A collection of stories ranging in time from the 1940’s to present and taking place in locales such as Memphis, Tennessee; Sheffield, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and various other rural locations in the South. The stories chronicle the lives, life events, and conflicts of southern characters including the poor and rural; high school and college students; the elderly; children; the educated and uneducated; businesspeople; teachers and the working class. A rich thread of southern heritage, culture, and the human condition runs throughout the collection and brings to life the character’s motivations, mannerisms, eccentricities, persistence and resilience. Characters such as Uncle Lum; Uncle Caleb and Aunt Martha; Mitchell Murphy and Marsha Butler; Pack Jordan and Granville Graves; Nancy and Jack; Walter and Edna; and Paul and Davey evoke the intimate expanse of history, legend, truth, desperation, and textures of place: Southern places, Southern people, Southern conflicts and Southern relationships.

High quality reprint of Snake Doctor, and Other Stories by Irvin S. Cobb.

Jiangnan, that part of east-central China watered by the Yangzi River, is the ironically Edenic setting for these six powerful tales of devotion, betrayal, and defilement. Zhu Lin, a uniquely angry female voice on China’s literary scene, takes a particular interest in the plight of young women whose exceptional qualities condemn them to exploitation by men. No other contemporary Chinese writer renders the hostility of rural society toward women in such stark and ultimately tragic terms. Serpents tyrannize the innocent in this fictional Jiangnan garden. The title story refers to a fragrant, blood-red flower known as the snake’s pillow, which symbolizes an innocent girl betrayed and violated by a male figure of authority. Immersed in the heady and sensual imagery of the natural world, Zhu Lin’s female protagonists invite comparisons not only with Eve but also with Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Zhu Lin has said of her fiction that its purpose is to “summon the souls” of readers who have lost themselves in the turbulence of a society in the transition to modernity—and then to restore these lost souls to the bodies they have left. An evocation of both flesh and spirit, these Jiangnan stories give voice to the complex and disturbing experience of women in a changing society.

About the Cover This simple sketch is over 100 years old. It hung in the farm house I was raised in as a small boy. The artist was a relative on the Jackson side of my family tree. The original sketch now hangs in the cabin where I live. My grandmother tried to explain the meaning of the sketch to me when I was eight years old, but it was way over my head. Now that I have entered the final chapter of my long journey, I look at the sketch a lot differently than I did when my grandmom talked to me about it so long ago. The old man is not only old but very wise. The sweet, mellow smell from his pipe is now an integral part of him. The fragrance of Spring completely surrounds the young girl. As she tells him about his upcoming long journey, you can see the slight smile on his face. He knows his next journey will be soon and very short. I suspect that he will give her very little advice. He knows that unraveling the mysteries and finding your own answers are what make our long journeys worthwhile. Poppy About the Stories You may find some of them are sad, some funny, and some a little mysterious. However, I hope they rekindle and stir emotions you have hidden deep inside you-for a very long time.

The Sweet's Price for Edenville and Other Stories of Black Gay Males consists of eight short stories about black gay males in the Southeastern United States and the ways they try to define their sexuality within a culture that can love them just as much as it can attempt to conscript them in a narrow definition of blackness and manhood in a long war against racism. Often the first casualty is the heart. From the very young who may not know the word "gay" to the older who may run from that same word or try to define themselves within it, each is trying to make a space for an authentic expression of their humanity in loving and sometimes hostile personal worlds.