A sublime and seductive reading experience. This portrait of a beguiling Southern city was a best-seller (though a flop as a movie). ~ Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt interweaves a first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.

The story is peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproarious black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

After working for Time magazine in London, Wendell Steavenson spent two years in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Stories I Stole captures the exuberance of a fledgling nation of local despots, mountain tribes, blood feuds, and an unlimited flow of red wine. From President Shevardnadze's rigged elections to horse races high in the mountains; from the eerie roadside artifacts of the Soviet era to the farcical power outages in the dead of winter, here is Georgia: weird, invigorating, and still coming to grips with the legacy of its most famous son, Joseph Stalin.Far more than a travel book, this is a scintillating menagerie of true stories peopled by vivid -- and sometimes insane -- characters. In the beach resort of Sukhumi, once the destination of every fashionable Russian but now wrecked by civil war, Wendell plays hangman with a secret policeman. In the capital, Tbilisi -- ensconced in Levan's Magic Room or lounging in the steam baths -- she hears about the latest duel or kidnapping. In Khevsureti, the meadows are dotted with blue-painted beehives and yellow flowers, while just over the border there is war in Chechnya. Stories I Stole is a candid, engaging, and quietly lyrical book about a land and its people.

Stories I Stole from Georgia

Tony Anderson set out in the summer of 1998 to walk through Georgia. He wanted particularly to visit the Georgian mountain tribes - Tush, Khevsurs, Ratchuelians and Svans - to discover if they shared a common mountain culture, and to test the old idea of the Caucasus as an impenetrable barrier from sea to sea. From Azerbaijan to Svaneti, Anderson found communities where the old customs and beliefs still triumphantly survive, despite years of Communist oppression and the terrible uncertainties since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Throughout his journey Anderson refers back to many other visits to Georgia, to the politics of independence, to the war in Abkhazia and Ossetia, to the civil war and Shevardnadze's accession to power, to the history of these people at one of the great crossroads of the world. It remains an abiding mystery that Georgia has managed to survive at all, devastated time and again by the vagabond hordes from the steppes and torn between the mighty empires that struggled over it. But survive it has with a vibrant culture still intact and, in the mountains, still deeply connected to its ancient ways.

Bread And Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia

The author of the acclaimed Azerbaijan Diary and Chechnya Diary now recounts his experiences in the strife-ridden Republic of Georgia. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia fell prey to a series of power struggles, rampant crime and corruption, secessionist wars, and the spillover of the war in neighboring Chechenya. Journalist Goltz traces these developments with the same kind of vivid, personal narrative that made his previous books so compelling. This fast-paced, first-person account is filled with fascinating details about the ongoing struggles of this little-known region of the former Soviet Union. Featuring memorable portraits of individuals in high places and low, it traces the story from 1992 through the Rose Revolution, the resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze, and the new presidency of U.S.-educated Mikhail Saakashvili.

Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

The brief war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 seemed to many like an unexpected shot out of the blue that was gone as quickly as it came. Former Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Ronald Asmus contends that it was a conflict that was prepared and planned for some time by Moscow, part of a broader strategy to send a message to the United States: that Russia is going to flex its muscle in the twenty-first century. "A Little War that Shook the World "is a fascinating look at the breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, the decay and decline of the Western Alliance itself, and the fate of Eastern Europe in a time of economic crisis.

A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia and the Future of the West

In 2011 when Alice Feiring first arrived in Georgia, she felt as if she’d emerged from the magic wardrobe into a world filled with mythical characters making exotic and delicious wine with the low-tech methods of centuries past. She was smitten, and she wasn’t alone. This country on the Black Sea has an unusual effect on people; the most passionate rip off their clothes and drink wines out of horns while the cold-hearted well up with tears and make emotional toasts. Visiting winemakers fall under Georgia’s spell and bring home qvevris (clay fermentation vessels) while rethinking their own techniques.

