One thing is always true about Southerners: we are wildly passionate. Whether it's a favorite college town, restaurant,or beach (and the list goes on!), Southerners love to celebrate the people and places they love. This special collector's issue from the editors of Southern Living is a reminder of the spectacular sights, inspiring people, and cultural institutions that define our region. In Best of the South, we share the best-kept secrets and classic charms of forever favorites like Charleston, Asheville, Savannah, and more. We spotlight our round-ups of the South's best beaches, seafood joints, and scenic drives, to name a few. From cover to cover, this issue is filled with even more reasons to love the South.
A collection of Southern literature features twenty stories written from 1996 to 2005 by both famous and first-time writers, including Lee Smith, Max Steele, Gregory Sanders, Stephanie Soileau, and many more, accompanied by incisive introductions by editor Anne Tyler. Original.
“The one food book you must read this year." —Southern Living One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock. Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.
2018 NBBQA Awards of Excellence Winner In The South's Best Butts, food writer and Southern gentleman, Matt Moore, waves away clouds of smoke to give barbecue-lovers a sneak peek into the kitchens and smokehouses of a handful of the Barbecue Belt's most revered pitmasters. He uncovers their tried-and-true techniques gleaned over hours, days, and years toiling by fire and spit, coaxing meltingly tender perfection from the humble pig—the foundation of Southern BBQ. More than a book of recipes, Matt explores how the marriage of meat, cooking method, and sauce varies from place to place based on history and culture, climate, available ingredients and wood, and always the closely-guarded, passed-down secrets followed like scripture. Because no meat plate is complete in the South without "all the fixin's" to round out the meal, Matt cues up patron-sanctioned recipes from every establishment he visits. One thing is for certain…this book will change the way you cook, smoke, grill, and eat, but be warned: Your own butt may suffer in the process.
C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights fight. During the 1960s, as the country struggled with the explosive issue of race, Atwater and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion. In an amazing set of transformations, however, each of them came to see how the other had been exploited by the South's rigid power structure, and they forged a friendship that flourished against a backdrop of unrelenting bigotry. Rich with details about the rhythms of daily life in the mid-twentieth-century South, The Best of Enemies offers a vivid portrait of a relationship that defied all odds. By placing this very personal story into broader context, Osha Gray Davidson demonstrates that race is intimately tied to issues of class, and that cooperation is possible--even in the most divisive situations--when people begin to listen to one another.
A highly acclaimed novel from the author of Brooklyn and an “immensely gifted and accomplished writer” (The Washington Post), about an Irishwoman who creates a new life in post-war Spain. In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew. The South is a novel of classic themes—of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom—to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.
The first volume of a collection of short stories by Sean Dietrich, a writer, humorist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.
From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.
