The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, gathers every May to clean up the graveyard and talk. Every one of them has stories to tell, and it is Albert Copeland who writes it all down in the notebooks he started years ago to track the progress of the floatplanes he builds. The notebooks hold all the best-kept secrets--of love, loss, and yearnings to let go. The Floatplane Notebooks, Clyde Edgerton's third novel, first published in 1988, is a multigenerational story of the Copeland family, spanning from the antebellum era to the Vietnam War.

The novel cycles through a...

Clyde Edgerton's Raney is the comic love story of a marriage between Raney, a small-town Southern Baptist, and Charles, a librarian with liberal leanings from Atlanta, united by their shared enthusiasm for country music. The novel both interrogates and honors the faiths and foibles of its subjects as the relationship is tested through trials and revelations. Despite the couple's differences, their marriage slowly evolves into a relationship of equals in which both are willing to compromise for the good of the other and the marriage. Told though Raney's naive and mesmerizing...