The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history.

This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation--Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons,...

At South Carolina Medical College, Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career--working university public relations--takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves are unearthed on campus.

In a parallel narrative set in the nineteenth century, Nemo ("no man"), a university slave purchased for his unusual knife skills, becomes an unacknowledged member of the surgical faculty by day--and by night, a "resurrectionist," responsible for procuring bodies for medical study. An unforgettable character, by turns apparently...