Anyone who has read the best-selling Mama Makes Up Her Mind or listened to Bailey White's commentaries on NPR knows that she is a storyteller of inimitable wit and charm. Now, in her stunningly accomplished first novel, she introduces us to the peculiar yet lovable people who inhabit a small town in south Georgia. Meet serious, studious Roger, the peanut pathologist and unlikely love object of half the town's women. Meet Roger's ex-mother-in-law, Louise, who teams up with an ardent typographer in an attempt to attract outer-space invaders with specific combinations of letters and...

Anyone who has read her bestseller Mama Makes Up Her Mind--or who has heard her on National Public Radio--knows that Bailey White is one of the keenest observers of Southern eccentricity since Mark Twain. Sleeping at the Starlite Motel revives White's reputation as a master storyteller, Southern division, as it catalogs the oddities of the Georgia town she knows so well.

For more than a decade, Bailey White has delivered a story each Thanksgiving to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" listeners. Long awaited by her many fans, "Nothing with Strings" is the entire collection of these Thanksgiving stories, published together for the first time.

With wit and charm, Bailey White writes about an almost-gone little town where a spoon player is a guardian angel, an old woman fears that John James Audubon is living in her attic, and a homely governess wins a baby bull in a raffle and loses her heart. It's the kind of place where Heavenly Blue morning...