But, as in any good fairy tale, Feiring sensed that danger rode shotgun with the magic. With acclaim and growing international interest come threats in the guise of new wine consultants aimed at making wines more commercial. So Feiring fought back in the only way she knew how: by celebrating Georgia and the men and women who make the wines she loves most, those made naturally with organic viticulture, minimal intervention, and no additives.

From Tbilisi to Batumi, Feiring meets winemakers, bishops, farmers, artists, and silk spinners. She feasts, toasts, and collects recipes. She encounters the thriving qvevri craftspeople of the countryside, wild grape hunters, and even Stalin’s last winemaker while plumbing the depths of this tiny country’s love for its wines.

For the Love of Wine is Feiring’s emotional tale of a remarkable country and people who have survived religious wars and Soviet occupation yet managed always to keep hold of their precious wine traditions. Embedded in the narrative is the hope that Georgia has the temerity to confront its latest threat—modernization.

For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey Through the World's Most Ancient Wine Culture

Scarlett O'Hara, the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a well-to-do Georgia plantation owner, must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea.

Gone with the Wind

Flight from the USSR, the first novel from one of Georgia's most famous author, Dato Turashvili, was originally published in Georgia in 1988. Since then, it has been adapted as a stage play entitled “Jeans Generation” and translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Greek and Croatian; receiving brilliant reviews everywhere. The novel is based upon an electrifying and tragic event in 1983. Gega Kobakhidze, a young actor, and seven friends hijack an airplane heading from Tbilisi to Leningrad. They desperately want to flee from the USSR and go to Turkey. They fail, are imprisoned and a number are killed. All of Georgia and the world were caught up in these events. Turashvili is a master of drama, with a precise and compelling sense of dialogue, his characterizations are complex but powerful, his story-line is totally engrossing, and we do not want to believe the inevitable and disastrous conclusion. He weaves a gripping literary work between historical fact and fiction, leaving the reader transfixed.

Flight from the USSR

At 3:37 in the morning of Sunday, October 12, 1958, a bundle of dynamite blew out the side wall of the Temple, Atlanta's oldest and richest synagogue. The devastation to the building was vast-but even greater were the changes those 50 sticks of dynamite made to Atlanta, the South, and ultimately, all of the United States ("Detroit Free Press"). Finalist for the National Book Award, "The Temple Bombing" is the brilliant and moving examination of one town that came together in the face of hatred, a book that rescues a slice of the civil rights era whose lessons still resonate nearly fifty years after that fateful fall day.

The Temple Bombing

The inspiring true story of a young Texan woman who overcame a dark and tragic past and turned a tiny shop in Idaho into a multi-million dollar brand.

New Plymouth, Idaho. It's here, in this quiet 1500 person-town, that a young mother of four with everything working against her, including a tragic past and a community resistant to change, created a country empire bigger than she'd ever dreamed. And oh yeah, she saved the town, built a national community of die-hard fans, and made herself a multi-millionaire in the process.

Her name is Jessi Roberts, and her store is Cheekys. Starting with just 6 purses in inventory, Jessi turned Cheekys into a clothing and fashion accessories brand name with annual revenues of over $6 million. Best of all, she did it by adhering to old-fashioned values that she believed in, including always being kind, lifting up the next gal, and treating your employees and customers like family. 

Now Jessi is telling her personal story and sharing her guiding principles for life and business. And she is finally opening up about her early years, a time so dark that she's told only a handful of people about it. Co-written with Bret Witter ("Dewey"), BACKROADS BOSS LADY brims with heartland-of-America authenticity as it celebrates rural life, the importance of community, and success without compromising one's beliefs. 


Backroads Boss Lady: How a Small-Town Girl Built a Big-Time Business by  Staying True to Herself, Her Family, and Friends

Designed by Atlanta architect A. Thomas Bradbury and opened in 1968, the mansion has been home to eight first families and houses a distinguished collection of American art and antiques. Often called “the people’s house,” the mansion is always on display, always serving the public. "Memories of the Mansion" tells the story of the Georgia Governor’s Mansion—what preceded it and how it came to be as well as the stories of the people who have lived and worked here since its opening in 1968.

