Download or read book Best Creative Nonfiction of the South Volume II North Carolina written by Casey Clabough and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Creative Nonfiction of the South serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. This North Carolina volume, second in the series, contains essays that celebrate and document the Tar Heel state’s diverse cultures and geography, from the mountains to the sea. The writers included here come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions, and as with most volumes in the series, this one indirectly reflects literary changes within the region over time. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent in the state has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission.

Download or read book The Coolest Monsters written by Megan Baxter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pieces in this collection range in setting from the small towns of New England to the deserts of the Southwest. Grounded in personal experience these essays ask through narrative what it means to be a rebel girl, a rebel teenager, and a rebel woman in a world that seems to offer no real alternative to traditional roles. Infused with lyrical and figurative language, this collection combines the swiftness of the prose poem with the power of the personal essay resulting in writing that pulls the ground out from under the reader again and again. The collection is organized chronologically in a way that charts the development of a woman as she attempts to adapt to the world around her through stories of love, heartbreak, and adventure. The essays travel with the narrator from a summer camp in Maine, to opal mining in Nevada, to the story of a deadly thunderstorm in Vermont, to hunting for ginseng, asking the questions about belonging, expectation and, ultimately, if there is a chance for real happiness.

Download or read book Best Creative Nonfiction of the South Volume I Virginia written by Casey Clabough and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-30 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how literary variations have manifested themselves in a given state. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have foiled the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent across the South has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission. “TRP has for years now published an annual collection of poetry from each of our Southern states, and these anthologies have done very well for us, both inside and outside university classrooms. We welcome this new series on Southern nonfiction and look forward to visiting these fine essayists, state by state.”—Paul Ruffin, Director, Texas Review Press

Download or read book Amazing Place written by Marianne Gingher and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of us understand place in terms of family and community, landscape, or even the weather. For others, the idea of place becomes more distinct and particular: the sound of someone humming while washing dishes, the musical cadence of a mountain accent, the smell of a tobacco field under the hot Piedmont sun. Some of North Carolina's finest writers ruminate on the meaning of place in this collection of twenty-one original essays, untangling North Carolina's influence on their work, exploring how the idea of place resonates with North Carolinians, and illuminating why the state itself plays such a significant role in its own literature. Authors from every region of North Carolina are represented, from the Appalachians and the Piedmont to the Outer Banks and places in between. Amazing Place showcases a mix of familiar favorites and newer voices, expressing in their own words how North Carolina shapes the literature of its people. Contributors include Rosecrans Baldwin, Will Blythe, Belle Boggs, Fred Chappell, Jan DeBlieu, Pamela Duncan, Clyde Edgerton, Ben Fountain, Marianne Gingher, Judy Goldman, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Michael McFee, Lydia Millet, Robert Morgan, Jenny Offill, Michael Parker, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, Wells Tower, and Monique Truong.

Download or read book The Web and the Rock written by Thomas Wolfe and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Web and the Rock" by Thomas Wolfe. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book The Great Dismal written by and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just below the Tidewater area of Virginia, straddling the North Carolina-Virginia line, lies the Great Dismal Swamp, one of America's most mysterious wilderness areas. The swamp has long drawn adventurers, runaways, and romantics, and while many have trie

Download or read book How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America written by Kiese Laymon and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR). Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).

Download or read book Two Captains from Carolina written by Bland Simpson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Two Captains from Carolina, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina--one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791- ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation. Grandy, born a slave, captained freight boats on the Dismal Swamp Canal and bought his freedom three times before he finally gained it. He became involved in Boston abolitionism and ultimately appeared before the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1843. As a child, Maffitt was sent from his North Carolina home to a northern boarding school, and at thirteen he was appointed midshipman in the U.S. Navy, where he had a distinguished career. After North Carolina seceded from the Union, he enlisted in the Confederate navy and became a legendary blockade runner and raider. Both Grandy and Maffitt made names for themselves as they navigated very different routes through the turbulent waters of antebellum America.

Download or read book North Carolina Women written by Michele Gillespie and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the twentieth century, North Carolina’s progressive streak had strengthened, thanks in large part to a growing number of women who engaged in and influenced state and national policies and politics. These women included Gertrude Weil who fought tirelessly for the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to women, and founded the state chapter of the League of Women Voters once the amendment was ratified in 1920. Gladys Avery Tillett, an ardent Democrat and supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal, became a major presence in her party at both the state and national levels. Guion Griffis Johnson turned to volunteer work in the postwar years, becoming one of the state's most prominent female civic leaders. Through her excellent education, keen legal mind, and family prominence, Susie Sharp in 1949 became the first woman judge in North Carolina and in 1974 the first woman in the nation to be elected and serve as chief justice of a state supreme court. Throughout her life, the Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray charted a religious, literary, and political path to racial reconciliation on both a national stage and in North Carolina. This is the second of two volumes that together explore the diverse and changing patterns of North Carolina women's lives. The essays in this volume cover the period beginning with women born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but who made their greatest contributions to the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic life of the state during the late progressive era through the late twentieth century.

