Southern Literary Fiction

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.

Siddharth Arora lives an ordinary life in the New England suburb of South Haven, but his childhood comes to a grinding halt when his mother dies in a car accident. Siddharth soon gravitates toward a group of adolescent bullies, drinking and smoking instead of drawing and swimming. He takes great pains to care for his depressive father, Mohan Lal, an immigrant who finds solace in the hateful Hindu fundamentalism of his homeland and cheers on Indian fanatics who murder innocent Muslims.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

Take one disgraced District Attorney. Add a part-time philosopher—full-time barbecue grill master, a sassy but big-hearted waitress, a transexual stuck between genders on a pay-as-you-go plan, a mentally challenged woman who forgets which are swear words and which aren’t, and a mute Latino in the U.S. illegally, stir them together in a bucolic village on the coast of South Carolina, and you’ve got a recipe for insanity. Unrue delivers a saga of tragedy and redemption cocooned within biting social satire with Keseyian barbs and lush imagery…A worthy story told well…

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.

In the quaint town of Amblewood, Booked Bliss is the heart of the community—a cozy bookstore where neighbors gather, stories come to life, and mysteries are best kept on the shelves. But when famed author Samuel Rowley dies suddenly during the weekly book club meeting, the quiet comfort of the store is shattered. The town’s beloved barista, Eliza Harrington, can’t help but suspect there’s more to Samuel’s death than meets the eye—especially when the police suggest foul play. With her trusty orange tabby, Agatha, by her side, and her sharp intuition honed by years of reading ...

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.

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.

As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision. As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further.

Dr. Frederick Eichner, world-renowned dermatologist, is visited by the entrancingly irritating Felix Treevly who comes to him as a patient and stays as an obsession. Prosaic incidents blossom into bizarre developments with the sharpened reality of dreams as the spectral Mr. Treevly leads the doctor into a series of increasingly weird situations. With the assistance of a drunken private detective, a mad judge, a car crash, a game show called What’s My Disease, and a hashish party, Treevly drives Eichner to madness and mayhem.

The envy of all her friends, wife and mother Saphora Warren is the model of Southern gentility and accomplishment. She lives in a beautiful Lake Norman home, and has raised three capable adult children. Her husband is a successful plastic surgeon - and a philanderer. It is for that reason that, after hosting a garden party for Southern Living magazine, Saphora packs her bags to escape the trappings of her picturesque-but-vacant life.

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 Creole beauty. Eccentric sisters and a black rose. One granny woman and a red button. Church suppers and bingo nights. A poet out of his element. Dreams of Mexico. The shadowy world of thoroughbred horse racing. If the Creek Don't Rise is a collection of hard-used characters, tangled relationships, family angst, and fortitude. Eighteen tales and six vignettes make this collection a skillful and moving exploration of the commonplace, the hidden, and the unforgettable.

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.

Returning to characters introduced in her previous novel, acclaimed author Joanna Catherine Scott explores the terrain of a devastated South, where the war is over - but conflict lives on. Having endured years of hardship, Eugenia Mae Spotswood returns to Wilmington to find out who her mother is, only to be met with racism and hatred.... Until she is befriended by the most powerful Negro leader in the state Senate. Also driven forward are the strong-minded ex-slave Tom and his crippled former enemy Clyde Bricket.

Everyone has a story. Everyone has secrets-- A cancer patient's stream-of-consciousness A teenager's coming-of-age with a mysterious girl A veteran's reminiscences of the Korean War A baseball scout's encounter with a legendary creature in 1940's Alabama A memory patient's last-gasp rumination of his life 'Savor this book. The flavor lingers...'

As the rest of America struggled during the Great Depression, the denizens of Hopewell Valley, Kentucky, were unmoved—they had always struggled. Henry Van Boorean made his own way—backstreet boxing, bootleg wine-making, and homemade fertilizer (spiked with roadkill). Along with his polio-stricken wife, two sons, a temperamental rooster, and a cast of eccentrics, he withstood the mid-twentieth century on a rundown farm in the foothills of Appalachia. Van Boorean’s Hill is the anti-Waltons. Unrue deftly subverts a century of Appalachian stereotypes with warmth, depth, and delicious ...

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naive nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town in the penal colony of New South Wales. Discarding allegiance to the country that has disowned him, Thomas, an honest man at heart, seizes a second chance and begins a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas Kendall fathers a dynasty that will last beyond 200 years.

In the moss-draped bayous of Caterwaul County, where secrets fester thicker than Spanish moss, a literary legend long presumed dead is resurrected with terrifying consequences. When a cache of Nullis Nemo Nusquama's lost manuscripts unleashes a feverish obsession in his devoted fans, fiction begins to bleed into reality. Jael Jewel, a woman wielding the South's charm like a weapon, knows the swamp's underbelly better than most. She enlists the help of N. N. Nusquama, pen name for her cousin, the volatile writer Cale, to weaponize the myth and cleanse their community of its violent ...