Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork.

Aging Herb’s charmed life with his dear wife, Susan, in their Key West house is coming undone. Susan now needs constant care, and Herb is in denial about his own ailing health. The one bright spot is the arrival of an endlessly optimistic manicurist calling herself Renee. She sings to Susan during manicures, gets her to paint, and brings her a sense of contentment. But then Herb and Susan’s adult children arrive to stage an intervention on their stubborn, independent father, and as a consequence, Renee’s gig with Susan—and her grand plans for her own life—start to unravel as well.

When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is famous for its up-to-the-minute shock therapies and for Dr. Carroll's revolutionary theory of the benefits of non-introspection. Evalina finds herself in the midst of a kaleidoscope of characters, including the estranged wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Orphaned when her father dies in the Civil War, Molly Petree is taken in by Uncle Junius on his Agate Hill plantation. But the terminally ill Junius is manipulated into marriage by his housekeeper, Selena, who inherits Agate Hill upon his death. Neglected and abused under Selena's watch, Molly escapes to a better life with help from her father's closest battlefield companion. But as she grows into a refined, educated woman, Molly remains haunted by tragedy.

Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. Researching an assignment for an Oral History course, Jennifer drives to the town where her mother and father grew up. Raised by a stepmother, the young college student wonders why her father never talks of her real mother and is intrigued by the mystery of her heritage. One by one, the Cantrells tell of lives filled with vitality, colored by the land and family history.

Clay’s Quilt was a Book Sense '76 Pick and was nominated for the Southeastern Booksellers Book of the Year and the Appalachian Writers Association Book Award. Clay Sizemore loves his home in Free Creek, but he longs for more. Since the death of his mother when he was four, he has felt the absence of family. His father left, and he has no siblings. But finally, through the love of others, he is able to create a place of his own.

Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.

Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God.

In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs - including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity of putting down roots.

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!

When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."

The Stantons and the Nortons were families in the truest, oldest sense: extended networks of kin stretching across the mountains, everyone within hiking distance. They’d come from the British Isles and settled in the Appalachians of North Carolina during the 1700s, bringing with them their dearly loved songs and their clannish ways, their ties to the land ultimately becoming as strong as their ties to one another.

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression

When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a "tap-dancing child abuser", the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi's intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.

Among the longleaf pines and family farms of eastern North Carolina, days seem to pass without incident for Margaret Clayton and Bernice Stokes until they discover each other in a friendship that will take them on the most important journey of their lives. Margaret, droll and whip smart, has a will of iron that never fails her even when her body does, while Bernice, an avid country-music fan, is rarely lucid.

Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned.

In the latest novel from Susan Gregg Gilmore, sometimes you have to return to the place where you began to arrive at the place where you belong.

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...."

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!

Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.

When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1954, The Ponder Heart is easily Eudora Welty’s most comic novel, a lighthearted burlesque that rivals Caldwell’s Tobacco Road for capturing rural idioms, and the novels of Mark Twain for high farce.

As the year 1928 begins, 14-year-old Lanie Belle Freeman of Fairhope, Arkansas, has bright hopes for the future. Her father has launched a new business, and her mother is expecting her fifth baby. Lanie has dreams of going to college and being a writer. Then tragedy strikes.

On a farm in western Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy’s fate will be the family’s greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive - and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.

Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”

Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.

A best-selling author of books for adults and children, Mark Childress pens his most outrageous work yet with Georgia Bottoms. The titular heroine is the epitome of the church-going Southern belle, except for one teeny-tiny aspect of her life. Georgia’s family inheritance has long since evaporated, and to maintain her genteel lifestyle, Miss Bottoms has taken six affluent lovers—the fly in the ointment being that one is a married preacher who’s about to reveal their infidelity to the whole congregation.

A consummate storyteller in the Southern tradition, Lee Smith tugs at her listeners' heartstrings with this haunting narrative that reads like a country ballad. Touching, funny, and sad, its down-to-earth characters are somehow familiar and endearing as they do their best to meet the demands of daily life.

Lee Smith, one of today's finest writers in the Southern literary tradition, has been compared to Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. This collection of nine stories, ranging from poignant ballads to delightfully inventive forms, showcases Smith's celebrated talent. The stories will make you chuckle and leave you with a satisfying sense that no matter how unruly or warped life may seem, equilibrium can be found after all.

Lee Smith, author of the acclaimed The Last Girls, delights with a tale of dry wit. Smith has won many prizes, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Academy Award in Literature.

Virginia native Lee Smith has won two O. Henry Awards, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for her engaging works. A collection of 14 tales - both new stories and previously published favorites - Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger is sure to delight listeners with its warm humor and unforgettable characters.

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.