"Beloved for his novels Twilight, The Long Home,and The Lost Country and his groundbreaking collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, William Gay returns with one final posthumous collection of short stories, adapted from the archive found after his death in February 2012. In addition to previously unpublished short stories, Stories from the Attic includes fragments from two of the unpublished novels that were works in progress at the time...

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin brought the abolitionist's message to the White House and beyond. No woman before or since has so successfully written a novel designed to motivate America to act on a major issue of the day. Controversial still, this novel has weathered continual debates on all aspects of its writing and its subject matter. In her eloquent introduction, Ann Douglas establishes the historical and literary significane of this...

Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change-and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won't withstand much more. So she tells the story of its people: of Hugh, her granddaddy, determined to preserve...

"Novel set in the south during the Great Depression that takes an entirely fresh view on big American themes-- race, heredity, inequality, shame-- set in a time of financial crisis and racialized violence"-- Cotton County, Georgia, 1930. Two babies-- one light-skinned, the other dark-- are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight,...

State Road 177 runs along the Suwannee River, between Fargo, Georgia, and the Okefenokee Swamp. Drive that route from east to west, and you'll cross six bridges. Take it from west to east, and you might find seven. But you'd better hope not. Titus and Melanie Bell are on their honeymoon, and have reservations in the Okefenokee Swamp cabins for a canoeing trip. But shortly before they reach their destination, the road narrrows into a rickety bridge...

At first glance, these stories seem grounded in the everyday: they paint pictures of idyllic Southern landscapes with characters fulfilling their roles as students, boyfriends, sons and wives. But all is not what it seems. Tackling issues of masculinity, sexual identity, and place, Nick White deconstructs the core qualities of Southern fiction, exposing deeply flawed and fascinating characters on wildly compelling quests.

"In twelve stories, Good Women follows the lives of Black women through Appalachia and the Deep South, examining what forces shape their realities and what force they carry with them. A darkly funny and deeply human collection, Hill observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, desperation, obsessions, and boundaries (or lack thereof) all influence how people navigate their worlds-in the most intimate and most coincidental of relationships....

"Beth McKenzie's attempt to turn an old Southern mansion into a Bed and Breakfast called The Dixie Dew is thwarted when her first guest is found dead in bed. Murdered, it turns out. Three days later a young priest who looks better in tennis whites than cleric black, is found strangled in his chapel. The whole town of Littleboro is abuzz, and Ossie Delbardo, the town cop whose job heretofore mainly involved controlling football traffic on Friday nights,...

The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more-from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father's drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising...

Murder usually begins at home, and Colleton County, North Carolina, proves no exception. When truck driver and childhood neighbor Dallas Stancil is shot and killed in his own backyard, Judge Deborah Knott figures she owes his memory at least the respectful ritual of taking his widow one of her Aunt Zell's best chicken casseroles. Mistake Number One. Dallas wasn't rich, but with development eating up the farms and forests of North Carolina his land...