Southern Literary Fiction

Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve’s 22 years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home. Eve’s questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the 20th century.

Pauline Smith, a retired insurance processor, is comfortable in her habits and her home. She is a born worrier with strong opinions and believes in family taking care of family. When her mother is injured in a fall, Pauline and her sister Perk must move Mama from their childhood home in Roanoke, Virginia to an assisted living complex in Richmond, where they live. As she is confronted with her mother's frail health, Pauline struggles to confront her own fear of death and the grief she's harbored since her father died when she was a child.

Irene, a lonely 19-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joyride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high.

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naïve 19-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas fathers a dynasty that will last more than 200 years. His descendants play their part in the forging of a nation, but greed and prejudice see an irreparable rift in the family which will echo through the generations. It is only at the dawn of the new millennium - as an old journal lays bare a terrible secret - that the family can finally reclaim its honour....

At 40, Ford Carson has forged a new life as a visual artist in the mountains of North Carolina. A chance meeting with Grace Burnett leads to a burgeoning love affair. But the romance is complicated by Grace’s estranged husband and the unexpected arrival of Ford’s own estranged son.

La obra de una de las grandes maestras de la literatura norteamericana con prólogos actualizados. Los relatos más significativos de la singular y sutil narrativa de Carson McCullers, que han accedido ya a la consideración de clásicos de la moderna literatura norteamericana. Prólogo de Paulina Flores.

In West Texas in the summer of 1937, Cottonwood tells the story of two families thrown together by tragedy and the bounds of racial injustice. Sheriff Rube Whitlock is faced with raising his two young sons after the death of his infant daughter leaves his wife too grief stricken to care for them. Overwhelmed with the responsibility, Rube hires Esther, a local black woman whose husband has just purchased his second mule and ignited a stirring of dissonance and contempt within the usually quiet community.

A northern white couple has relocated to the South to operate a vineyard on a North Carolina plantation. There, they pass their idle hours listening to the stories of one Uncle Julius, who has a deep knowledge of the land. These stories, however, are more than mere entertainments. They all have their time and place, and they offer not only a quiet commentary on the events of the day but also a deeper reckoning with the plantation’s disturbing past.

In Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.

When Cuban fisherman first spotted the Key West lighthouse floating in Florida waters, they called her Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. It’s a beacon that draws people from everywhere seeking the end-of-the-line bohemian oasis that can still be found amidst the condo share towers, chain stores, and Redneck Riviera clientele. And it’s a mecca for gay men and the women who love them. Sue Kaufman Prize-winning author Michael Carroll knows the territory intimately. His stories wind in and out of the bars and guesthouses and lives of this singular paradise.

The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant for a white family, and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household.

Retired racehorse jockey and Vietnam veteran Anse Caulfield rescues exotic big cats, elephants, and other creatures for Little Eden, a wildlife sanctuary near the abandoned ruins of a failed development on the Georgia coast. But when Anse's prized lion escapes, he becomes obsessed with replacing her - even if the means of rescue aren't exactly legal.

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.

Callum, a seasoned horse thief at 15 years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South.

Overcome by "the pall", Henry seeks escape in a quest for love and purpose occasioned by a crisis in his company's fortunes. Dodging an Iago-like rival, he finds love with a colleague in his department, endangers his bond with his family, and finally confronts the single urgent question of his life.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.

Alice always thought she'd see her brother again. Rob ran away when he was 15, with so many years left to find his way home. But his funeral happened first. Now that she has to clear out her childhood home in Georgia, the memories come flooding in, bringing with them an autopsy report showing her family's lies - and sealed, addressed letters from Rob.

Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea 'Knot' Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, 19th-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, when motherhood looms, Knot begins to learn that her freedom has come at a high price. Low on money, ostracized from her parents and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.

With clouds looming ominously on the horizon, a group of children play among the roots of the gnarled Bone Tree. Their games will be interrupted by a merciless storm – bringing with it the Great Flood of 1927 - but not before Robert Chatham shares his first kiss with the beautiful young Dora. The flood destroys their homes, disperses their families, and wrecks their innocence. But for Robert, a boy whose family has already survived unspeakable pain, that single kiss will sustain him for years to come.

A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these 42 short stories - ranging from the '80s and '90s to present day - expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.