This volume offers readings of Eudora Welty's last two novels, Losing Battles (1970) and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer prize. The essays focus on Welty's work as a novelist, although she was better known as a writer of short fiction, a critic and reviewer, a photographer, and an autobiographer. This collection seeks to stimulate interest in this aspect of the writer's talent and to serve as a guide to reading and teaching her late novels.

Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality brings together essays by a number of distinguished O'Connor scholars, four of whom were the writer's friends, to assess the impact of the political, religious, and social milieu of her time on novels and short stories that consistently attract interpretive attention and are rediscovered by new generations of readers. The contributors mark the current terrain of scholarship on the wry Georgian writer and open new avenues for future explorations in O'Connor's work.

An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics

Jan Nordby Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the literature and its creators. In this volume he interviews fourteen Southern storytellers who reveal their influences, methods and daily routines, and struggles with the writing process.