Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how literary variations have manifested themselves in a given state. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent across the South has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission. “TRP has for years now published an annual collection of poetry from each of our Southern states, and these anthologies have done very well for us, both inside and outside university classrooms. We welcome this new series on Southern nonfiction and look forward to visiting these fine essayists, state by state.”—Paul Ruffin, Director, Texas Review Press
The pieces in this collection range in setting from the small towns of New England to the deserts of the Southwest. Grounded in personal experience these essays ask through narrative what it means to be a rebel girl, a rebel teenager, and a rebel woman in a world that seems to offer no real alternative to traditional roles. Infused with lyrical and figurative language, this collection combines the swiftness of the prose poem with the power of the personal essay resulting in writing that pulls the ground out from under the reader again and again. The collection is organized chronologically in a way that charts the development of a woman as she attempts to adapt to the world around her through stories of love, heartbreak, and adventure. The essays travel with the narrator from a summer camp in Maine, to opal mining in Nevada, to the story of a deadly thunderstorm in Vermont, to hunting for ginseng, asking the questions about belonging, expectation and, ultimately, if there is a chance for real happiness.
Best Creative Nonfiction of the South serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. This North Carolina volume, second in the series, contains essays that celebrate and document the Tar Heel state’s diverse cultures and geography, from the mountains to the sea. The writers included here come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions, and as with most volumes in the series, this one indirectly reflects literary changes within the region over time. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent in the state has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission.
Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby’s debut novel My Darkest Prayer is republished in a new edition, with a new introduction from the author. “S.A. Cosby’s reissued debut thriller proves he was a master from the start...Cosby has in three books emerged as one of the genre’s best living practitioners...its reissue is a brilliant idea.” —Los Angeles Times “I handle the bodies.” Whether it's working at his cousin's funeral home or tossing around the local riffraff at his favorite bar, Nathan Waymaker is a man who knows how to handle the bodies. A former marine and sheriff's deputy, Nathan has built a reputation in his small Southern town as a man who can help when all other avenues have been exhausted. When a beloved local minister is found dead, his parishioners ask Nathan to make sure the death isn’t swept under the rug. What starts out as an easy payday soon descends into a maze of mayhem filled with wannabe gangsters, vicious crime lords, porn stars, crooked police officers, and a particularly treacherous preacher and his mysterious wife. Nathan must use all his varied skills and some of his wit to navigate the murky waters of small town corruption even as dark secrets of his own threaten to come to the surface. “[A] colorful tale of small-town corruption...[Cosby's] powerful storytelling skills shine through.” —Washington Post
This informal book traces the evolution of literary nonfiction and reveals how Gay Talese writes in the genre. In addition, articles by such masters as John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Dillard illustrate various writing techniques.
"I know of no other book exactly like this one, yet it is part of a tradition. One thinks of the best work of John McPhee, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard. The writing is at once eloquent, elegant, and evocative. In short, it is a beautifully written work: a genuine pleasure to read, and to re-read." -George Garrett "Casey Clabough's unique vision, his curious and important quest, his personable and earnest manner of expression draw us into his world just that engagingly. His world is our world, too, the trace our ancestors followed into the wilderness to transform a landscape into a nation. History, memoir, travel journal, meditation--The Warrior's Path is all these things at once, its firm understanding of the past made lyric with lively language. This is a volume to keep close at hand when doubts about our American destiny begin to assail. Solid, durable, and--entrancing." --Fred Chappell "This account draws us deep into an intimacy with our geography and culture, with all the triumphs, failures, and contradictions we are heir to." -Robert Morgan, author of Brave Enemies and Boone: A Biography One of North America's oldest and most storied routes, "the Warrior's Path," as it was known by the Iroquois, was formed centuries ago by migrating animals and the humans who followed them. It spanned from the Iroquois lands of what is today New York State down the Appalachian Valley system and into the Cherokee country of Tennessee and North Georgia. Casey Clabough recently set out to hike more than five hundred miles of the route from Maryland to Tennessee and, in the process, to connect history, culture, and nature to the story of his own colonial German ancestors who traversed that particular section en route to the Smoky Mountains at the close of the 1700s. The Warrior's Path is both the story of Clabough's journey and a philosophical meditation upon the extraordinary people and events that have populated the thoroughfare over the course of several centuries. Rich in energy and lore, Clabough deftly employs both his ancestors' journey and his own as springboards for understanding the path's and the region's centrality in the American experience. As he contemplates the past, Clabough conjures and evokes countless historical images: from sketches of the grand French-Indian and Revolutionary struggles to the hardscrabble circumstances of his own Appalachian ancestors. At once richly philosophical, minutely historical, and highly personal, the book invites the reader to accompany Clabough on his journey as he recounts a contemplative, provocative, and at times harrowing, experience that is sure to delight and fascinate readers. Casey Clabough is Associate Professor of English and English Graduate Coordinator at Lynchburg College in Virginia. He also serves as literature editor for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities' Encyclopedia Virginia. The author of scholarly books on James Dickey and Fred Chappell, his work has appeared in Callaloo, Contemporary Literature, Shenandoah, The Hollins Critic, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
An extraordinary, literary memoir from a gay white South African, coming of age at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s. Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary--and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend whose uncle led a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare at barbecues and abused Glen's sister in an antique-filled, tobacco-scented living room. But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings, earn interest on their deposits, and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. Retief writes movingly of the complicated emotions and politics in this punitive all-male world, and of how he navigated them, even as he began to realize that his sexuality was different than his peers'.
"Examines both the roots and the resonance of Neema Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, and gun culture"--
From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Sophie’s Choice: three novellas of a young writer’s journey to adulthood. In Love Day, twenty-year-old Paul Whitehurst is a Marine lieutenant during World War II, waiting to land on Okinawa, wrestling with anxiety and memories of his boyhood in Virginia. In Shadrach, ten-year-old Paul witnesses his neighbors as they welcome a guest: a ninety-nine-year-old former slave who has walked nine hundred miles from Alabama so that he may die on the land of his childhood owner. And in A Tidewater Morning, Paul is thirteen and struggling to deal with his mother’s impending death from cancer. Together in one volume, each of these affecting semiautobiographical novellas from the author of such literary classics as the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the memoir Darkness Visible, weaves together the transformative experiences of Whitehurst’s early life with William Styron’s signature deep historical insight, underscoring how the significance of the past informs the present. As the Los Angeles Times notes, it is “one of Styron’s finest works. . . . The beauty and humanity of the Southern tradition are evoked vividly.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.
