Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H837
ISBN: 9780881462715
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $24.00
After a death at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque journey, he sweeps through society, revealing the highest and lowest in human nature and only slowly coming to self-understanding. He searches the points of the compass for what will help, groping for a place where he can feel content, certain that he has no place where he belongs and that he rides the rails through a great darkness. His difficult path to collect enough radiance to light his way home is the road of a boy struggling to come to terms with the cruel but sometimes lovely world of Depression-era America.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P467
ISBN: 9780881464467
Price: $18.00
After tragedy at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia, to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes.
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Product Code: P484
ISBN: 9780881464825
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
For five heart-churning days, the world turns its attention to tiny Pridemore, Missouri, where rescue teams work around the clock to free a mentally challenged man from a collapsed cave. That’s how Mayor Roe Tolliver envisions it, anyway. Weary of watching the town he’s led for more than forty years slide into economic oblivion, the mayor hatches a devious and dangerous plan. Get ready for a fast-paced romp filled with quirky characters, hilarious twists and turns, and a small town that just might get its fifteen minutes of fame.
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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: P528
ISBN: 9780881465716
Price: $17.00
Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life.
Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P529
ISBN: 9780881465723
Price: $18.00
Bill Merritt grew up in Atlanta, Georgia during the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War. A joyously unreconstructed Southerner, he looks on with amazement as Atlanta changes from a sleepy Southern town into the City Too Busy to Hate. This was the time of Martin Luther King and Ivan Allen, but also the time of Lester Maddox, the Temple Bombing, great moral certainties, Elvis, Klan rallies, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a corrupt political system keeping some of America’s finest statesmen in office (some since the Teddy Roosevelt administration), and a man named Armstrong walking on the moon.
Merritt’s family is eccentric and colorful, occasionally courageous, often self-centered. This is the story of the way the Civil Rights Revolution looked to Southerners: to decent people trying to honor their heritage while realizing the time had come to let go of parts of that heritage, and how difficult that letting go was made by the outsiders who most wanted change. This is the story the way Southerners remember it—and tell each other.
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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: 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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P443
ISBN: 9780881462722
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $15.00
Going Farther into the Woods than the Woods Go opens with the poet speaking from an interior landscape in which life is going too fast and he is lonely and isolated from himself and others. Life is brutal, and the speaker finds himself constantly questioning his self-worth, yet in a surrealistic, witty fashion perhaps best described as black humor.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H880
ISBN: 9780881464733
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $25.00
HALF OF WHAT I SAY IS MEANINGLESS is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti’s hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate home in North Carolina where he landed in 1976 as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. Though these essays are not queued chronologically, they form a seamless chronicle of contemplation on the indelible stamp of home, family, ancestry, and spirituality, regardless of locale.
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Product Code: P504
ISBN: 9780881465259
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
Good ole boy Dickie Frye vanishes from the Georgia hills and the urbane Fletcher Carlyle bursts onto the New York publishing scene, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But when a psychotic rampage lands Carlyle in Weatherhaven, eminent psychologist Anton Kohl finds himself talking to Dickie Frye. Kohl’s instincts tell him Frye is not lying—but what he says can’t possibly be true. A fallen priest comes out of Sumerian mythology, the love of Kohl’s life comes out of his past, and a chicken comes out of a posh apartment on Central Park West to meet his fate. Anton Kohl’s carefully constructed world is about to be deconstructed.One part fable and one part Southern yarn, Kiss of the Jewel Bird soars from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Manhattan, rewriting history and opening a window onto a wider, more magical world, where the path to destiny is anything but straight.
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