Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P454
ISBN: 9780881463972
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $22.00
This book establishes that Horton Foote’s characters and themes come from Wharton, Texas, a region influenced more by the Deep South than the cowboy tradition of West Texas. But these interviews also establish that such stories are not place-specific. They are universal stories about going away and the eternal search of emotional and spiritual homes. Foote’s stories are revealed as reflecting the dislocation, loneliness, racial tension, and gender and class divisions of the United States. But he explains that these topics are embedded in his plays and films, not part of a rhetorical approach to writing. He writes in the realist tradition. In every interview, Horton Foote demonstrates his kind, engaging, and sensitive view of life and art.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P707
ISBN: 9780881469448
Price: $20.00
Holly Haworth "trace[s] the moon through the traceless sky" in a meditation on time's cyclical nature and how it slips away--and on writing as a way of time-keeping, poetry a tool for etching memory. Mournful lament and exuberant praise, THE WAY THE MOON compels us to stop in our tracks and savor even the losses.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P679
ISBN: 9780881469073
Price: $20.00
Jackie K. Cooper has spent the last three decades of his life gathering his memories of growing up in the South. He has studied the various seasons of his life and having reached the winter season, he offers reflections on lessons learned, the people who have influenced him, the role of God's hand in his journey, and the good fortune with which he has been blessed.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P544
ISBN: 9780881466157
Price: $18.00
Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, THIS GLADDENING LIGHT offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes--doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy--all told at the level of the ground.
This much-anticipated nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of Northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P581
ISBN: 9780881467024
Price: $17.00
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P637
ISBN: 9780881468281
Price: $19.00
The characters in the story collection TOWER move through their lives with the sense that something is missing. When attempting to fill the void, they discover that the problem isn't what's missing, the problem invariably has to do with a truth they’ve been trying to avoid.
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Product Code: P501
ISBN: 9780881465204
Price: $18.00
William Wright’s eighth collection of poems is an expansive personal journey that includes poems about subjects as varied as a farm woman forsaken by her husband, yellow jackets, insomnia, a mountain witch, salt marshes, a ditch filled with rainwater, and even a post-apocalyptic portrait of the last person on Earth. Beginning with “Prologue,” a piece that embeds a kaleidoscopic, novel-like vision of a small agricultural town and a few of its inhabitants, these poems capture the exterior world and recontextualize its many forms through a dreamlike logic, harnessing radiant imagery and strong aural texture through lines and words that stir both mind and heart. Here, Wright reveals how the most luminous forms often dwell in even the darkest subjects and images.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P616
ISBN: 9780881467765
Price: $16.00
Born and raised in Ohio, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood moved to the South over two decades ago and has also lived and traveled in her mother's native country of Mexico. She writes about all of these places in her debut poetry collection, TROUBLE CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL AT THE BEGINNING, using their landscape and culture as a backdrop and a contrast to consider her identity and what it means to migrate from one location to another, how a place's values and societal expectations can shape who you are and who you become, and how you can be both a part of something and apart from it.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H986
ISBN: 9780881467420
Price: $35.00
UNDERSTANDING THE SHORT FICTION OF CARSON MCCULLERS uses diverse critical techniques to identify how McCullers's short fiction engages with the modern world and contemporary audiences. While McCullers's longer work has received significant critical attention, her short fiction has not received the same treatment. This collection adds to analyses of McCullers's better-known stories as well as considers those that have received little or no critical attention. McCullers's writing maintains lasting appeal because it captures both the joy and sadness of humanity, especially the meaning we draw from connections with others and the pain of isolation when we find it difficult to cultivate these relationships in modern culture.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H974
ISBN: 9780881467048
Price: $35.00
IN COLD BLOOD remains one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century, a study of crime and a polemic against capital punishment that is without peer. Truman Capote purportedly considered it the “first nonfiction novel,” ushering in the era of New Journalism, as defined by Tom Wolfe. It also was the catalyst for a century of crime reporting in America, and crime coverage is by definition popular, involving heightened dramatic conflict, human interest, and questions of morality. The study focuses upon the voices left out of IN COLD BLOOD, which Capote wrote during his whirlwind race to an imaginary finish line.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P690
ISBN: 9780881469219
Price: $20.00
Catherine Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it's there, in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts, that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the mountains, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P421
ISBN: 9780881462319
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
One of the most beloved books in American literature, Walden is must reading for any American or anyone interested in reading great literature. But for those who go there looking for reasons Thoreau became a recluse they are sure to
be disappointed. Instead, reading Walden is more of a journey to the self and how that self can live in the world.
This new edition has an insightful and lyrical essay introducing the text by Sam Pickering, the inspiration for the Dead Poets Society. His essay is the most provocative piece on Walden since E. B. White.
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