A beautifully narrated novel of time and place, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky re-creates a southern summer when the depression and the boll weevil turned hopes to dust. With the extraordinary talent to make the reader see the Ball canning jars on the kitchen table, hear the clicks on the party line, and feel the bittersweet moments of 20-year-old Callie Tatum's first experiences with adult desire, Oliver portrays a young wife's increasingly dangerous infidelity with cinematic precision and palpable suspense.

Weary of the expectations imposed on her by her strict upbringing, eighteen-year-old Mazy Pelfrey prepares to leave her home in the Kentucky mountains for the genteel city of Lexington, where she’ll attend secretarial school. She knows her life is about to change—and only for the better. Everything will be blue skies from now on. But business school is harder than she thought it would be and the big city not as friendly, until she meets a charming young man from a wealthy family, Loyal Chambers. When Loyal sets his sights on her, Mazy begins to see that everything she’d ever wished to have is right before her eyes. The only hindrance to her budding romance is a former beau, Chanis Clay, the young sheriff she thought she’d left firmly behind. Danger rumbles like thunder on a high mountain ridge when Mazy’s cosseted past collides with her clouded future and forces her to come to terms with what she really wants.

Retired police officer Chase Harlow from North Carolina receives a call from his old friend and fellow policeman, Andy Toler. Andy's granddaughter, Emily, went with some friends to a small island for one last summer fling before the start of school-but she never came back. Chase agrees to check into things and heads to the island. As soon as he arrives, he learns about the murder of a young girl. It's not Emily; as it turns out, Emily has returned home safe and sound. Even so, Chase can't ignore his police instincts, and he decides to find out what he can about the girl who was killed. One night at a bar, he meets a beautiful woman named Adrian who tells Chase that she saw the murdered woman at Rainbow Island, an isolated island far out in the Atlantic Ocean. Home to an elite private club, it boasts that it can "make all your dreams come true." Chase isn't so sure about that, but he heads out to the island to see if he can uncover the villain. What he finds, however, is romance, intrigue, and a killer who isn't going to come quietly.

Devotion re-creates the life of Varina Anne (Winnie) Davis, the youngest child of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Winnie was not quite a year old when the family fled the Rebel stronghold of Richmond as the Civil War was ending. Twenty-one years later, Winnie was catapulted into a celebrity she did not seek. As the officially proclaimed Daughter of the Confederacy, she was presented with great fanfare at large conventions of Confederate veterans from Texas to Virginia. In the late nineteenth century, Winnie Davis was known here and abroad as a foremost cultural symbol of the South's Lost Cause. Yet she was also a cosmopolitan, intellectual "New Woman" who earned a living as a journalist and novelist and traveled with the Joseph Pulitzers. Winnie's adoring followers often misread her steadfast love for her father as unconditional support of the failed Confederacy and the Old South's nostalgic ideals of womanhood. Julia Oliver explores these contradictions from several angles. Winnie speaks from the pages of her journal. Other narrators include Winnie's close friend Kate Pulitzer; her sister, Maggie Hayes; and the love of her life, Alfred Wilkinson, the grandson of a famous abolitionist. From the portrayals of Winnie's romance, her relationships with her parents, her illness and depression, and her ambivalent role as torchbearer for the Lost Cause emerges a young woman whose conflicted existence reflects the tenor of the country in the aftermath of the Civil War. An intimate saga about a remarkable, star-crossed family, Devotion poignantly measures the massive weight of memory on individuals caught up in the sweep of history.

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver. As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.

The highly acclaimed author of Louisiana Power and Light now presents a beautifully crafted collection of tales which are told with insight, humor, and tenderness--stories "full of whimsy and wisdom" . . . a collection that "takes you by the lapels and demands that you listen while it works its magic" (James W. Hall).

C.P. MacKay, a rising football star and a student at Sparta University, encounters hardships and moral and ethical issues while playing football and attending school during the 1960s.

"College football coach Abram Dufrene won't risk destroying his career for anything. He's sacrificed too much to see his hard work and integrity go down in flames. So when an innocent but passionate encounter with a sexy stranger forces him to choose between business and pleasure, the decision should be simple. Too bad nothing about Louise 'Lou' Boyd is simple. She's had him hooked since the second he met her. But she's the guardian of the athlete he's recruiting, which puts her off-limits. With all eyes on them, it's only right to keep his distance from Lou. Yet, for the first time, doing the 'right' thing feels too wrong."--P. [4] of cover.