jacob has always been resigned to play the cards that were dealt him, but when a fatal mistake changes everything, he’s faced with a choice: stay and appease his father, or leave the mountains with the girl he loves. In a place where blood is thicker than water and hope takes a back seat to fate, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above the only life he’s ever known.A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel In the country-noir tradition of Winter's Bone meets 'Breaking Bad,' a savage and beautiful story of a young man seeking redemption.

    In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.

    In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to the observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend. Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies' organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancé, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame. Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands. Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery's observation that "the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

    Cornelia is rich, white, and pampered, the mistress of the house, who oversees a seemingly perfect world of smooth surfaces and stubborn silence. Tweet, her housekeeper, is a poor, black, world-weary woman with a ghost-ridden past. As the years go by, Cornelia and Tweet each endure moments of uncertainty and despair; each, in her time of need, is rescued by the other.In the footsteps of Southern writers like Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, Ellen Douglas celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit in this story of two women bound by transgression and guilt, memory and illusion, gratitude and love."Ellen Douglas is not just one of our best Southern novelists. She is one of our best American novelists." - The New York Times Book Review

    He teaches in Gainesville, Florida, where he was born in 1952. His work has appeared in "The New Yorker," " Esquire," "Harper's, "and many other periodicals. Simons Everson Manigault ("You say it 'Simmons.' I'm a rare one-"m" Simons") lives with his mother, an eccentric professor (known as the Duchess), on an isolated and undeveloped strip of South Carolina coast. Convinced that her son can be a writer of genius, the Duchess has immersed Simons in the literary classics since birth ("Like some kids swat mobiles, I was to thumb pages") and has given him free rein to gather materials in such spots as the Baby Grand, a local black nightclub. ("It was an assignment. I'm supposed to write. I'm supposed to get good at it.") Although possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication beyond his years, Simons feels the normal adolescent bewilderment about the behavior of his parents. His conventional father, the Progenitor, has recently left the family in a dispute over Simon's upbringing and has moved to nearby Hilton Head, where he would like to see his son raised among the orthodox surroundings of condominiums, country clubs, and private schools. At the book's center is Taurus, an enigmatic father-surrogate who tutors the boy in the art of watching the world without presumption. "Edisto" is, as Walker Percy observed, "a truly remarkable first novel, both as a narrative and in its extraordinary use of language. It reminds one of "The Catcher in the Rye," but it's better--sharper, funnier, and more poignant." "When asked for a list of the best American writers of the younger generation, I invariably put the name of Padgett Powell at the top."--Saul Bellow "[This] is distinctly a tour de force . . . I found myself increasingly charmed by the book's wit and impressed by its originality. Some turn of phrase, some flash of humor, some freshly observed detail, some accurately rendered perception of a child's pain or a child's amazement transfigures nearly every page. Powell's ear is acute: one of the pleasures of the book is his ability to catch the nuances of Southern speech, whether it is the malicious conversation of the Doctor's academic colleagues at a cocktail party or the genial banter of country folks at the fishing pier."--"The New York Review of Books" "A remarkable book . . . there is not a line that simply slides by; each, in one way or another, turns things to a fresh and unexpected angle. There are splendid things said."--Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Simons Manigault is brother to all literary adolescents--Mailer's D.J., Salinger's Holden Caufield, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus . . . "Edisto" is a sparkling read, so full of an energetic intelligence, inventiveness, love of language, and love of people . . . Padgett Powell is an extravagantly talented writer."--Ron Loewinsohn, "The New York Times Book Review" ""Edisto" is a startling book, full of new sights, sounds, and ways if feeling. Mr. Powell weaves wonderful tapestries from ordinary speech; his people, black and white, whether speaking to each other or past each other, tells us things that we never heard before. The book is subtle, daring, and brilliant."--Donald Barthelme "Sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten."--R. Z. Sheppard, "Time" "Powell creates a language that captures rhythms and reflections that are at once original and true."--Peter S. Prescott, "Newsweek"

    It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American Bildungsroman. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel covers the span of time from Gant's birth to the age of 19. The setting is the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, a fictionalization of his home town, Asheville, North Carolina. Playwright Ketti Frings wrote a theatrical adaptation of Wolfe's work in a 1957 play of the same title.

    Five years of struggle to create a community ensue, in which part of the struggle is just to survive. This is the story of late 18th century life in an untamed country.

    One stiflingly hot August afternoon, as Cameron sits waiting for Tanya during their daily run to the Biz-E-Bee convenience store, he suddenly and inexplicably rises up and out of his wheelchair.In the aftermath of this "miracle," Cameron finds himself a celebrity at the center of a contentious debate about what's taken place. And when scientists, journalists, and a Vatican investigator start digging, Cameron's deepest secrets--the key to his injury, to his identity, and, in some eyes, to the nature of his recovery--become increasingly endangered. Was Cameron's recovery a genuine miracle, or a medical breakthrough? And, finding himself transformed into a symbol, how can he hope to retain his humanity?Brilliantly written as closely observed journalistic reportage and filtered through a wide lens that encompasses the vibrant characters affected by Cameron's story, Anatomy of a Miracle will be read, championed, and celebrated as a powerful story of our time, and the work of a true literary master.

    In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

    This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.

    On a late autumn day, near a little town called Franklin, 10,000 men will soon lie dead or dying in a battle that will change many lives for ever. None will be more changed than Carrie McGavock, who finds her home taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a field hospital. Taking charge, she finds the courage to face up to the horrors around her and, in doing so, finds a cause.Out on the battlefield, a tired young Southern soldier drops his guns and charges forward into Yankee territory, holding only the flag of his company's colours. He survives and is brought to the hospital. Carrie recognizes something in him - a willingness to die - and decides on that day, in her house, she will not let him.In the pain-filled days and weeks that follow, both find a form of mutual healing that neither thinks possible.In this extraordinary debut novel based on a true story, Robert Hicks has written an epic novel of love and heroism set against the madness of the American Civil War.

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    Louisa, a young maid at the hotel determined to befriend him, wins his attention through a shared love of pigeons; with her, we hear his tragic and tremendous life story unfold. Meanwhile, Louisa discovers that her father—and her handsome, enigmatic love interest, Arthur Vaughan—are on an unlikely mission to travel back in time and find his beloved late wife. A masterful hybrid of history, biography, and science fiction, The Invention of Everything Else is an absorbing story about love and death and a wonderfully imagined homage to one of history's most visionary scientists.

    But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she's holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio.As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.

    On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.