Set in 1957 in a small Tennessee town just awakening to shifting racial and social attitudes, the novel concerns the inevitability of change and the consequences for those who resist it. Hester Cameron Glenn, a proud, well-bred southern aristocrat, is the self-appointed guardian of her family's and her community's heritage. When a young black man is chained to a tree and stoned to death, Hester deplores the brutality of the act. Slowly she comes to suspect, and finally to know, who his real murderer is, and she decides what she must do to protect the family honor.
Set in 1957 in a small Tennessee town just awakening to shifting racial and social attitudes, the novel concerns the inevitability of change and the c...
In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a...
In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are...
Fred Chappell's The Gaudy Place is perhaps the first novel to depict the society of the street people of the New South and their relationship to the middle class. For its wry portrayal of displacement and injustice this novel was awarded the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize. The street-smart teenager Arkie triggers the events of the story with his ambition to rise in economic status. He proposes business deals to the prostitute Clemmie and the successful con man Oxie, a hustler who aspires to political office. When the prank of a middle-class teenager, Linn Harper, offers Oxie the surprising...
Fred Chappell's The Gaudy Place is perhaps the first novel to depict the society of the street people of the New South and their relationship to the m...
"That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers since, I can remember everything. I remember the day summer started."
So begins Lee Smith's disarming first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Hollins College and a winner in 1968 of the Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, set in a small southern town at midcentury, tells the story of nine-year-old Susan, for whom the first bright, carefree, promise-filled days of summer slowly...
"That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers sin...
Returning to Kentucky upon her father's sudden death, sixteen-year-old Amantha Starr learns that she is to be sold into slavery to appease her father's creditors.
Returning to Kentucky upon her father's sudden death, sixteen-year-old Amantha Starr learns that she is to be sold into slavery to appease her father'...
Carol Hollywell is beautiful, smart, elegant, and charming. A debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, she is heir to a good southern name and a small southern fortune. She knows what she wants and, more important, knows how to get it. She is, in other words, the prototypical southern belle, a Scarlett O'Hara for the 1950s, and when she moves to Washington, D.C., in 1957, she sets, the town on its ear. Willie Morris' cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) follows this headstrong woman from her arrival in the...
Carol Hollywell is beautiful, smart, elegant, and charming. A debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, she is heir t...
"Spencer's refined, sensuous writing and laser insights inform this novel, as extraordinary as her other works." -- Publishers Weekly
At a certain point approaching the Mississippi coast, the air fills with the salt smell of the Gulf of Mexico. For all of the characters in Elizabeth Spencer's gracefully written novel, the salt line divides past and present, memory and longing, tranquillity and danger. Crossing it places everyone in the chaotic path of Arnie Carrington, former professor and 1960s campus radical, who is on a crusade to restore the small Gulf Coast town of Notchaki after...
"Spencer's refined, sensuous writing and laser insights inform this novel, as extraordinary as her other works." -- Publishers Weekly
"This is Robert Penn Warren's best book. . . . Cruel sometimes, crude sometimes, obsessed sometimes, the book is always extraordinary: it does know, and knows sadly and tenderly, even. It is, in short, an event, a great one."-Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book Review The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, "in some important senses, a new work." Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, this long poem recalls events leading to and resulting...
"This is Robert Penn Warren's best book. . . . Cruel sometimes, crude sometimes, obsessed sometimes, the book is always extraordinary: it does know, a...
"Hysterically funny, beautifully written. . . . Warming and endearing, brilliant."-Anne Tyler, New Republic After four years of college in New England, Louise Brown is back in New Orleans, steeped in society's "wastrel-youth contingent" yet somewhat detached, observing it all. From one lush, sweltering event to another, Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, laconic speech, and drunkenness reign, inscribing the South's hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter. At the center (in Louise's eyes) is Claude Collier, rumpled, accident prone,...
"Hysterically funny, beautifully written. . . . Warming and endearing, brilliant."-Anne Tyler, New Republic After four years of college in New England...
Published amid controversy in 1926, Flight focuses on the dilemma of Mimi Daquin, a light-complexioned African American woman who passes, for a time, as white. In the New Orleans of her birth, Mimi never encountered the hierarchies of skin color that existed elsewhere. But when her family moves to Atlanta, she embarks on a lifelong lesson about what it really means to belong to a people. From the Atlanta riot of 1906 to her shameful expulsion from black bourgeois society because of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, to her working-class status in Philadelphia and Harlem, Mimi eventually decides...
Published amid controversy in 1926, Flight focuses on the dilemma of Mimi Daquin, a light-complexioned African American woman who passes, for a tim...
