Describes the plantations that existed in the southern United States into the nineteenth century, examining what life was like for the owners of these large farming communities, their children, and the slaves.

A collection of ten short stories by the Southern author Flannery O'Connor.

"An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America"--

"There?s nothing quite like family?for good or bad. But in a world where we sometimes know more about the Kardashians than we do the people sleeping right down the hall, it?s easy to forget that walking through life with our family offers all sorts of joy wrapped up in the seemingly mundane. There?s even a little bit of sacred sitting smack-dab in the middle of the ordinary. And since time?s-a-wastin?, we need to be careful that we don?t take our...

"A fiercely funny collection of essays on marriage and manners, thank you notes and three-ways, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the Calgon-scented, onion-dipped, monogrammed art of living as a Southern Lady" --

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

"One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked. Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and...