Southern Essays

"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 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...

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it." It is one of the greatest novels in the English language — and one of the most demanding. This edition is built to help you read it. The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the fall of the Compsons, a once-proud Southern family rotting from within, through four narrators and across three decades. It opens inside the mind of Benjy, who cannot tell past from present; moves to his ...

David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book. If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast...

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.

The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems David Rakoff’s collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of our funniest, most insightful writers. In Don’t Get Too...

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...

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...

This program is read by the author. South Toward Home is a wry and humorous audiobook about life and culture in the American South. In thinking about her native land, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These...

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Translation Prize* *Finalist for the National Translation Award* *Honorable Mention for the Society of Authors TA (Translators Association) First Translation Prize* *Honorable Mention for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize* “These...

“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...

Bloomsbury presents I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, read by Jully Lee. Translated by International Booker shortlistee Anton Hur, the sequel to the New York Times bestselling South Korean smash hit. Baek Sehee could never have predicted how many people I Want to...

A Backwards Glance is a collection of stories from the extraordinary life of an exceptional man. Follow Sid Mickle from his small-town Alabama childhood to a 40-year professional career that allowed him to travel far from home without ever forgetting its lessons. This book is more than a collection of stories. It is a nostalgic journey through time with family, friends, work associates and a collection of real life memories. There is success and failure, joy and tragedy, setbacks and triumphs. These stories include vivid recollections of childhood struggles to understand his polar-opposite ...

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time...

"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...

There are places that shape the people who live upon them. The Southern Plains of New Mexico and West Texas are one of those places. For more than two decades, historian, teacher, and storyteller Jim Harris chronicled the lives of ranchers, pioneers, artists, soldiers, writers, cowboys, dreamers, and ordinary citizens whose stories might otherwise have disappeared with time. These essays travel from the windswept Llano Estacado to the mountains of the Big Bend, from forgotten frontier settlements to courthouse squares, cattle ranches, museums, and family homesteads. Along the way, Harris ...

When my claustrophobic sister Julie Ann and her down-in-the-back husband Jody were trapped on a stalled elevator in a posh hotel, they were not alone in their distress. Two young male execs were with them. As soon as the elevator lurched heart-stoppingly close to a place near a floor level, the two young men were able to wedge open the elevator door just enough to squeeze up and through. The two executives escaped, leaving behind my sister-- a grandmother-- and her husband Jody, her hero. I heard later from my sister that, “Jody couldn’t believe his eyes--two young men leaving me behind...

""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...

Is it possible to divorce your ex and still love you former mother-in-law? Take a trip to the bayou with Louisiana Mystery Writer Eric Wilder. Hear some of his favorite family stories and try twenty recipes from possibly the greatest Cajun-Creole cook on earth: his former mother-in-law. Lily's Little Cajun Cookbook is filled with humor, mystery, tall tales and the wonderful aroma of Cajun and Creole cuisine.

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...