NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South.
This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs...

The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance.

"Novel set in the south during the Great Depression that takes an entirely fresh view on big American themes-- race, heredity, inequality, shame-- set in a time of financial crisis and racialized violence"-- "Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a...

A collection of critical essays from award-winning author Dorothy Allison about identity, gender politics, and queer theory, now with a new preface
Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award–winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through twenty-three impassioned essays that explore her identity—from...

Looking for guidance in understanding the ways and means of Southern culture? Look no further. Florence King's celebrated field guide to the land below the Mason-Dixon Line is now blissfully back in print, just in time for the Clinton era. The Failed Souther Lady's classic primer on Dixie manners captures such storied types as the Southern Woman (frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained-all at the same time), the Self-Rejuvenating Virgin,...

Hortense Calisher's evocative memoir bristles with intelligence and youthful inquiry Kissing Cousins recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family's surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new city and school boorish, the young Calisher takes solace in the enduring friendship she develops with Katie Pyle, a gregarious nurse turned "kissing cousin" fifteen...

If Nights Could Talk is a rich gothic story of a Southern family, a tale of wealth and emotional need that spans generations. Marsha Recknagel's memoir begins with the surprise appearance of her 16-year-old nephew, Jamie, who arrives on her doorstep and into her ordered, childless life. Fleeing a chaotic home run by Marsha's unstable younger brother and his wife, Jamie is an ominous creature-and the center of an ongoing family tug-of-war. For Marsha,...

Author William Gay is the winner of the 1999 William Peden Award and the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. In his debut collection, Gay brings to life 13 stories about a diverse group of colorful characters living in the fertile Tennessee country land.

For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales.
Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of...