Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P480
ISBN: 9780881464702
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen- month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction.
His new volume of poems, CONCERTINA, recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gang, the other venturing beyond the manacles of history into a realm of second chances, while the country, in the throes of its bicentennial celebration, still swoons from Watergate and its aftermath.
What’s more, CONCERTINA, is an outsider’s meditation on the American South and the power of place to transform not only language, but to instill in the speaker the impulse to tell the story of everything his eye lights upon. Indeed, Bathanti’s world is as much about the geography, the very ether, of North Carolina, as it is about prisons. His voice is contemplative, poised on a tightrope of its own making, pitched near detonation.
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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: 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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Product Code: H885
ISBN: 9780881464788
Price: $29.00
Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn’t change over the course of his long career.
Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree.
What hasn’t been done before, however, and what SEARCHING FOR EDEN undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck’s literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck’s life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.
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Product Code: H896
ISBN: 9780881464917
Price: $24.00
Perhaps it was a sense of estrangement from the everyday that drew Cynthia Sorrel to the village of Cooper Patent. The failed painter was lured by the gatehouse with its seven doors, the lake with its tower, and the magical air of a place that couldn't quite decide whether it was fictional, mythic, or real. The gatehouse should have been a first clue that she was on a journey, and soon she begins to glimpse and then to pursue a figure in the woods near her house, convinced she has seen the Muse.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H886
ISBN: 9780881464931
Price: $29.00
Filled with colorful details and rich with photographs of the author's life, It Is Written is a beautifully written page-turner about how one person turns the raw materials of life into art.
Over a thirty-year career as a published author of fiction, poetry, and essays, Philip Lee Williams has become one of the South's most-honored writers. Now, Williams tells the story of his creative life in an open, jaunty, and often hilarious autobiography.
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Product Code: P491
ISBN: 9780881464962
Price: $18.00
In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." A prefatory poem, "To Readers," uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry. Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.
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Product Code: H888
ISBN: 9780881464818
Price: $26.00
When he arrives on Neal's Island to begin ten days of intensive group therapy to treat his obsession for a woman he cannot forget, he brings with him the pseudonym of Bloodworth.
Vastly different as individuals, yet suffering the same crippling malady of obsession, five men are not prepared for the antics of Dr. Carson X. Willingham. He is maverick and madman, a brilliant investigator of his subjects, a mesmerizing performer, and either a genius or a charlatan with a rare gift of persuasion. Willingham is also a man with his own demons, caused by his own history of obsession.
It is in this environment that Bloodworth finds himself faced with the delicate question of honesty as he tries to free the memory of his Kalee, and begin his new journey into the uncertainty of what might be.
This book also available in e-book format through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
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Product Code: H891
ISBN: 9780881465020
Price: $35.00
John Updike once wrote that many of his works are "illustrations of Kierkegaard," and yet no current study provides an extended, convincing reason why this is so, why Updike came to live by Søren Kierkegaard's ideas. This study does, telling the story of Updike's life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career, and tracing the subsequent evolution of Updike's complex and coherent theology.
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Product Code: P493
ISBN: 9780881465013
Price: $15.00
Blessed with an innate optimism and a magical childhood, Elisabeth Belle Sterling discovers that the path to happily-ever-after love is not as easily obtained as she had always imagined.
The Camelot-like love she longs for seems like only a dream until she meets the handsome Kincaid Patterson, a West Point graduate who carries a dark secret from his past.
Theirs is a passionate and unconditional love that has to confront a painful past, heart-searing separation, and the greatest of all tragedies. But the biggest obstacle is the loss of faith that threatens to undermine all that they have.
Set in the South during the 1960s and 70s against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Save My Place is a beautifully written love story of two people who search deep within their souls to save each other.
This book also available in e-book format through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
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Product Code: H892
ISBN: 9780881465051
Price: $35.00
For more than seventy years, beginning in 1939, when he penned his first play, Wharton Dance, Horton Foote was regarded as one of America’s most revered dramatists. With his probing and perceptive dramas, he succeeded in charting the landscape of small-town America while creating classics of modern theatre and film that have found devoted audiences around the world. Foote wrote more than a hundred plays and screenplays for cinema, theatre, and television, and was equally successful in all three mediums--a record of variety and productivity unmatched by any other writer.
With a foreword by Hallie Foote, this biography is the most thorough and comprehensive to date of American dramatist Horton Foote. Drawing on the author's complete access to Foote's personal papers and extended conversations with the writer, his family, and his friends, Marion Castleberry discusses all the important aspects of Horton Foote's life and career--his Wharton, Texas childhood, his devotion to family, his deep Christian faith, his abiding passion for the theatre, and his successes as a screenwriter and independent filmmaker.
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Product Code: P495
ISBN: 9780881465075
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
Rodney Earwood and Palmer Cray had been best friends for as long as either could remember. They were brothers in all but the genetic sense, each born late in the lives of good women who had given up on the dream of motherhood by the time their respective miracles occurred.
They wandered the hills of North Georgia, hunted the pine woods, fished the cool, green streams, and camped under the stars. They shared each other's clothing, each other's families, and each other's homes. They grew into tall young men, and on a hot May afternoon right after they turned eighteen, they both graduated from Sweetwater High School, numbers seven and eight in the crooked, sweaty line that held a class of thirty of Sweetwater's finest.
Shortly thereafter, Rodney and Palmer flew a Camaro into a tree, Palmer flew into a haystack, Rodney flew into the great beyond, and nothing in Sweetwater was ever the same again.
This book also available in e-book format through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
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