Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day, and she hasn't been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father's home is unnervingly secluded: her only neighbors are the McGees,...

Pulitzer prize-winner author of All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg builds a monument to his grandfather Charlie Bundrum. Known for being a passionate family man with a special talent for living and surviving, Bundrum was a master roofer, carpenter, whiskey-maker, fisherman, banjo player, and buck dancer. Unable to read, he asked his wife Ava to read him the newspaper every night so he would not be ignorant. Set in the Great Depression, Bundrum's...

There's nothing quite like family-for good or bad. But in a world where we sometimes know more about the Kardashians than we do the people sleeping right down the hall, it's easy to forget that walking through life with our family offers all sorts of joy wrapped up in the seemingly mundane. There's even a little bit of sacred sitting smack-dab in the middle of the ordinary. And since time's-a-wastin', we need to be careful that we don't take our people-and...

Obnoxious diet guru Clarissa Jardin reports her womanizing, gambling husband, Bill, missing. When Bill turns up as a frozen corpse with a bullet in his skull, Bill's mother hires Savannah to prove Clarissa killed her son or hired someone to do it.

Carson McCullers--novelist, dramatist, poet--was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the Sout

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...

On the eve of Evangeline's wedding, on the shore of Winter Island, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie's mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California. Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent...

The bestselling author of "Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen" returns with this collection that highlights Southern cooking at its finest.