Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P514
ISBN: 9780881465396
Price: $15.00
Sequel to the award-winning MOTHER OF RAIN.
When it is a healing they need, the people at Christian Bend, Tennessee, turn to one woman—Burdy Luttrell.
Melungeon by birth, Burdy learned the therapeutic properties of roots from the women in her family. When Burdy discovers that Lincoln Memorial University is hosting a class on healing roots, she persuades her friend, Mayne, to drive her up. The two women make a fateful stop at Laidlow Pharmacy at Bean Station where an armed gunman executes three people and critically injures another.
Burdy—the woman able to cure others—is now fighting for her life at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.
Karen Spears Zacharias has crafted a mesmerizing novel of tragedy and transformation, a beautiful rendering of fact and fiction, and a tenderhearted narrative of survivors and the battles they face.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P517
ISBN: 9780881465464
Price: $18.00
Based on the writings of renowned British actress, Fanny Kemble, and her life in 19th-century England and the American South.
THE POISONED TABLE portrays a passionate rivalry between fictional actress Isabel Graves and real-life Shakespearian stage sensation Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble.
In this tale of ambition, romance, and betrayal, Graves harbors early resentment, convinced that Kemble’s family theatre connections assured Fanny’s selection for the lead role in Romeo and Juliet despite Isabel’s superior beauty and talent. The novel traces their unconnected adventures and acting careers in the Old and New Worlds, as well as their introduction to the horrors of American slavery and to romance with one of the wealthiest men in America, Pierce Butler, owner of Georgia cotton and rice plantations and master of more than 800 slaves.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P521
ISBN: 9780881465501
Price: $16.00
FIREFLIES is a collection of lyric poems—formal and informal— that seek solace in nature and memory for the heartache of being human.
From children chasing fireflies at night to middle agers chasing lost loves at three in the morning, they trace the compromises we make to make it—the dead mice, cats, fetuses, and loves left in our wakes. And they celebrate the tenuous survival of trees, love, and innocence.
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Product Code: P511
ISBN: 9780881465532
Price: $16.00
In spring 1962, a young black girl named Etta Hemsley is killed at a civil rights demonstration on a university campus in Atlanta. The next day, the home of Jovita Curry, a black woman in Overton, Georgia, is burned.
Both events are etched into the memory of Cole Bishop and eerily play out the predictions of a former classmate named Marie Fitzpatrick. Both Cole and Marie are high school seniors when they first meet in fall 1954. Cole, like his classmates, is a native-born Southerner influenced by the traditions of segregation as a way of life. Marie is a recent transplant from Washington, DC, a brilliant and assertive nonconformist with bold predictions about a new world that is about to be ushered in by the force of desegregation. Included in her prophecy is a warning for Cole that will cause him to leave the South to live and teach in Vermont. The odd friendship between the two of them continues after high school in a series of tender and revealing letters.
THE BOOK OF MARIE is the story of a generation—whites and blacks—who ignited the war of change. Yet, it is also as much about the power of place— the finding of home—as it is about the history of events.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P526
ISBN: 9780881465655
Price: $18.00
Novelist Raymond L. Atkins offers a lighthearted change of pace in this collection of humorous essays. He explores a diverse range of topics as seen from the porch of his home on the southern bank of the mighty Etowah River in northern Georgia.
From this lofty height he holds forth on holidays, parenthood, cars, home ownership, aging, travel, medicine, technology, ballet, movies, marriage, Shakespeare, dogs, cats, music, swimming pools, vintage television, nicknames, amusement parks, restaurants, school projects, language, computers, hair, bad jobs, William Faulkner, weddings, advertising, Broadway plays, yard work, hospitals, cooking, Elvis Presley, moving, money, art, college, dinner theater, and a variety of other subjects.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P527
ISBN: 9780881465679
Price: $20.00
In her second book of essays, Kathy Bradley continues her examination of the natural world as a prism through which to understand the human experience. With her family farm in the coastal plains of South Georgia serving as the anchor, Bradley uses her observations of animal life, agriculture, and the seasons to create what others have called parables, but what she calls “a map key or decoder ring” for some of the dilemmas of twenty-first-century life.
The chronological stories, four years’ worth of tales that began life as newspaper columns, are inhabited by wild and unpredictable animals, civilized and unpredictable people, moons and cornfields, tides and floods and droughts—each described in sensory detail, each a metaphor rich in meaning. Bradley invites readers along on her wanderings in order that they might find their own meaning in the recounting of commonplace events and the lives of ordinary people.
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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: H852
ISBN: 9780881463880
Price: $29.00
Author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams argues that a lack of connection to the land is the direct result of our failure to care intimately about one another. From PIECES OF WHITE SHELL: A JOURNEY TO NAVAJOLAND (1984) to WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS: FIFTY-FOUR VARIATIONS ON VOICE (2012), her writing is born in the red-hot fires of contradiction. A Mormon and a believer in the power of women, an activist and a solitary writer, a student of science and a woman of faith, Williams celebrates paradox and lives both on the page and in the world.
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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: P535
ISBN: 9780881465846
Price: $17.00
Imagine the relationship triangle from “East of Eden” and set it deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Add a couple of ghosts, a good measure of dysfunction, and a whole lot of twists and turns, and you have Ann Hite’s new Black Mountain novel, SLEEPING ABOVE CHAO. Hite’s fourth novel returns to Swannanoa Gap, a small town at the foot of Black Mountain, and introduces new characters while revisiting some favorites from her previous novels.
The reader will travel to a ranch in Montana, to Pearl Harbor, and to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, while watching the cast of characters struggle through World War II, emerging into adulthoods which would weigh heavy on anyone’s shoulders. The story ends as the Civil Rights Movement ignites.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P539
ISBN: 9780881465952
Price: $16.00
In 1915 Grassy Glade, Florida, just across the bay from Panama City, Annie Laura’s birth daughter, Viola Lee has a good life.
But things begin to unravel when her fiancé, James, does not return from his lumber camp deep in the piney woods of North Florida. A stranger interrupts Viola Lee’s long-awaited and much hoped for reunion with Annie Laura, revealing a secret that could threaten Viola Lee’s happily ever after.
Milinda Jay has created a vivid cast of characters in this story of tragic family secrets, love, longing, redemption, and ultimate triumph.
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