The authors worked closely with the former first families (Maddox, Carter, Busbee, Harris, Miller, Barnes, Perdue, and Deal) to capture behind-the-scenes anecdotes of what life was like in the state’s most public house. This richly illustrated book not only documents this extraordinary place and the people who have lived and worked here, but it will also help ensure the preservation of this historic resource so that it may continue to serve the state and its people.

Published in cooperation with the University of Georgia Libraries and Kennesaw State University

Memories of the Mansion: The Story of Georgia's Governor's Mansion

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around--fast.

On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the small town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, E. Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin.

"Cold Sassy Tree" is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and resplendent treasure.

Cold Sassy Tree

An exciting and hilarious debut novel: a remarkable picaresque set in post-Soviet Georgia—land of corruption, love, and power shortages
In the republic of Georgia, the Communists are long gone, replaced by . . . well, by what? Something much more confusing. There are no jobs in the cities. And when there are jobs, employees aren’t compensated. And when they are compensated, it’s because the jobs are . . . not strictly scrupulous. In the village, life goes on much as it always did, but these days, the homemade farmers cheese is giving way to the oil pipeline. And as for romance in this strange, confounding modern age . . . the less said, the better.



But there’s one man in Georgia who remains unseduced by corruption, unfazed by nostalgia, and unable to abandon chivalry, no matter how antiquated a notion it may be. This man is Slims Achmed Makashvili, a humble maritime lawyer and the hero of this brilliant novel.



When Slims discovers an application for an American small business internship program sponsored by Hillary Clinton, he knows that he has found his calling. In his letters to Senator Clinton, Slims dreams of bringing efficiency, opportunity, and the American dream to his homeland, even as his friends and relatives embrace decadence, lethargy, and a staggering array of unsavory business practices. But when he finally gets to America—specifically to utopian San Francisco, where the streets are paved with quinoa—Slims sees what reform and progress look like up close. And suddenly, his loud, bickering family and his anguished, joyful country no longer seem so grim.



A gleeful picaresque, a visionary satire, and a work of extraordinary empathy and imagination, "Waiting for the Electricity" is a marvelously imaginative debut novel.

Waiting for the Electricity: A Novel

"In An Hour Before Daylight," Jimmy Carter, bestselling author of "Living Faith" and "Sources of Strength," recreates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm before the civil rights movement forever changed it and the country.

Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy, offering an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and a strict segregationist who treated black workers with respect and fairness; his strong-willed and well-read mother; and the five other people who shaped his early life, three of whom were black.

Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation and recounts a classic, American story of enduring importance.

An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood

In his barracks, Walter Burke is trying to write a letter to the parents of a fallen soldier, an Alabama man who died in a muddy rice paddy. But all he can think of is his childhood friend Lamar, the friend with whom he first experienced the fury of violence, on the streets of Birmingham, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The juxtaposition is so powerful—between war-torn Vietnam and terror-filled “Bombingham”—that he is drawn back to the summer that would see his transition from childish wonder at the world to his certain knowledge of his place in it.

Walter and Lamar were always aware of the terms of segregation—the horrendous rules and stifling reality. Their paper route never took them to the white areas of town. But that year, everything exploded. And so did Walter’s family. As the great movement swelled around them, the Burkes faced tremendous obstacles of their own. From a tortured past lingered questions of faith, and a terrible family crisis found its climax as the city did the same. In the streets of Birmingham, ordinary citizens risked their lives to change America. And for Walter, the war was just beginning.

Bombingham

Weird Georgia

Retired professor Andrew Lachlan has returned to his family home on a lake in central Georgia to die. And yet he has never felt so alive, so ready to learn about the natural world around him. Having taught all his life, he is ready for solitude. But a young country boy, Willie Sullivan, disrupts Lachlan’s search for order and rekindles memories he thought long dead.Lachlan also finds Callie McKenzie, a woman he loved years earlier, and they soon begin to see in each other reflections of the lives they once led. Lachlan’s journal of his year by the lake leads him to a deeper understanding of himself and the world.

