Her Own Place traces the life and times of Mae Lee Barnes, an African American woman from rural South Carolina. The novel begins with Mae Lee's life as a teenager in the 1940s and follows her eventual marriage to her boyfriend, Jeff Barnes, who proposes before going off to fight in World War II. While Jeff is in the army, Mae Lee works rotating shifts at a local munitions plant and saves every penny she can to purchase a small farm. When Jeff returns from the war, he alternates between spending time on the farm and going to find work in the city, and eventually the family decides to start a...

Accomplished South Carolina storyteller George Singleton has been called "the unchallenged king of the comic southern short story" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "a breakthrough writer you need to know" by Book magazine, and "a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurman" by novelist Tony Earley. Singleton's third collection Why Dogs Chase Cars comprises fourteen uproarious short stories about Mendal Dawes, a young boy coming of age in the backwoods town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, and coming to terms with his eccentric but...

A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, Familiar Ground follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly 100 years old. Jacob aims to confront a moment of violence from forty years in his past that cost him the life of his brother Drue. Elizabeth Cox s debut novel, first published in 1984, is about the recurrence of loss in our lives and of the intractability of guilt that must give way for any measure of self-forgiveness.
The novel introduces us to a memorable collection of southern characters. There is the...

In this collection of stories award-winning writer Steve Yarbrough effortlessly evokes the special qualities of small-town southern life as he examines - with subtle humour, keen insight, and unfailing sympathy - the relationships between ordinary men and women.

First published in 1982, Cakewalk was the first short story collection by iconic southern writer Lee Smith. Comic and observant, Smith's fourteen tales in Cakewalk introduce readers to a host of memorable southern characters. Her protagonists include aging gossips, a soap opera-hooked housewife, a runaway teenager, and divergent sisters in various combinations. Smith's gutsy southern women don't always triumph, but, with her sympathetic portrayals, readers gain a better appreciation for the merits of spirited perseverance, right or wrong, in the face of modern adversity. They are everyday...

The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators--Tracy, Randy, and Vincent--making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash's later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak...

From lowcountry writer William Baldwin comes a new edition of his 1993 Lillian Smith Award-winning novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy. Including a new introduction by the author, this Southern Revivals edition makes available once more a story that touches on the issues of religion, race, and coming-of-age in the post-Civil War South, when the lines between these issues were not always clear. Set in fictional Cedar Point, a small southern community in the early 1900s, The Hard to Catch Mercy is told through the eyes of a young boy, Willie T., who is forced to confront the changing world around...

Vietnam veteran David Larson can't go home again. Instead the Georgia native wanders westward into the desolate landscape of Slut's Hole, Wyoming, and seeks to integrate himself amid a hardscrabble cast of memorable locals. David is taken in by Sixbury, a one-legged widow, sheep farmer, and mother to a nearly adult mentally handicapped son. This rough-hewn family unit is later augmented when David becomes the unwilling guardian to Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at a highway rest stop. A tragic turn of events moves the novel into violent territory that bridges western laconic traditions...

In her 1981 collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Ellen Gilchrist writes about New Orleans as no other writer. Laced with envy, greed, lust, terror, and self-deceit, her stories will shock and compel readers. Gilchrist's characters, women who dream of independent lives beyond the shadows of their husbands and fathers, resort to outrageous schemes in pursuit of freedom and fulfillment, despite the consequences. The range of emotions and realities encompassed by Gilchrist's work is suggested by the story titles: "Rich," "There's a Garden of Eden," "The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar,"...