Author : Louis Decimus Rubin
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 41,44 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 0826265049
"Examines the problems facing the American literary scene, including creative writing programs, sports writing, Southern literature, publishing, and poetry, with references to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, T. S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Bill Cheng
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 29,3 MB
Release : 2013-05-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0062225030
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young man must choose between the lure of the future and the claims of the past. Having lost virtually everything in the fearsome storm—home, family, first love—Robert Chatham embarks on an odyssey that takes him through the deep South, from the desperation of a refugee camp to the fiery and raucous brothel Hotel Beau-Miel and into the Mississippi hinterland, where he joins a crew hired to clear the swamp and build a dam. Along his journey he encounters piano-playing hustlers, ne’er-do-well Klansmen, well-intentioned whores, and a family of fur trappers, the L’Etangs, whose very existence is threatened by the swamp-clearing around them. The L’Etang brothers are fierce and wild but there is something soft about their cousin Frankie, possibly the only woman capable of penetrating Robert’s darkest places and overturning his conviction that he’s marked by the devil. Teeming with language that renders both the savage beauty and complex humanity of our shared past, Southern Cross the Dog is a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.
Author : Allen Whitley
Publisher : Greenleaf Book Group
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 10,63 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1934572411
In the late 1930s, Jim Crow walked unopposed in Mississippi, and Europe was preparing for war. But even though an ocean apart, the threads of hate and fear bound them together. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Where Southern Cross the Dog begins with the tragic slaying of a day laborer and the chance meeting of its two main characters: Travis Montgomery, a new graduate of Millsaps College, and Hannah Morgan, a young, educated, affluent African-American woman who returns to the South to assist her ailing grandmother. As their initial wariness turns to friendship and then romance, Travis and Hannah unravel the secrets behind the murder which include a conspiracy that runs from Clarksdale to pre-war Europe.
Author : Annye C. Anderson
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 10,24 MB
Release : 2020-06-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 030684527X
A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 “[Brother Robert} book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth.”—Rolling Stone An intimate memoir by blues legend Robert Johnson's stepsister, including new details about his family, music, influences, tragic death, and musical afterlife Though Robert Johnson was only twenty-seven years young and relatively unknown at the time of his tragic death in 1938, his enduring recordings have solidified his status as a progenitor of the Delta blues style. And yet, while his music has retained the steadfast devotion of modern listeners, much remains unknown about the man who penned and played these timeless tunes. Few people alive today actually remember what Johnson was really like, and those who do have largely upheld their silence-until now. In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy. Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to Anderson by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Johnson back down to earth; they preserve both his memory and his integrity. For decades, Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Brother Robert is here to set the record straight. Featuring a foreword by Elijah Wald and a Q&A with Anderson, Wald, Preston Lauterbach, and Peter Guralnick, this book paints a vivid portrait of an elusive figure who forever changed the musical landscape as we know it.
Author : Frané Lessac
Publisher : Candlewick
Page : 33 pages
File Size : 39,10 MB
Release : 2019-12-24
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1536202266
This celebratory picture book from Frané Lessac shines a light on beloved nighttime activities under the starry skies of Australia. After nightfall in Australia, families watch movies as bats flit overhead, mysterious orbs of light bounce across the outback, a staircase to the moon appears reflected at the ocean’s edge, and a Ferris wheel offers a citywide view — all under the Southern Cross. Bright and colorful artwork, fascinating natural phenomena, and shared experiences connect people across the country in Frané Lessac’s fascinating tour of Australia at night.
Author : W. C. Handy
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 41,7 MB
Release : 1991-03-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780306804212
W. C. Handy's blues—“Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"—changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy presents his own story: a vivid picture of American life now vanished. W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a sensitive child who loved nature and music; but not until he had won a reputation did his father, a preacher of stern Calvinist faith, forgive him for following the "devilish" calling of black music and theater. Here Handy tells of this and other struggles: the lot of a black musician with entertainment groups in the turn-of-the-century South; his days in minstrel shows, and then in his own band; how he made his first 100 from "Memphis Blues"; how his orchestra came to grief with the First World War; his successful career in New York as publisher and song writer; his association with the literati of the Harlem Renaissance.Handy's remarkable tale—pervaded with his unique personality and humor—reveals not only the career of the man who brought the blues to the world's attention, but the whole scope of American music, from the days of the old popular songs of the South, through ragtime to the great era of jazz.
Author : Eudora Welty
Publisher : HMH
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 45,36 MB
Release : 1979-03-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0547538685
This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.
Author : Patricia Cornwell
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 11,67 MB
Release : 1999-12-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1101203722
Patricia Cornwell has a sixth sense about the men and women in blue. In Hornet's Nest, her page-turning novel about crime and police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cornwell moved behind the badges of these real-life heroes to uncover flesh-and-blood characters who strode through her pages to reveal vulnerable, passionate, brave, sometimes doubting, always fascinating figures. In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us even closer to the personal and professional lives of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder. This time, her setting is Richmond, Virginia, where Charlotte Police Chief Judy Hammer has been brought by an NIJ grant to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the police force, city manager, and mayor of Richmond, Hammer is joined by her deputy chief Virginia West and rookie Andy Brazil on the most difficult assignment of her career. In the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, the trio must bring truth, order, and sanity to a city in trouble.
Author : David Wroblewski
Publisher : Bond Street Books
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 20,13 MB
Release : 2009-03-19
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307371891
An Oprah's Book Club Pick A #1 New York Times Bestseller A National Bestseller Beautifully written and elegantly paced, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a coming-of-age novel about the power of the land and the past to shape our lives. It is a riveting tale of retribution, inhabited by empathic animals, prophetic dreams, second sight, and vengeful ghosts. Born mute, Edgar Sawtelle feels separate from the people around him but is able to establish profound bonds with the animals who share his home and his name: his family raises a fictional breed of exceptionally perceptive and affable dogs. Soon after his father's sudden death, Edgar is stunned to learn that his mother has already moved on as his uncle Claude quickly becomes part of their lives. Reeling from the sudden changes to his quiet existence, Edgar flees into the forests surrounding his Wisconsin home accompanied by three dogs. Soon he is caught in a struggle for survival—the only thing that will prepare him for his return home.
Author : Steve Cheseborough
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 28,59 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781578066506
Updated and expanded, this indispensable guidebook maps out the blues birthplaces, juke joints and crossroads of the Mississippi Delta.
