This book covers in unmatched detail the life history, relationships, biology, and conservation of all the world's toucans, barbets, and honeyguides. These number 133 species, found in tropical regions around the world. The toucans are especially well-known because of their dramatic bills and their association with the Amazon rainforest. The authors have been working with these birds for over 20 years, and their knowledge and expertise in these groups is unrivalled. Much of the information in this book has never previously been published. The color plates, painted by well-known US artist...

The common characterization of Mark Twain as an uneducated and improvisational writer took hold largely because of the novelist's own frequent claims about his writing practices. But using recently discovered evidence--Twain's marginal notes in books he consulted as he worked on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court--Joe Fulton argues for a reconsideration of scholarly views about Twain's writing process, showing that this great American author crafted his novels with careful research and calculated design.
Fulton analyzes Twain's voluminous marginalia in the copies of...

A loamy volume of verse thematically inspired, Working the Dirt celebrates Southerners' connections to the land. The selected poems share themes of gardening, farming, and the rich Southern soil. The approximately one hundred poets, known and lesser known, living and dead, include: Fred Chappell, Walter McDonald, A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, Tom Dent, Jesse Stuart, Jim Wayne Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marion Montgomery, James Whitehead, C. D. Wright, George Scarbrough, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Thad Stem, Jr., William Sprunt, Donald Justice, Thomas Rabbitt, James...

H. L. Mencken first identified the South as the Bible Belt in the 1920s. To be sure, religion shapes and defines even those Southerners who don t think of themselves as particularly religious. Practically no one who grows up Southern can escape being shaped, stimulated, harmed, or informed by religion and spirituality. "All Out of Faith "gives voice to southern women writers who represent a broad spectrum of faiths, Catholic to Baptist, Jewish to Buddhist, and points in between. These essays and stories revea; that southern culture has always reserved a special place for strong women of...

"Circling Faith" is a collection of essays by southern women that encompasses spirituality and the experience of winding through the religiously charged environment of the American South.
Mary Karr, in Facing Altars, describes how the consolation she found in poetry directed her to a similar solace in prayer. In Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow, Susan Cushman recounts how her dissatisfaction with a Presbyterian upbringing led her to hold her own worship services at home and eventually to join the Eastern Orthodox Church. Magic by Amy Blackmarr depicts a religious practice that occurs wholly...

Tell the World You re a Wildflower is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Beginning with the youngest characters and ending with the oldest, the stories encompass plastic surgery and white supremacists, family secrets and family trees, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a young writer who describes her work in progress as the bastard love-child of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.
In Tell the World You re a Wildflower, each character must decide what to tell, whether to tell it,...

Fiction. Women's Studies. BELLES' LETTERS 2 affords a variety of fiction being written by Alabama women. A number of stories are love stories--first loves, lost loves, strange loves, from transient, feckless, grotesque, even abusive, to permanent and heartwarming. Featuring 39 authors, including Lee Smith, Sena Naslund, Fannie Flagg, Gail Godwin, and Vicki Covington.

Emblematic of the tensions that white southern women of the era experienced between independent creative expression and traditional familial and community expectations.