Southern Essays

From celebrated New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Rick Bragg comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, Bragg explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast.

"I loved it." —Ann Patchett The bestselling author of American Housewife ("Dark, deadpan and truly inventive." --The New York Times Book Review) is back with a fiercely funny collection of essays on marriage and manners, thank-you notes and three-ways, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the...

From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun Celebrated author and newspaper columnist Rick Bragg brings us an ode to the stories and history of the...

The Foxfire Magazine, a literary journal first published in 1967 in Rabun Gap, Georgia, was founded on the belief that stories and meaning could be found in Appalachian spaces, not only in classics such as Shakespeare. Filled with poetry and prose from local students and authors, the magazine also featured interviews with relatives and neighbors. These oral histories conducted by students from the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School quickly became the star of the magazine. Now, pulled from the vast Foxfire archive, come twenty-one oral histories from southern Appalachian women.

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

A literary treasure of over one hundred unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of twentieth-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne...

Nick Westmore is a “swallow” escaping the UK winters by flying between his home in the UK (Isle of Wight) and summering in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s an enviable “Baby Boomer” lifestyle which he shares with his wife Caryl Westmore, an Author, Podcaster and Coach. They met and married in 2007. Nick has previously lived all over the globe and written letters home about his adventures as an “ex-pat” in the oil and gas industry which you can read and chuckle about in his previous book, True Expat. Now he tackles the fascinating stories of everyday life in South Africa. ...

"An extraordinarily powerful journey that is both political and personal...An important book for everyone in America to read." --Walter Isaacson,#1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs The New Orleans mayor who removed the Confederate statues confronts the racism...

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books The best-known book by Cuba’s most important...

From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks—writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of...

“So often people ask me if there’s a book on story I can recommend. This is the one. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”––Alexa Junge, writer/producer, Friends, Sex and the City, The West Wing A master class of 27 lessons, drawn from 27 diverse narratives, for novelists...

This program is read by the author, Ken Layne, host of the Desert Oracle radio show. It includes an exclusive first listen to a story from Desert Oracle: Volume 2. The cult-y field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora...

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Translation Prize* *Finalist for the National Translation Award* *Longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize* “These days, when an American president has decreed that ‘there are only two genders: male and female’...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. Throughout her prolific...

""Tantalizing"" - NPR “A thrilling detective story… Stapinski pursues the study of her family’s criminal genealogy with unexpected emotional results.” — Library Journal A writer goes deep into the heart of Italy to unravel a century-old family mystery in this spellbinding memoir that...

I grew up in a family where we wrote one another love letters. We put them on pillows, in lunch bags, by bedsides. So it was only natural that when my niece Katie asked me to compile some family recipes for her upon the occasion of her marriage that I would place those recipes alongside all the love letters I had been wanting to write and had written in the form of essays that were published in a variety of magazines and newspaper periodicals before their decline. Eating supper hasn’t declined, however, and love letters to brides and nieces have a kind of perennial value if not to the ...

An Italian memoir. Laine gave up her job as a nurse, sold her home and gave away most of her belongings. She has three desires bubbling at the heart of her choice: to write a book, paint a picture and climb a mountain before she died. A man with a van took most of her remaining belongings, along with her basset hound Basil, down to the heel of Italy over 1,500 miles away, where she would spend the next four years. If it all seemed like a folly, then she was willing to take the risk. She moved to a house that she had only spent a week in the year before. She knew no one and yet she had ...

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality.

Steve Hely, writer for The Office and American Dad!, and recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, presents a travel book about his journey through Central and South America. Part travel book, part pop history, part comic memoir, Hely's writing will make readers want to reach for...