Download or read book The Real South written by Scott Romine and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular regional magazines, for example -- Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds. Romine addresses a major critical problem -- "authenticity" -- in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an "authentic" or "real" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed. From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

Download or read book The New Writers of the South written by Charles East and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories and selections from novels by twenty writers depict the complexities of life in the modern South

Download or read book Voices from Louisiana written by Ann Brewster Dobie and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices from Louisiana provides thoughtful, timely profiles of some of the state’s most highly regarded and popular contemporary authors. Readers interested in Louisiana’s rich literary tradition will appreciate these evocative essays on writers whose works emanate from the cultures and landscapes of the Gulf South. Ann Brewster Dobie explores the works of eleven well-known authors and concludes with a look at several emerging talents. These writers work in a broad range of genres, from coming-of-age stories and historical narratives that recover the voices of silenced and oppressed peoples, to crime thrillers set in New Iberia and New Orleans, to poetic invocations of the natural world and narratives capturing the realities of working-class lives. Whether native to the state or transplants, these writers produce works that reflect the vibrant culture that defines the intricate literary landscape of the Pelican State. Dobie highlights the careers of Darrell Bourque, James Lee Burke, Ernest Gaines, Tim Gautreaux, Shirley Ann Grau, Greg Guirard, William Joyce, Julie Kane, Tom Piazza, Martha Serpas, and James Wilcox. Newcomers also profiled include Wiley Cash, Ashley Mace Havird, Anne L. Simon, Katy Simpson Smith, Ashley Weaver, Steve Weddle, and Ken Wheaton.

Download or read book Follow the Story written by James B. Stewart and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable guide to nonfiction writing from the Columbia Journalism School professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist behind the bestsellers Blind Eye, Blood Sport, and Den of Thieves. In Follow the Story, bestselling author and journalist James B. Stewart teaches you the techniques of compelling narrative writing, from nonfiction books to articles, feature stories, or memoirs. Stewart provides concrete directions for conceiving, reporting, structuring, and writing nonfiction—techniques that he has used in his own successful books and stories. By using examples from his own work, Stewart illustrates systematically a way of thinking about and executing stories, a method that has helped numerous reporters and Columbia students become better writers. Follow the Story examines in detail: - How an idea is conceived - How to “sell” ideas to editors and publishers - How to report the nonfiction story - Six models that can be used for any nonfiction story - How to structure the narrative story - How to write introductions, endings, dialogue, and description - How to introduce and develop characters - How to use literary devices - Pitfalls to avoid Learn a clear way of looking at the world with the alert curiosity that is the first indispensable step toward good writing.

Download or read book Southern Writers at Century s End written by Jeffrey J. Folks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers. Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.

Download or read book Oil and Gas Field Code Master List 1997 written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On the City s Rim Politics and Policy in Suburbia written by Frederick M. Wirt and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The New Gilded Age written by David Remnick and published by Random House. This book was released on 2001-03-01 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In keeping with its tradition of sending writers out into America to take the pulse of our citizens and civilization, The New Yorker over the past decade has reported on the unprecedented economy and how it has changed the ways in which we live. This new anthology collects the best of these profiles, essays, and articles, which depict, in the magazine's inimitable style, the mega-, meta-, monster-wealth created in this, our new Gilded Age. Who are the barons of the new economy? Profiles of Martha Stewart by Joan Didion, Bill Gates by Ken Auletta, and Alan Greenspan by John Cassidy reveal the personal histories of our most influential citizens, people who affect our daily lives even more than we know. Who really understands the Web? Malcolm Gladwell analyzes the economics of e-commerce in "Clicks and Mortar." Profiles of two of the Internet's most respected analysts, George Gilder and Mary Meeker, expose the human factor in hot stocks, declining issues, and the instant fortunes created by an IPO. And in "The Kids in the Conference Room," Nicholas Lemann meets McKinsey & Company's business analysts, the twenty-two-year-olds hired to advise America's CEOs on the future of their business, and the economy. And what defines this new age, one that was unimaginable even five years ago? Susan Orlean hangs out with one of New York City's busiest real estate brokers ("I Want This Apartment"). A clicking stampede of Manolo Blahniks can be heard in Michael Specter's "High-Heel Heaven." Tony Horwitz visits the little inn in the little town where moguls graze ("The Inn Crowd"). Meghan Daum flees her maxed-out credit cards. Brendan Gill lunches with Brooke Astor at the Metropolitan Club. And Calvin Trillin, in his masterly "Marisa and Jeff," portrays the young and fresh faces of greed. Eras often begin gradually and end abruptly, and the people who live through extraordinary periods of history do so unaware of the unique qualities of their time. The flappers and tycoons of the 1920s thought the bootleg, and the speculation, would flow perpetually—until October 1929. The shoulder pads and the junk bonds of the 1980s came to feel normal—until October 1987. Read as a whole, The New Gilded Age portrays America, here, today, now—an epoch so exuberant and flush and in thrall of risk that forecasts of its conclusion are dismissed as Luddite brays. Yet under The New Yorker's examination, our current day is ex-posed as a special time in history: affluent and aggressive, prosperous and peaceful, wired and wild, and, ultimately, finite.

