This prize-winning debut collection of 15 stories by the acclaimed Irish author are “among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English” (The Observer).
 
The compassionate, witty, and unsettling short stories collected here announced Claire Keegan as one of Ireland’s most exciting and versatile new talents and earned comparison to the works of Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie,...

"A fiercely funny collection of essays on marriage and manners, thank you notes and three-ways, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the Calgon-scented, onion-dipped, monogrammed art of living as a Southern Lady" --

Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment. "Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip...

"From the best-selling, Pulitzer prize-winning author of All Over But the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of his irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns by the celebrated author, newspaper columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, culled from his best-loved pieces in Southern Living and Garden & Gun. From his love of Tupperware ("My Affair...

"Without meaning to defy society's guidelines for parenting, marriage, work and friendship, Katherine Snow Smith continually finds herself off the expected path--whether that means falling on President Barack Obama, camped with her teenage daughter at a raucous music festival, or ending a twenty-four-year marriage because she simply can't "muddle through." Here, she shines a spotlight on the humor and humanity that come with sometimes breaking the...

"This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as "friends" and "allies" of slaves and sheds...

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--"Everything That Rises Must Converge "and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

"Wedged between the bluffs and the river for which it's named, there's a small and all-but-forgotten town. 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...

First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, an account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston's personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life -- public and private -- of an artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion...