A collection of essays written for the column "The high & the low" in the magazine Garden & gun.

The story of the author's life, first in Mississippi, then going to school in Texas, and then writing in New York.

Southerners love to tell stories. In these twenty-six stories, Alice Joyner Irby recalls her blessed yet turbulent life in and out of the South. Her childhood adventures begin in the 1930s on the Roanoke River in Weldon, a close-knit town in Northeastern North Carolina, where she and her brother, George, kept Granny's boarding house lively with pranks on customers and neighborhood playmates. Every decade brought unforeseen opportunities, painful disruptions, and life-altering choices-from the controversial McCarthy hearings to the heroic school-integration efforts of the 1950s; from the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins when Alice was Director of Admissions at UNCG, to her role within LBJ's Job Corps in Washington, D.C. These were exciting and formative times for the Republic. Alice witnessed all of it-and more.Alice's guiding "celebrities" come to life in South Toward Home. Unconditional love and support from her parents, siblings, and daughter enabled her journey and sustained her resilience. Alice may have been an upstart daredevil who climbed the sheer walls of success in a man's world, but this young Southern woman never entirely left behind the open-hearted, unpretentious people of Halifax County-or the black-delta banks of the timeless Roanoke River.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding himself--and his home.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

The first volume of a collection of short stories by Sean Dietrich, a writer, humorist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

In considering the pleasures and absurdities of her native culture, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia, the soul of the South, and in her warmhearted and funny new book, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life—taking us everywhere from dive bars and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival to an impromptu shindig on a Mississippi River sandbar and a coveted seat on a Mardi Gras float. She writes about the region’s music and food, its pesky critters and prodigious drinking habits, its inhabitants’ penchant for making their own fun—and, crucially, their gift for laughing at themselves. With her distinctive voice and knowing eye, Julia also provides her take on the South’s more embarrassing characteristics from the politics of lust and the persistence of dry counties to the “seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord.” No matter what, she writes, “My fellow Southerners have brought me the greatest joy—on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.” South Toward Home, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, is Julia Reed’s valentine to the place she knows and loves best.