Download or read book Miss Undine s Living Room written by James Wilcox and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A candidate for the office of Superintendent of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, middle-aged matron Olive Mackie of Tula Springs, Louisiana, finds her political aspirations thwarted when her ninety-one-year-old Great Uncle L.D. comes under suspicion for murder. Police don't believe that L.D.'s home-care attendant would commit suicide by jumping from a second-floor window -- but Olive, who has heard her uncle demonstrate his excellent memory by reciting important dates in history over and over, thinks he would. Before justice can be done, half the staff of City Hall, a home ec teacher, an uninspired dentist, the principal of a disreputable private school, and several adulterous housewives are implicated in James Wilcox's spectacular plot. His third Tula Springs novel, Miss Undine's Living Room is not only a masterful comedy, exuberant and irreverent, but also a deeply felt examination of the education of the mind and the spirit.

Download or read book Sweetbitter written by Reginald Gibbons and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-02-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award “Reginald Gibbons’s first novel takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule—not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white Reuben Sweetbitter and Martha Clarke, a white woman, fall in love. . . . Reuben and Martha’s love is strong, but, dishearteningly, racism is stronger. Timely in the subject of interracial love, this authentic, richly -detailed novel plumbs sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one’s identity, bringing the -anguish of the two young lovers to life. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal “Far more than a spellbinding love story . . . a novel wide and deep in its understanding. . . . An unforgettable story, a remarkable piece of work.”—Dallas Morning News “I love this novel: it sings, it soars. Simultaneously deft and deep, it brings a lost world back to brilliant light.”—Andrea Barrett “Surprising in every way. . . . The novel’s ending is as strong as its beginning—terrifying and beautiful, a true tour de force.”—Chicago Tribune

Download or read book The Book of Changes written by Richard H. W. Dillard and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Book of Changes is a great Chinese box of a novel, strewn with conundrums, misleading clues, disintegrating landscapes, false starts, fake quotations, magicians, werewolves, severed hands and heads, and a sinister German dwarf who bumps from scene to scene in various disguises, sexes, and shapes", wrote the New York Times about R. H. W. Dillard's first novel in 1974. "Nothing remains intact for long: Men become women or change into screaming wolves; women appear in men's boxer shorts; suburban folk under the names of Herbert Hoover, Oscar Wilde, and the brothers Marx drift in and out of the novel; even that ingenious puppet-maker and puller of strings, Vladimir Nabokov, shows up briefly". In the midst of this bizarre world, Dillard stages an intricate detective story that will keep the reader on edge from its baffling beginning to its astonishing end. Under the shadowy lead of amateur sleuth Sir Hugh Fitz-Hyffen, evidence arises that links events stretching from the mountains of Romania to the ancient strongholds of Scotland to the tenements of Newark, New Jersey. An enormous diamond, a mask said to be that of Fu Manchu, and a series of brutal "Zodiac" killings are but three of the strands in the complex net of this thoroughly postmodern and highly entertaining mystery.

