Award-winning novelist Doris Betts's probing look at life in a small North Carolina town richly evokes the summer of 1968. A moving, sometimes startling portrait of people grappling with change and their need for love, The River to Pickle Beach pulses with the reality of the contemporary South.

Back in print at last, the nine beautifully crafted tales in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories display Doris Betts at the top of her form: compassionate, witty, and unforgettable.
"The Ugliest Pilgrim" takes you into the adventures and into the heart of a disfigured young woman who has run away from her life in search of a better one. This award-winning story is the basis for the musical Violet, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In "Hitchhiker," a wary secretary hitches a ride in a boat with a man hell-bent on saving fish; instead he saves her...