Southern Literary Fiction

The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre-Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden affinity for a little figurine, Muhlbach succumbs to his intrigue and, 30 dollars later, begins his journey as a connoisseur. With superb delivery and subtle clarity, Connell allows us to see and feel Muhlbach’s emerging mania, with its impending tension and sudden exhilaration.

There’s a difference between being lost and being lost in Louisiana. Being lost means that, given enough time, you’ll sort it out. Being lost in Louisiana means you can’t find your butt to scratch it. Bill Montgomery is the latter. After arriving in Springhill, his only hope is to get out. In one blistering hot afternoon, he discovered that it wasn’t so bad, but first, he had to learn its secrets and the people that lived them. Toles sweeps the reader away, lost in the story from page one, swimming with ease in the current. Sprinkled with humor and small-town charm, the author ...

As far as everyone in the squad room knows, Ben Halloran is completely fresh to the streets of the 77th Division - just a soft kid from the West Side who's decided to become a cop and happened to draw the hardest neighborhood in LA. But demons from Ben's complicated past catch up with him and his tough, oddly principled Daryl Gates-era partner, Miguel Marquez, all too quickly. From the moment Ben and Marquez hit the streets together, they're pulled into a web of ultra-violent corruption and retribution.

1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how?

Carly Castillo has only ever known Fish Village. Her grandmother claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an indigenous Texas people once believed to be extinct, thereby tethering them to Galveston. But as Carly ages, she begins to imagine a life elsewhere, undefined by her family’s history. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop turned seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave Galveston for bigger cities with more possibilities. But he didn’t take them then, and he sure as hell won’t now.

Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through life's arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a preacher who ignores his destitute family, Florida Grace doesn't think much of Jesus. He's the reason she's lived in squalor and He wasn't there for her through her failed marriage. But in one shining moment He calls out to her and she returns to her roots to heed His call.

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

"Mon père vient de mourir." Le narrateur décide alors de revenir dans son pays natal, Haïti, dont il avait été exilé par le dictateur du moment. Et le voilà sur les traces de son passé, de ses origines. Un périple doux et grave, rêveur et plein de charme, qui lui fera voir la misère, la faim, la violence mais aussi les artistes, les jeunes filles... L'espoir, peut-être.

Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband, Duke, are exemplars of Charlotte, North Carolina’s high society, a world where old Southern money and the secrets behind it meet the new wealth of bankers, real estate speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers. Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family’s legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy and descendant of a Confederate general, whose promising political career was mysteriously short-circuited, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War reenactor.

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is 17 years old when she's sentenced to life in prison. When she's released 18 years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start.

Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks).But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City.

Although they come from different ways of life, both Bonnie and Ruth are experiencing drastic changes. After discovering that her husband has lost all of their money and has left her broke, Bonnie Duke Cullman is abandoning her comfortable life in Atlanta to teach at a community college in rural Alabama. Ruth Elkin just lost her sewing job at the Cherished Lady factory, and now she must attend college classes to get back on track.

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning.

In 1925, eighteen-year-old Gracie is suffocating under the weight of being the eldest in a large family. Desperate for freedom and longing to be seen, she hatches a daring plan to escape to Nashville, chasing her dream of becoming a country music star. Along the way, a divine vision of heaven reveals the overwhelming power of God’s love, filling her with purpose and hope. But just as her journey begins to take shape, darkness descends—Gracie is kidnapped and locked inside a frigid graveyard vault, where the cold stone walls seem to whisper of despair. As she shivers in the suffocating ...

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.

Growing up in the suburbs in postwar Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his 30s. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears.

A Feast of Freedom is a brilliant spoof of international affairs--an irresistible blend of humor and satire that is as delightful, as timely, and as deliciously cunning as The Mouse That Roared. While visiting cannibals on a small South Pacific island, the Vice President gets into a stew--literally--causing an international incident that only Leonard Wibberley could concoct. PRAISE FOR A FEAST OF FREEDOM: "Another wildly funny, enormously readable, strangely applicable novel from the pen of a gifted writer."--The Los Angeles Times "A Feast of Freedom must certainly be put along side The ...

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought.

Accompanied by his friend, ship’s surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin, Captain Jack Aubrey has returned home to England and the life of a country gentleman. But their comfortable experience is cut short when Jack is made a pauper overnight. He flees to the continent, narrowly escaping debtor’s prison, only to find himself a hunted fugitive from Napoleon’s regime as, yet again, war looms.

A hilarious, wildly erotic, and biting satire of Hollywood, Blue Movie tells the story of King B., an Oscar-winning director who's determined to shoot the dirtiest and most expensive X-rated movie ever made; Sid Krassman, a producer who's made a fortune catering to the tastes of the American public, and Angela Sterling, a misunderstood sex symbol who'd give anything (and everything) for a chance to do something "serious."