Download or read book Heavenly Days written by James Wilcox and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of twenty years and seven novels James Wilcox has established himself as one of the most distinctive and beloved voices of the South, a comic master whose work has been praised by writers as diverse as Robert Penn Warren and Anne Tyler. From Modern Baptists—which was both included in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon and featured in GQ’s list of the forty-five best books published in the last forty-five years—to Plain and Normal, he has charted the collision of the stubbornly genteel Old South with a world of franchise food and a brimming melting pot, as the manners and mores that have always been its cherished hallmark threaten to vanish completely. In Heavenly Days, his first novel in five years, Wilcox returns to the familiar landscape of Tula Springs, Louisiana, and introduces a sweetly hapless heroine trying to come to terms with a way of life for which she is utterly unequipped. Lou Jones—middle-aged, well educated, and faultlessly sensitive—has found herself unaccountably living in a $295,000 faux-Cajun cabin (her husband’s dream house) and working as the receptionist in a fundamentalist health emporium housed in a defunct train station. Hardly the thing for a Ph.D. in music theory, yet Lou consoles herself with making valuable contributions to the American Bassoon Society’s newsletter, and with drawing the town’s spiritually needy citizens into her beneficent orbit. But her well-meaning interventions soon involve her in a series of increasingly complicated misunderstandings, as she becomes embroiled in evading a gun-toting tax collector, trying to befriend her aloof housekeeper and her unnervingly elegant mother, waging an ongoing and fruitless battle over the ownership of her husband's childhood home, and wrestling with a hotly disputed loblolly dresser. These are all distractions, though, from Lou’s true, if unacknowledged, aim: to find the grace of heaven in the days of her own life through the bonds of love. Heavenly Days marks the welcome return of James Wilcox—a gift to his longtime readers and to an entire generation of new ones.

Download or read book Guest of a Sinner written by James Wilcox and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-01-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is 22 cats that drive the dazzlingly handsome Eric Thorsen to distraction and into the apartment -- if not immediately the arms -- of Wanda Skopinski, the rather mousy woman he meets at church when she thrusts a lesbian romance novel upon him. The stench from downstairs drives him from both his rent-controlled apartment and his complacency as a not-quite-successful piano teacher. In his sixth novel, James Wilcox moves beyond the modern South he has etched so vividly and amusingly in the past to take on Manhattan. But somehow he manages to bring the city down to size.... The book is filled with as eccentric an array of characters and as much gentle kinkiness as any small-town chronicle.... A winning and consistently entertaining story." -- Vogue

Download or read book Still in Print written by Jan Nordby Gretlund and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism. Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the southern novel. Featuring: M. Thomas Inge on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain Clara Juncker on Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth Kathryn McKee on Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon Jan Nordby Gretlund on Pam Durban's So Far Back Tara Powell on Percival Everett's Erasure Tom Dasher on Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man Jean Cash on Larry Brown's Fay Carl Wieck on Chris Offutt's The Good Brother Owen W. Gilman Jr. on Barry Hannah's Yonder Stands Your Orphan Hans H. Skei on James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross Charles Israel on George Singleton's Work Shirts for Madmen John Grammer on Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman Scott Romine on James Wilcox's Heavenly Days Edwin T. Arnold on Donald Harington's Enduring Marcel Arbeit on Lewis Nordan's Lightning Song Thomas Ærvold Bjerre on Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land Richard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Download or read book Modern Baptists written by James Wilcox and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X. -- ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over -- moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown -- it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter. Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the past forty-five years, and among Toni Morrison's "favorite works by unsung writers" in U.S. News and World Report.

Download or read book Contemporary Southern Men Fiction Writers written by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully annotated bibliography lists sources of criticism for thirty-nine Southern male authors, each of whom has published at least one significant book of fiction between 1970 and 1994.

Download or read book Contemporary American Fiction written by Kenneth Millard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-21 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.