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: 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: P583
ISBN: 9780881467062
Price: $30.00
THE INCARNATIONAL ART OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR argues that O’Connor designed a unique asthetic to defy the Gnostic dualisms that characterize American intellectual and spiritual life. Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d’art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O’Connor’s fiction actively resists romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O’Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H975
ISBN: 9780881467086
Price: $29.00
SYMBOL AND EXISTENCE will prove fascinating to Walker Percy scholars and fans who wish to decipher Percy’s authentic philosophical stance. Percy, an existentialist Catholic at his core, was also a scientist seeking an objective paradigm to portray his views. SYMBOL AND EXISTENCE demonstrates that Percy was quite methodical and logical in his thought and provides an entirely new perspective on his scholarship. Much of this book is unique and has never been published before; however, some sections were revised and published as isolated journal articles or book chapters, never presented as the unified whole that Percy intended. The orderly unity of Percy’s work has not previously been accessible to scholars and fans.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P587
ISBN: 9780881467130
Price: $18.00
John Wesley O'Toole, a disbarred former attorney, is trying to make a new start in life as an art dealer in Savannah, Georgia, after his release from prison. He is struggling financially when he is approached by a prominent wealthy businessman and offered a significant sum to help recover a painting that’s been stolen by the man's estranged granddaughter, Lucy. It’s an offer O'Toole can’t afford to refuse, and seemingly his one chance to avoid losing everything he’s worked for. With the help of Jenna, O'Toole’s friend and sometimes lover, he sets out to find the missing painting, and with it, the missing granddaughter.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P590
ISBN: 9780881467215
Price: $16.00
On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P600
ISBN: 9780881467345
Price: $20.00
In WEATHERING: POEMS AND RECOLLECTIONS an aging poet greets a "phalanx" of memories and finds himself amid "an epic transmigration of echoes." At the heart of this collection of poetry and prose are three retrospective essays that narrate the adolescent poet's coming of age through encounters with such eminent elders as James Dickey, who was Havird's early mentor, Robert Lowell, and Archibald MacLeish. These prose memoirs also explore this poet's ambivalent relation to his native South and reveal the emergent cosmopolitan stance of his mature poetry.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P601
ISBN: 9780881467352
Price: $16.00
In his third book of poetry, William Woolfitt reflects on experiences of hope and despair, on ecological crisis and violence and stubborn survival, on Lucille Clifton's imperative to "bloom how you must" and on Gerard Manley Hopkins' vision of a grandeur-charged world. Set in Appalachia, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Newfoundland, Mali, and elsewhere, SPRING UP EVERLASTING attempts to listen to and learn from the stories of people who have resisted the destruction and desecration of their environments, families, homes, and bodies.
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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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H988
ISBN: 9780881467376
Price: $25.00
First cousins Ellison Winfield and Adeline Green are meant to grow up happily and innocently across the street from one another amid the supposed wholesome values of small-town Green Branch, South Carolina, in the 1960s and 70s. But Eli's tragic accident changes the trajectory of their lives and of those connected to them. In this compelling coming of age story, culture, family, friends, bullies, and lovers propel two young people to unite to guard each other in a world where love, hope, and connectedness ultimately triumph.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H984
ISBN: 9780881467406
Price: $35.00
Flannery O'Connor is unique in that she is not only familiar with seventeenth-century emblematic representations of scriptural truth, but she is also knowledgeable of the conventions of twentieth-century art forms. Her characters are illuminated by textual images formulated from the juxtaposition of scripture, seventeenth- and twentieth-century archetypes, and street detritus that inhabits pictorial sequences exceeding the boundaries of time and diachronically upending O'Connor's narrative world.
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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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