Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a terrible slump. He's batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife; and he secretly fears he's inherited his mother's insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his record of Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," his record player, and his new saxophone and flees, negotiating his way through madcap adventures and flashbacks to childhood ("If you folks believed more strongly in God, maybe you wouldn't be colored"). Pursued by a raging dope dealer, saddled with a mishandled elephant and an abused...
Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a terrible slump. He's batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife...
A candidate for the office of Superintendent of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, middle-aged matron Olive Mackie of Tula Springs, Louisiana, finds her political aspirations thwarted when her ninety-one-year-old Great Uncle L.D. comes under suspicion for murder. Police don't believe that L.D.'s home-care attendant would commit suicide by jumping from a second-floor window -- but Olive, who has heard her uncle demonstrate his excellent memory by reciting important dates in history over and over, thinks he would. Before justice can be done, half the staff of City Hall, a home ec teacher, an...
A candidate for the office of Superintendent of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, middle-aged matron Olive Mackie of Tula Springs, Louisiana, finds her ...
With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, she has known in her life. From her idyllic childhood in small-town Mississippi onward, a questioning spirit and voracity for reading and writing shape Spencer's course: her formal and informal educations at Vanderbilt and in Rome, Florence, New York, and Montreal, and her break with the culturally rigid segregated society from which she sprang; her friendships with such great writers as Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Robert Penn...
With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, s...
"It is 22 cats that drive the dazzlingly handsome Eric Thorsen to distraction and into the apartment -- if not immediately the arms -- of Wanda Skopinski, the rather mousy woman he meets at church when she thrusts a lesbian romance novel upon him. The stench from downstairs drives him from both his rent-controlled apartment and his complacency as a not-quite-successful piano teacher. In his sixth novel, James Wilcox moves beyond the modern South he has etched so vividly and amusingly in the past to take on Manhattan. But somehow he manages to bring the city down to size.... The book is...
"It is 22 cats that drive the dazzlingly handsome Eric Thorsen to distraction and into the apartment -- if not immediately the arms -- of Wanda Sko...
Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X. -- ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over -- moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery;...
Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career a...
The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories and novellas takes its title is credited as Wolfe's final effort. It tells the story of the Joyner family and conveys Wolfe's fine sense of family traits, rooted in a traceable past.
The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories and novellas takes its title is credited as Wolfe's final effort. It tells the st...