Download or read book Mothers and Strangers written by Samia Serageldin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anthology of creative nonfiction, twenty-eight writers set out to discover what they know, and don't know, about the person they call Mother. Celebrated writers Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith have curated a diverse and insightful collection that challenges stereotypes about mothers and expands our notions of motherhood in the South. The mothers in these essays were shaped, for good and bad, by the economic and political crosswinds of their time. Whether their formative experience was the Great Depression or the upheavals of the 1970s, their lives reflected their era and influenced how they raised their children. The writers in Mothers and Strangers explore the reliability of memory, examine their family dynamics, and come to terms with the past. In addition to the editors, contributors include Belle Boggs, Marshall Chapman, Hal Crowther, Clyde Edgerton, Marianne Gingher, Jaki Shelton Green, Sally Greene, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eldridge "Redge" Hanes, Lynden Harris, Randall Kenan, Phillip Lopate, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Jill McCorkle, Melody Moezzi, Elaine Neil Orr, Steven Petrow, Margaret Rich, Omid Safi, James Seay, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Sharon K. Swanson, and Daniel Wallace.

Download or read book Idol Talk written by Elizabeth Searle and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of acne, social anxiety and training bras are the teen idols that make adolescent life a little more bearable. Whether their cutouts are plastered on bedroom walls or hidden behind locker doors, there is no denying the impact of these stars on young women. This collection of new essays explores with tenderness and humor the teen crushes of the past 60 years--from Elvis to John Lennon to Whitney Houston--who have influenced the choices of women, romantically or otherwise, well into adulthood.

Download or read book The Sum of Trifles written by Julia Ridley Smith and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents’ possessions? Smith’s wise and moving memoir in essays, The Sum of Trifles, peels back the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned, from an eighteenth-century miniature to her father’s prosthetics. A vintage hi-fi provides a view of her often tense relationship with her father, whose love of jazz kindled her own artistic impulse. A Japanese screen embodies her mother’s principles of good taste and good manners, while an antebellum quilt prompts Smith to grapple with her family’s slaveholding legacy. Along the way, she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. The Sum of Trifles offers up dark humor and raw feeling, mixed with an erudite streak. It’s a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go.

Download or read book Together written by Judy Goldman and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist and poet Judy Goldman's inspiring account of the mishap that left her husband paralyzed, how it tested their marriage, and their struggle to regain their "normal" life. When Judy Goldman’s husband of almost four decades has a routine spinal injection to alleviate back pain, he is instantly paralyzed from the waist down—a phenomenon no doctor can explain or undo. She’s forced to take over, navigating the byzantine medical world they suddenly find themselves in. Her husband is forced to give in. This is the starting point for Together, which looks at the changes every couple faces—the slow, ordinary ones brought about by time and the sudden, dramatic ones that take us by surprise. Identities shift; roles switch. How do we adjust? How do we let go of the if-onlys? Together is a deeply honest story about the life we dream of and the life we make—an elegant and empathetic meditation on what happens to love, over time and all at once.

Download or read book American Harvest written by Marie Mutsuki Mockett and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

Download or read book Sound Wormy written by Andrew Gennett and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in what remains some of the wildest country in the United States, Sound Wormy recalls a time when regulations were few and resources were abundant for the southern lumber industry. In 1901 Andrew Gennett put all of his money into a tract of timber along the Chattooga River watershed, which traverses parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. By the time he wrote his memoir almost forty years later, Gennett had outwitted and outworked countless competitors in the southern mountains to make his mark as one of the region's most seasoned, innovative, and successful lumbermen. His recollections of a rough-and-ready outdoors life are filled with details of logging, from the first "cruise" of a timber stand to the moment when the last board lies "on sticks" in the mill yard. He tells how massive poplars, oaks, and other hardwoods had to be felled and trimmed by hand, dragged down mountain slopes by draft animals, floated downstream or carried by rail to the mill, and then sawn, graded, and stacked for drying. He tells of buying timber rights in a land market filled with "sharp" operators, where titles and surveys were often contested and kinship and custom were on an equal footing with the law. Gennett saw more than potential "boardfeet" when he looked at a tree. He recalls, for instance, his efforts to convince the U.S. Forest Service to purchase undisturbed areas of wilderness at a time when its mandate was to condemn and buy up farmed-out and clear-cut land. One such sale initiated by Gennett would become the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness in North Carolina. Filled with logging lore and portraits of the southern mountains and their people, Sound Wormy adds an absorbing new chapter to the region's natural and environmental history.

Download or read book Southern Cultures written by Harry L. Watson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Winter 2014 Issue brings us duels and Dashboard Poets, eels and faux villages, a beloved television icon, interviews with liberal hero Walter Mondale and conservative activist Jack Kershaw, Civil War battlefi eld monuments, and more. From familiar faces and famous legends to humble commemorations and invented histories, we explore the tensions between preservation and progress that have forged the region as we know it.

Download or read book Graceland At Last written by Margaret Renkl and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-09-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this luminous collection” a New York Times columnist “delivers smart, beautifully crafted personal and political observations” on the American south (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Margaret Renkl’s New York Times columns offer readersa weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling collection. “People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland. In a patchwork quilt of essays, Renkl also highlights other voices of the South. Teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find a generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman. From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book for Southerners and non-Southerners alike. “E.B. White suggested that newspapers cover nature as eagerly as commerce. . . . Renkl . . . seems like a belated answer to White . . . [crafting] graceful sentences that White would surely have enjoyed.” —Wall Street Journal “Margaret Renkl’s perspective feels like a guiding light . . . No matter where you’re from, column after column, Renkl will make you feel right at home.” ?Pittsburgh Post-Gazette