Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America's best storytellers--and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood--in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," set in a South that remains segregated...

Contributors to this work continue the work of critically remapping the South through their studies of southern literature and culture. In appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. They explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism...

The complex truth about the color line-its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure-is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites.