Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H864
ISBN: 9780881464269
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $25.00
Winner of the 2011 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction
Travel to Sequoyah, Georgia, to meet Early and Ivey Willingham. Early is a lifelong underachiever who occasionally smokes marijuana, drinks malt liquor, and watches the world go by. Ivey is a modern day prophet who sees dead relatives and angels in her sleep. Together they own Camp Redemption, a failing Bible camp in the North Georgia mountains.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P530
ISBN: 9780881465730
Price: $18.00
Margaret Norman lives in a family with secrets, not the least of which is her own. But what concerns Margaret more is that her family will not talk about her mother, “Weezie,” an artist who died shortly after Margaret was born. Her father, Jim Norman, a brooding attorney, is too obsessed with his own pain to share. Louisa, her older sister, is hostile toward Margaret and ignores her. Black housekeeper, Ida, who is helping to raise Margaret, does not think it her place to tell what others will not. And gentle great aunt, Maggie, did not know Margaret’s mother.
Set in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, CARDINAL HILL takes place in a world where blacks and whites, although separated by custom and law, often thrive in personal relationships; where half a world away, a war disrupts lives of those close to home; and where little girls suspect that kissing causes babies.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P548
ISBN: 9780881466232
Price: $17.00
Christian Bend isn’t the kind of place where one expects to find the sorts of secrets the widow Burdy Luttrell has been harboring. Tucked in the hills of East Tennessee, Christian Bend is a place of piercing beauty, where the rivers and love run constant. Burdy never could bring herself to tell Rain Hurd the truth about his father. She’d always meant to, but put it off until that day she was nearly killed in the shooting at Bean Station. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Rain left his job in Rhode Island and flew to Burdy’s bedside at that Knoxville hospital. That’s when Burdy told him about the letters.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P512
ISBN: 9780881465372
Price: $17.00
Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P612
ISBN: 9780881467574
Price: $18.00
Fifteen-year-old Lucas Webster doesn't mind working in the fields and chopping cotton on his grandparents' farm in South Georgia, but he hates getting stuck caring for his Uncle Robert who was born with Down Syndrome. After his grandpa dies in the spring of 1948, things change. His grandmother withdraws in her grief and Alvin Earl, Robert's half-brother, returns to manage the farm with his guns and stash of liquor. Despite Lucas's objections, Alvin Earl plans to pull him out of school to work on the farm full-time and send Robert to the state asylum.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P677
ISBN: 9780881469035
Price: $20.00
John Wesley O'Toole, the disbarred attorney-turned art dealer and protagonist of THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, returns to face another challenge when he is approached by a wealthy cryptocurrency trader wanting to invest heavily in quality works of art. A proposition that seems almost too good to be true turns deadly when the trader's body is discovered, and the digital code keys needed to retrieve his millions are missing.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P560
ISBN: 9780881466515
Price: $17.00
DIXIE LUCK features stories about hardy gamblers, look-on-the-bright-side salesmen, and other brands of optimistic Southerners. The stories are set in locales from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Atlantic Coast; each city or town seems to hold its own version of good fortune. The collection also includes the Faulkner Award-winning novella TERMINAL, a tale that finds a husband and wife reuniting in hopes of finding one final cash-out at the windows. The stories are literary--they study characters who try to stay honest and upbeat in the face of stacked odds.
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Product Code: H734
ISBN: 9780881460728
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $25.00
Down Town is the panoramic story of the American South, carefully observed and skillfully recounted by a native son. Through the characters of “our town,” we gain new perspectives on the historical events that have shaped our country since 1865 - Reconstruction, the first World War, the Depression, World War II, racial integration, land speculation and economic boom.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P563
ISBN: 9780881466546
Price: $17.00
Easter weekend in Macon, Georgia: Connie Hotlzclaw is a good-hearted ex-boxer and small-time loser who can't keep out of trouble. He dreams of carrying his girlfriend, Rita Estes, a pretty Waffle House waitress, away to a ranch in Montana and a new start, away from the hamburger grease and petty hoods. His brother, Carl, though, has other ideas. He wants a big score, and he convinces pliable Connie to join in a kidnapping--an easy mark, a sure thing, a rich local college kid whose mother, of course, will do anything to get him back. All goes well, the boy's mother waits in a nearby hotel with the ransom money, and for a moment it seems Connie may get his dream of Rita and a Montana ranch.
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Product Code: HH1034
ISBN: 9780881468854
Price: $45.00
Timothy H. Scherman re-introduces modern readers to a nineteenth-century woman writer and political activist whose disappearance from literary history would seem impossible in light of the volume of her published writing and the visceral responses she elicited from readers in her own day. Collecting samples of her work in every genre--personal letters, short fiction, essays, lectures, editorial, memoir, excerpts from several novels and one of her plays--Scherman captures the full creative range of one of the earliest woman professionals in the literary field in three conveniently arranged volumes.
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Product Code: P445
ISBN: 9780881462746
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Few people know that Ralph Waldo Emerson had a mentally challenged brother. Now, in a deeply moving novel in letters, noted writer Philip Lee Williams imagines the last year of this brother's sad but transcendent life as he lives with a farm family in Massachusetts. Emerson's Brother shows how this brother, Bulkeley, deals in his own way with many of the themes Waldo did, including nature, self-reliance, and love.
Writing letters to his brother and friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Bulkeley Emerson aches with the need to express himself, trapped as he is in the prison of his own genetics. Though Bulkeley's journey toward the end of his life can be agonizing and filled with unfilled longing, there is a quiet acceptance, too, as he nears his time to become part of nature itself.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H982
ISBN: 9780881467369
Price: $25.00
Lucy McKay, a high school English teacher from Mississippi, is estranged from her divorced parents. Her father, Pratt McKay, is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her mother a professor of art history at Duke. Pratt, who is ill with multiple sclerosis, invites Lucy to spend her summer vacation with him at his second home, which is in an expensive gated community 250 miles west of Chapel Hill in the Great Smoky Mountains. The visit begins with difficulty for Lucy, who is 35, also divorced, and unhappy. She and her father have trouble talking about his progressing illness. Told in a double-journal form by Lucy and her father, this is a story of love's cost and necessity.
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