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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Edited by: Susan Cushman Foreword by: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P542
ISBN: 9780881466126
Price: $18.00
A SECOND BLOOMING is a collection of essays by twenty-one authors who are emerging from the chrysalis they built for their younger selves and transforming into the women they are meant to be. They are not all elders, but all have embraced the second half of their lives with a generative spirit.
These women of all ages have made it over a wall to find their true selves. As Agatha Christie says of the second blooming, “…a whole new life has opened before you…. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P544
ISBN: 9780881466157
Price: $18.00
Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, THIS GLADDENING LIGHT offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes--doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy--all told at the level of the ground.
This much-anticipated nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of Northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H934
ISBN: 9780881466171
Price: $25.00
STARTLED AT THE BIG SOUND: ESSAYS PERSONAL, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL is the first prose collection by Stephen Corey, a widely published poet (with ten collections in all) and one of the country’s most highly regarded literary editors, who cofounded The Devil’s Millhopper in 1977 and has worked with The Georgia Review since 1983. These essays, written across three decades, variously describe, analyze, and meditate upon his concurrent lives as family member, publishing writer, editor for a major literary journal, and cultural-political observer of the broader world within which he has lived while experiencing his smaller realms.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H935
ISBN: 9780881466188
Price: $26.00
A MAN'S WORLD is a collection of 20 profiles of fascinating men by author and magazine writer Steve Oney. Written over a 40-year period for publications including Esquire, Premiere, GQ, Time, Los Angeles, and The Atlanta Journal & Constitution Magazine, the stories bring to life the famous (Harrison Ford), the brilliant (Robert Penn Warren), the tortured (Gregg Allman), and the unknown (Chris Leon, a 20-year-old Marine Corps corporal killed in the Iraq war). Several of the articles are prize winners. “The Talented Mr. Raywood” won the City and Regional Magazine Association Award for best profile in an American city magazine. “Herschel Walker Doesn’t Tap Out” won the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award for best magazine sports story. “Hollywood Fixer” won the Los Angeles Press Club Award for best magazine profile. “The Casualty of War” was a finalist for Columbia University’s National Magazine Award.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P553
ISBN: 9780881466386
Price: $20.00
Michael McFee’s new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” All of us have appointed rounds in our lives--essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays--many of them pointed, a page or so, addresses McFee’s appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H951
ISBN: 9780881466577
Price: $28.00
"When the bullets start flying, I hope the first one gets you." The man in the crosshairs was the author's father. It was an era of seismic social change in the American South. Four decades later, his son visited the National September 11 Museum. In a young firefighter's heroism on 9/11, the author glimpsed a truth about his father's lifelong devotion to duty, law, and justice. So he sat down and began writing him letters. THE BURDENS OF AENEAS is that series of letters--a fascinating collection of wide-ranging essays, invented conversations, reminiscences, interior monologues, and vivid descriptions of life in a vanishing America. Part memoir, part extended reflection on paternal duty and love, it breaks new ground in blending deeply personal writing with scholarly meditation on a masterwork of world literature, Virgil's AENEID.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P558
ISBN: 9780881466485
Price: $20.00
Founded in fieldwork and reflection, LOST PLACES follows the author from small towns and rural landscapes, through a transitional city neighborhood, to the challenging construction of an urban renewal loft, as she struggles to renovate living spaces and transform relationships after an early divorce. In a voice droll and lyrical by turns, Hankla charts a path through enigmatic encounters with snakes and contemplations of Thomas Jefferson's problematic biography homes, underground and ancient cities, Star Trek, the contradictory nature of Appalachia, desire, our families, spiritual callings, and definitions of home.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P565
ISBN: 9780881466560
Price: $25.00
To celebrate baseball and sing the national anthem for more than 100 minor league baseball games during a single summer, Joe Price drove more than 25,000 miles through forty states. Accompanied on the zig-zagging, cross-continental trek in an RV by his wife who had not been a baseball fan, he often shared games and baseball stories with relatives and friends along the way. Throughout the journey he experienced how baseball brings people together. Grounded in their respective communities, each ballpark reflected specific products, habits, and values associated with its location, and often evoked and formed distinct baseball memories and stories.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P568
ISBN: 9780881466607
Price: $24.00
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2016 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the ninth annual conference sponsored by Mercer University's Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America's Founding Principles. 1776 was a momentous year. Contributors include W.B. Allen, Jane E. Calvert, Adam Potkay, Dennis C. Rasmussen, James H. Read, Diana Schaub, Scott Philip Segrest, and Brian Steele.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P569
ISBN: 9780881466652
Price: $18.00
PARADE'S END is a collection of familiar essays. The author is a meanderer, and PARADE'S END celebrates the passing drift of days and the quiet miracles of living. Trees bud, snow falls, and Christmas blooms green and red with joy and happiness. As Time passes, acquaintances vanish.
In these essays the author cruises the Adriatic and the Caribbean, he summers on a farm in Nova Scotia, receives an honorary degree in Tennessee, and roams the fields and woods of Eastern Connecticut. During his travels he meets many improbable people, most of whom exist. However, he follows the advice of Oscar Wilde and does not degrade truth into facts.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H973
ISBN: 9780881466980
Price: $27.00
TALES FROM GEORGIA'S GNAT LINE is about the South--the Deep South; Larry Walker’s part of the world. It’s about good people, and some not so good. It’s about a part of the United States that was, and is, somewhat different from the rest. And it’s about cotton, because in many ways cotton caused Southerners to do some of the things that otherwise good people would not have done. It’s never been easy to be a Southerner, black or white. This book is about the South of the past, the present, and, if read carefully, of the future.
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