The Heart of a Distant Forest

Porter Osborne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the depression years. On a red-clay farm in Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex. But it is Porter's family - his genteel, patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother, and, most of all, his beloved though flawed father - who teach Porter the painful truths about growing up strong enough to run with the horsemen.

Run with the Horsemen

Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, but no comprehensive, up-to-date account has been written about this little-known country—until now. Remedying this omission, Donald Rayfield accesses a mass of new material from recently opened archives to tell Georgia’s absorbing story.

 Beginning with the first intimations of the existence of Georgians in ancient Anatolia and ending with the volatile presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Rayfield deals with the country’s internal politics and swings between disintegration and unity, and divulges Georgia’s complex struggles with the empires that have tried to control, fragment, or even destroy it. He describes the country’s conflicts with Xenophon’s Greeks, Arabs, invading Turks, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Soviet totalitarianism. A wide-ranging examination of this small but colorful country, its dramatic state-building, and its tragic political mistakes, "Edge of Empires" draws our eyes to this often overlooked nation.

Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia

Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger, longing--sometimes worse--lie just below the surface of a pleasant summer afternoon or a Sunday church service.In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby" and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide." But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that made him worth the trouble he caused."

The title story in the collection begins with a visit to clean the graves in a country cemetery and ends with the terrifying pursuit of a young girl and her grandmother by two bikers, one of whom "had the invading sort of eyes the woman had spent her lifetime bolting doors against."

In the story "Inexorable Process" we see the relentless desperation of Angelina, "who hated many things, but Sundays most of all," and in "Solomon's Seal" the ancient anger of the mountain woman who has crowded her husband out of her life and her heart, until the plants she has tended in her rage fill the half-acre. "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."

How Far She Went

Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in America. She eats road kill, wrestles alligators, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built herself in an island wilderness. She’s had three husbands and many lovers, one of whom she shot and killed in self-defense. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia.

Cumberland is the country's largest and most biologically diverse barrier island—over forty square miles of pristine wilderness celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie owned much of Cumberland, and his widow Lucy made it a Gilded Age playground. But in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high-school diploma tries to stop one of the wealthiest families in America? "Untamed" is the story of an American original standing her ground and fighting for what she believes in, no matter the cost.

Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island

The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir

The money is old, the problems are new. 

A wry and addictive debut about a modern-day American dynasty and its unexpected upheaval when the patriarch wills his dwindling fortune to his youngest, adopted son--setting off a chain of events that unearth family secrets and test long-held definitions of love and family.

The Whitbys: a dynasty akin to the Astors, once enormously wealthy real-estate magnates who were considered "the landlords of New York."

There was a time when the death of a Whitby would have made national news, but when the family patriarch, Roger, dies, he is alone. Word of his death travels from the longtime family lawyer to his clan of children (from four separate marriages) and the news isn't good. Roger has left everything to his twenty-one-year-old son Nick, a Whitby only in name, including the houses currently occupied by Shelley and Brooke--two of Roger's daughters from different marriages. And Nick is nowhere to be found.

Brooke, the oldest of the children, who is unexpectedly pregnant, leads the search for Nick, hoping to convince him to let her keep her Boston home and her fragile composure. Shelley hasn't told anyone she's dropped out of college just months before graduating, and is living in her childhood apartment while working as an amanuensis for a blind writer named Anandaroop Gupta, with whom she develops a rather complicated relationship. And when Nick, on the run from the law after a misguided and dramatic act of political activism, finally shows up at Shelley's New York home, worlds officially collide as Nick and Mr. Gupta's daughter fall in love. Soon, all three siblings are faced with the question they have been running from their whole lives: What do they want their future to look like, if they can finally escape their past?

Weaving together multiple perspectives to create a portrait of an American family, and an American dream gone awry, "Baby of the Family" is a book about family secrets--how they define us, bind us together, and threaten to blow us (and more) apart--as well as an amusing and heartwarming look at the various ways in which a family can be created.

Baby of the Family

Georgia Odyssey is a lively survey of the states identity and consider it integral to their own. Georgia Odyssey is the ideal introduction to our past and a unique and often provocative look at the interaction of that past with our present and future.

