Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In A Whole New Life, however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination.

In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long...

For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short story.
These fifty stories include two early collections -- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors -- as well as more than two dozen stories that are gathered only in The Collected Stories. In his introduction, the author explains how, at one point, he wrote...

Thirty-nine-year-old Fred Lemish had always hoped that love would find him by the age of forty, and with four days to go, he begins a compulsive, yet humorous, search for that love and commitment, in a classic novel of gay life. Reprint.

This is the central volume in Horton Foote s remarkable nine-play Orphans Home Cycle, in which the author chronicles the evolution of a familythe strengths that bind its members together and the strains that force them apartand the cataclysmic changes in Southern society over twenty-six turbulent years. Beginning in 1902 with the death of the protagonist s fathera loss that sends twelve-year-old Horace Robedaux on an odyssey to the darkest corners of the heartand ending in 1928 with another momentous funeral, Foote traces a lineage of loss and regeneration.
Caught in a conflict as old as...

"Higher Elevations: Stories from the West" is a rich and varied anthology of fiction from "Writers' Forum." As the subtitle promises, it is regional, but these are not all stories from your grandfather's (or Hollywood's) West. These are rodeos and forest fires, lonely farmhouses, and isolated lives in wide open spaces, but there are also stories of the urban homeless, of teenage girls in the club and drug scene of present-day Austin, of wetbacks, Vietnamese immigrants, literate writers of advertising commercials living in high-rise flats. There are action stories and stories of local color,...

Caroline Vaughan's photographs offer inspired and surprising visions of landscapes, still lifes, and the human form. In "Borrowed Time," her images of nature and people, sometimes surreal and often arresting, follow each other to create a visual poem of opposition and likeness, physical beauty and balance. Compelling the viewer's attention with delicate rich tones and meticulous technique, she holds the viewer's gaze even when her subject is difficult. Most highly acclaimed for her psychologically complex but subtle portraits of family, friends, loved ones, and strangers, Vaughan's work,...

Caroline Vaughan's photographs offer inspired and surprising visions of landscapes, still lifes, and the human form. In "Borrowed Time," her images of nature and people, sometimes surreal and often arresting, follow each other to create a visual poem of opposition and likeness, physical beauty and balance. Compelling the viewer's attention with delicate rich tones and meticulous technique, she holds the viewer's gaze even when her subject is difficult. Most highly acclaimed for her psychologically complex but subtle portraits of family, friends, loved ones, and strangers, Vaughan's work,...

From Reynolds Price, much acclaimed author of award-winning novels, plays, poems, stories, and essays, comes a work that is unique among contemporary writers of American literature. For more than forty years, Price has kept a working journal of his writing life. Now published for the first time, " Learning a Trade" provides a revealing window into this writer's creative process and craftsman's sensibilities.
Whether Price is reflecting on the rhythm of his day-to-day writing process or ruminating about the central character in what would become, for instance, "Kate Vaiden"--should she be a...

From Reynolds Price, much acclaimed author of award-winning novels, plays, poems, stories, and essays, comes a work that is unique among contemporary writers of American literature. For more than forty years, Price has kept a working journal of his writing life. Now published for the first time, " Learning a Trade" provides a revealing window into this writer's creative process and craftsman's sensibilities.
Whether Price is reflecting on the rhythm of his day-to-day writing process or ruminating about the central character in what would become, for instance, "Kate Vaiden"--should she be a...

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers