Adam Finney, a young man who is mentally disabled, faces sterilization and lobotomy in a state-supported asylum. When he is found dead in the French Broad River of rural North Carolina, his teenaged stepsister, Jess, is sought for questioning by their family and the police. Jess s odyssey of escape across four states leads into dark territories of life-and-death moral choices where compassion and grace offer faint illumination but few answers. A Question of Mercy, set in a vivid landscape of the mid-twentieth-century South, is the fifth novel from Robert Penn Warren Award winning writer...

Katherine Clark s The Harvard Bride begins with the lavish Mountain Brook wedding of Daniel Dobbs and Caroline Elmore, college sweethearts introduced in Clark s second novel, All the Governor s Men. Picking up where the previous novel ended, The Harvard Bride is a wry comedy of manners and portrait of a marriage unfolding against the backdrop of the return of native southerners, with their newly completed Ivy League educations, to the self-contained world of Mountain Brook s Tiny Kingdom.
As a newlywed Caroline struggles to find her bearings unwilling to join the Junior League, look for...

'You set yourself up as judge, jury, and executioner, Pamela had said, but that was wrong: you set yourself up as angel, and await the word of God.
Luther Redding lost his job, and almost lost his wife, Pamela, and teenaged daughters Katie and Lucy, when the real estate bubble burst in Florida. Now he pilots a Reaper drone over the mountains of Afghanistan from a command center in the bowels of Tampa s MacDill Air Force Base, studying a target s pattern of life and awaiting the command to end that life. Meanwhile Bobby Rosen has returned home from his tours in Iraq to a broken marriage...

Novelist Walker Percy once said that the only remaining unexplored territory in southern literature was the Jewish southerner. Famous all over Town, the first novel from southern storyteller Bernie Schein, stakes a claim on Percy s unexplored terrain with a comically candid multigenerational account of two Jews, a lowcountry native and a northern transplant, at the epicenter of momentous events in the sleepy southern coastal hamlet of Somerset, a fictitious stand-in for Schein s native Beaufort, South Carolina.
Schein s diverse and memorable cast includes southern Jewish lawyer Murray...

An enticing collection of tales told in the fabulist and metafiction traditions, Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves embraces a cyclical movement of renewal, like the ancient ouroboros motif itself, in which artfully rendered answers always give rise to perplexing new questions. Maggie Schein s stories introduce medicine men, monks, immortals, witches, seekers, and souls in various stages of their cycles in and out of lived life, as well as the occasional talking animal, all searching for meaning and for connections to one another through storytelling. Each fable is a meditation on love,...

Fear and brutality grip Columbia, South Carolina, in the harsh winter of 1865 as General William Tecumseh Sherman continues his fiery march to the sea and advances on the capital city where secession began. John Mark Sibley-Jones s By the Red Glare takes us into the lives of representative citizens black and white, men and women, Confederates and Unionists, civilians and combatants, freed and shackled, sane and insane on the eve of historic destruction.
The Columbia hospital is overcrowded with wounded soldiers from both sides. As word of Sherman s advance spreads, old animosities...

On a placid Blue Ridge mountain lake on Labor Day Weekend in 1935, three locals sightseeing in an overloaded boat drown, and the cotton mill scion who owns the lake is indicted for their murders. Decades later Ben Crocker--witness to and reluctant participant in the aftermath of this long-forgotten tragedy--is drawn once more into the morally ambiguous world of mill fortunes and foothills justice.
The son of mill workers in Carlton, South Carolina, Crocker is caught between competing loyalties to his family and future. Crocker wanted more than a rough-hewn life on a factory floor, so he...

Mary Hood's novella Seam Busters explores the connections we make to one another, from the simplest of acts to those moments that define life and death. When Irene Morgan returns to Frazier Fabrics, a family-owned cotton mill in the hardscrabble heart of Ready, Georgia, she joins an eclectic group of women workers sharing their interwoven lives inside and outside the factory. Under constant surveillance and beholden to production quotas and endless protocols presented under the auspices of "American Pride," the women sew state-of-the-art camouflage for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, one...

Pam Durban's new collection of stories explores the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters--science, religion, family, self--the powerful act of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all.
The title story in Soon--chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology--follows two generations of a...

Set in historical Charleston's insular South of Broad neighborhood, A Southern Girl is a tale of international adoption and the evolution of a family. Coleman Carter is a scion of the Old South, a resourceful trial lawyer, devoted husband, and dutiful father. When his wife, Elizabeth, champions their adoption of a Korean orphan, and Soo Yun arrives, the reactions of Coleman's community open his eyes to the racism and exclusivity of his sheltered life. As the Carters forge a new family identity, Coleman must confront generations-old fears inherent in southern traditions of purity and prestige....