Georgia Odyssey

Sabbath Creek is the story of Lewis Pope, a fourteen-year-old boy thrust into an adult world when his beautiful mother takes him on an aimless journey through south Georgia. Cerebral and sensitive, Lewis is forced to confront the latent fears-scars left from the emotional abuse of an alcoholic father and the lack of comfort from a preoccupied mother- that crowd his interior existence.

At the heart of the journey, and of the novel itself, is Truman Stroud, the quick-witted, cantankerous, ninety-three-year-old black owner of the crumbling Sabbath Creek Motor Court, where Lewis and his mother are stranded by car trouble. Despite his prickly personality and the considerable burden of his own tragedies, Stroud becomes the boy's best hope for a father figure, as he teaches Lewis the secrets of baseball and the secrets of life.

This compassionate, powerful work of fiction travels from the ruined landscape of south Georgia and takes us all the way through the ruined landscape of a broken heart.


Sabbath Creek

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A rich and lively gathering of highlights from the first twenty years of an extraordinary career, interspersed with "B sides" and "bonus tracks" from this prolific and widely acclaimed poet.

"Blue Laws "gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut ("Most Way Home, "1995) and the amazing "double album" life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, "remixed" for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted" Jelly Roll: A Blues "(2003)" "and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in "Dear Darkness "(2008) and "Book of Hours "(2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his "Ardency: A Chronicle of the "Amistad" Rebels" or bold sequences such as "The Ballad of Jim Crow" and a new "Homage to Phillis Wheatley."

Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015

Exploring a culture filled with arcane laws, historical incidents, and bizarre paradoxes, Piu Eatwell's follow up to her award-winning and critically acclaimed myth-buster "They Eat Horses, Don't They" is a delightful exploration of France's quirky, literary, and culinary heritage.

From absinthe and catacombs to former French soccer player Zinedine Zidane, Eatwell leaves no stone unturned, taking readers off the beaten path to explore the kind of information that gets missed in guidebooks and 'official' information sources. Who could imagine, for example, that there is a village in France where UFOs are banned from landing? Or that there is a verifiable population of wild kangaroos in the forests surrounding Paris?

These, and many other off-beat delights, are just some of the curiosities awaiting readers in this journey through byways and hidden treasures of this endlessly fascinating and paradoxical country. Full of the richness and variety of France beyond the platitudes, including recipes and charming illustrations, "F is for France "is an ideal gift book and a must-read for Francophiles and anyone with an interest in French travel and culture.

F Is for France: A Curious Cabinet of French Wonders

Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove

When Jessica Handler was eight years old, her younger sister Susie was diagnosed with leukemia. To any family, the diagnosis would have been upending, but to the Handlers, whose youngest daughter, Sarah, had been born with a rare, fatal blood disorder, it was an unimaginable verdict. Struck by the unlikelihood of siblings sick with diametrically opposed illnesses, the medical community labeled the Handlers’ situation a bizarre coincidence. To their mother, the girls’ unlikely diagnoses constituted a reverse miracle—the sort no one wishes for. By the time she was nine years old, Jessica had begun to introduce herself as the “well sibling.”Deeply moving and exquisitely written, Invisible Sisters is an extraordinary story of coming of age as the odd one out—as the daughter of progressive Jewish parents who moved to the South to participate in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as the healthy sister among sick, and eventually, as the only sister left standing. In a book that is as hard to forget as it is to put down, Handler captures the devastating effects of illness and death on a family and the triumphant account of one woman’s enduring journey to step out of the shadow of loss to find herself anew.

Invisible Sisters: A Memoir

JACK RIGGS
"When the Finch Rises" is the debut novel of an author whose work will be read as classic literature for a long time to come. It is a story full of truths and revelations, transcending its fictional bounds to become something so real and so finely wrought that it will simply astonish. Jack Riggs has created an emotional testament to the myriad shades of the human condition.

