A family saga set in North Caroline and Virginia between 1903 and 1944 depicts three generations of the Kendals and the Mayfields. Sixteen-year-old Eva Kendal elopes with her thirty-two-year-old Latin teacher, Forrest Mayfield. Before long, the suicide of Eva's mother brings Eva and her young son home, where they remain for years.

Risking a whipping if they are discovered, Rosa and her mama sneak away from their slave quarters during the night to a hidden location in a field where they learn to read and write in a pit school.

This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative...

"When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn't want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn't want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn't want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn't...

Abandoned by her mother and raised by her loving but religiously zealous grandmother, 16-year-old Heavenly Faith Simms (H.F. for short) has never felt like she belonged anywhere. When she finds her mother's address in a drawer, she and her best friend, Bo, an emotionally repressed gay boy, hit the road in Bo's scrap heap of a car and head south. Their journey through the heart of the American South awakens both teens to the realization that there...

A reminiscence of a Christmas shared by a seven-year-old boy and a sixtyish childlike woman, with enormous love and friendship between them.

Presents a collection of stories selected by the author from her fifteen previous collections of short fiction.

In a career spanning five decades, Eudora Welty has chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner. One of the most influential writers of the century, her novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly southern women's, lives with an artistry...

"American Southern Gothic Literature presents one of the few book-length surveys of the genre available today, in a diverse collection of representative texts from a group of international critics. In addition to exemplary novels from established writers, such as Edora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, and Cormac McCarthy, works explored here include poetry, a play, and a fairy tale novella. This volume, part of the Critical Insights series,...