The National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw their world and how they imagined the world to come.

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers--one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy--has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys--now a grown man--tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back...

Eudora Welty is among the very few authors who are acclaimed for their work in both literature and photography. It was twenty-five years ago that she surprised her readers with this important book, for in One Time, One Place many of them discerned for the first time that this revered writer was also a gifted photographer. Throughout her writing career Welty's camera was a close companion. The one hundred pictures included here are her selections from many she took during the Great Depression as she traveled in her home state of Mississippi. These pictures are poignant images of human...