It is the late 1960s in the small North Carolina mill town of Ellenton. Twelve-year-old Raybert Williams and his best friend Palmer Conroy live in cramped homes in a working-class neighborhood, but they use the vast outdoors as their personal playground. Yet hardships are never far away. Raybert’s father disappears for days at a time, only to come home broken and battered. Raybert’s mother is a loving woman who battles her own demons while struggling to keep it all together. Palmer’s family life offers no better refuge for the adventure-seeking boys.

But Raybert and Palmer have each other. And in that glorious friendship, they are significantly blessed. They dream together of space flight and moonwalks. They construct a bike jump to rival Evel Knievel’s–and they’ll run it once they work up the courage. Knievel tempted fate and won, taking a leap over twenty buses on faith alone, soaring high and landing safely, even after many crashes and broken bones. Palmer and Raybert have their own plan that, once executed, will take them all the way to the ocean, landing them intact and together on the other side of freedom.

Through the scrim of adolescence and poverty, Jack Riggs offers a glimpse of universal human foibles and singular moments of transcendence. Fiercely honest and beautifully narrated, "When the Finch Rises" flashes like the sharp rim of the eclipsed moon on the night when Raybert and Palmer’s fate is finally revealed.


"From the Hardcover edition."

When the Finch Rises

The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life

Thomas Lux's poems embody the sound of deep emotions lightly carried. In their deft, sometimes humorous fashion they unseat the spirit, fastening on the rueful and mysterious poignancies of our lives, like that unopened bottle of maraschino cherries abandoned in the refrigerator, or cocking a snook at the dreadful challenges of commercial leech farming today. For the past twenty-five years, Lux's work has grown from his early experiments in surrealism into a body of work that, while challenging the mind and affecting the funnybone, is designed to touch the heart, a destination Lux attains with the utmost precision and delicacy. This book for the first time brings together in one volume the best of his mature work.

New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux: 1975 - 1995

When fifteen-year-old Cissie Brodie loses her parents to cholera, she is forced out of the family cottage and left to raise her nine siblings alone. Although desperately poor, the strong-willed Cissie determines to build a new home for the Brodies. It is only a rough stone shelter, but to Cissie and her family it is enough to keep them from the workhouse.

They have friends, but charity cannot always spare them the harsh reality of their struggle and the bitterness of those who wish them harm. But can love, when it arrives, teach Cissie not to fear the world beyond the dwelling place?

Set in the 1830's, "The Dwelling Place" is the powerful tale of a tenacious family's battle to overcome the odds.

The Dwelling Place

In a bombed-out Polish village during World War II a young resistance fighter finds that he is suddenly alone and trapped between two opposing armies. He is one of Poland's "Devil's Rebels" fighting desperately to save his homeland, but an injury has erased his memory and his only possession is a torn photograph of a couple he assumes are his parents. The woman appears to be holding the hand of a young child whose image has been ripped off. Could the child be him?

Caught in the crosshairs of the retreating German army and the advancing Russian forces, the village holds nothing but destruction and despair until a mysterious young woman offers a small glimmer of hope that may represent his last chance - news of a refuge train departing from a nearby town headed for American installations at the border. But complications arise when the resistance fighter is betrayed by his own countryman and hunted by German SS Officers who are determined to kill him before they retreat. Desperately searching for a home and family he can't remember he is persuaded to rescue two children who are doomed to die without his help.

As time runs out the former rebel is faced with an impossible choice. Standing at the crossroads of saving himself or risking his life for strangers, what would motivate a young man at the brink of salvation to make one more sacrifice?

Winter Sky

It is the mid-1950s in Quarrytown, Georgia. In the slum known as the Ape Yard, hope's last refuge is a boardinghouse where a handful of residents dream of a better life. Earl Whitaker, who is white, and Tio Grant, who is black, are both teenagers, both orphans, and best friends. In the same house live two of the most important adults in the boys' lives: Em Jojohn, the gigantic Lumbee Indian handyman, is notorious for his binges, his rat-catching prowess, and his mysterious departures from town. Jayell Crooms, a gifted but rebellious architect, is stuck in a loveless marriage to a conventional woman intent on climbing the social ladder.Crooms's vision of a new Ape Yard, rebuilt by its own residents, unites the four-and puts them on a collision course with Doc Bobo, a smalltown Machiavelli who rules the community like a feudal lord. Jeff Fields's exuberantly defined characters and his firmly rooted sense of place have earned "A Cry of Angels" an intensely loyal following. Its republication, more than three decades since it first appeared, is cause for celebration.

A Cry of Angels

Book two in "The Mysteries of New Venice", the steampunk adventure series" The Guardian" called a "magnificent achievement" 

It's 1907 in the icily beautiful New Venice, and the hero of the city's liberation, Brentford Orsini, has been deposed by his arch-rival -- who immediately assigns Brentford and his friends on a dangerous diplomatic mission to Paris.

So, Brentford recruits his old friend and louche counterpart, Gabriel d'Allier, underground chanteuse and suffragette Lillian Lake, and the mysterious Blankbate--former Foreign Legionnaire and leader of the Scavengers, the city's garbage collecting cult--and others, for the mission.

But their mode of transportation--the untested "transaerian psychomotive"--proves faulty and they find themselves transported back in time to Paris 1895 ... before New Venice even existed. What's more, it's a Paris experiencing an unprecedented and crushingly harsh winter.

They soon find themselves involved with some of the city's seediest, most fascinating inhabitants. But between attending soirees at Mallarmé's house, drinking absinthe with Proust, trying to wrestle secrets out of mesmerists, and making fun of the newly-constructed Eiffel Tower, they also find that Paris is a city full of intrigue, suspicion, and danger.

For example, are the anarchists they encounter who are plotting to bomb the still-under construction Sacre Coeur church also the future founders of New Venice? And why are they trying to kill them?

And, as Luminous Chaos turns into another lush adventure told in glorious prose rich in historical allusion, there's the biggest question of them all: How will they ever get home?



ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-142-3

Luminous Chaos (The Mysteries of New Venice, #2)

Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Year’s Day, 1953. He died much as he had lived: drunk, forlorn, suffering from a birth defect, wondering when the bubble would burst. Having sprouted out of nowhere, like a weed in the wilds of south Alabama, he was gone at the age of twenty-nine.  Now, with his definitive biography of the man and his music, Paul Hemphill takes the reader on a journey through Hank Williams’s life and times: his dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child, learning music from a black street singer, refining it in raucous rural honky-tonks during the Depression, emerging as a star of the Grand Ole Opry. Uneducated, virtually fatherless, an alcoholic in his teens, unlucky at love, Hank mined his experiences to write songs that will live forever.  Hemphill, author of "The Nashville Sound" and the son of a long-distance trucker from Alabama, brings his background to bear on a story that often reads like fiction. He has unearthed many fresh details in Williams’s life, but most importantly, he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.

Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams

The Confederate General Rides North: A Novel

In this extraordinary, long-awaited debut novel, the acclaimed essayist James Kilgo has woven a richly textured and complex tale from the threads of actual events. Set in rural South Carolina in the early twentieth century, "Daughter of My People" is the story of the ties of land, blood, and honor that bind and threaten to destroy two families.At the center of the story are two brothers, Hart and Tison Bonner, and their cousin Jennie Grant, the mixed-race woman one brother loves and the other dishonors. Theirs is a world in which dark passions lead to tragic consequences. The burden of understanding that promises redemption and victory over the destructive forces of ignorance and prejudice rests on the shoulders of Jennie. A shadowy but prominent figure in the stories passed down to Kilgo, Jennie here is given her due. Her strength and dignity, the driving forces of this novel, shine through the generations with the glow of heirloom sterling.

Kilgo is a sensory writer, bringing the landscape alive with an abundance of sights, sounds, and smells. He writes with a resonance that draws the reader in and does not let go until long after the last page has been turned. "This is a love story," he says. "And I hope it breaks the reader's heart as mine was broken in the telling of it."

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Luminous Chaos (The Mysteries of New Venice, #2)

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