Download or read book The Voice at the Back Door written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1994-03-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret. In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.
Download or read book The Stories written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fire in the Morning written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome back into print her first novel, and her new readers will discover the sources of her notable talent in this book. Published in 1948 to extraordinary attention from such eminent writers as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, this father-and-son story revolves around an old southern theme of family grievances and vendettas. Fire in the Morning recounts the conflict between two families extending over two generations up to the 1930s.The arrival of an innocent stranger flares old arguments and ignites new passions. In Spencer's compelling tale of the half-forgotten violence, the well-deep understanding of father and son, Kinloch Armstrong, the young hero, confronts mysteries of the past. His wife, a newcomer to the area and its legacies, makes friends with a family of traditional rivals. After she is involved in a nighttime wreck and the death of a local man, the past gradually comes to light, and the two families once again become caught up in revelations, hatreds, and conflicts. Spencer faithfully renders the setting--a small, dusty Mississippi town--and the surrounding countryside as it was in the early twentieth century.
Download or read book The Southern Woman written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short fiction spans six decades of writing and includes ten stories that are being published for the first time.
Download or read book The Snare written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reprinting of a major southern writer's New Orleans novel that explores a young woman's temptation to live on the periphery of evil
Download or read book Elizabeth Spencer Novels Stories LOA 344 written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 831 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow South Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing--three novels and nineteen stories--from a career spanning more than six decades. The Voice at the Back Door (1957), greeted by The New Yorker as "a practically perfect novel" and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer board (which awarded no prize in 1957). Also included in this volume are The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's most famous work, a deftly poignant comedy about Americans abroad that was adapted to the screen by Guy Green; and a second superb Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), reminiscent of Henry James's novels in its atmosphere, interiority, and concern with transplanted Americans. Spencer excelled in the short story form and this volume presents a career-spanning selection by editor Michael Gorra that ranges from the early "First Dark" (1959), a kind of ghost story about a spectral oversized house in a Southern town, to the valedictory "The Wedding Visitor" (2013), about the refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define one's adult life. Spencer's special focus was families, and few writers have so brilliantly plumbed the passions that unite them and the inner upheavals that can tear them apart.
Download or read book Landscapes of the Heart written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, she has known in her life. From her idyllic childhood in small-town Mississippi onward, a questioning spirit and voracity for reading and writing shape Spencer's course: her formal and informal educations at Vanderbilt and in Rome, Florence, New York, and Montreal, and her break with the culturally rigid segregated society from which she sprang; her friendships with such great writers as Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren; and her own many remarkable literary successes. A deeply affecting memoir by an esteemed American author, Landscapes of the Heart reveals Spencer to be both a part of and forever apart from her beloved southern roots.
Download or read book The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. Collected in this volume are The Light in the Piazza, which is her signature piece, and six other Italian tales in which her American characters encounter and respond to the mysteries of Italian mores.
Download or read book The Southern Woman written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning collection of stories from “one of the foremost chroniclers of the American South” (The Washington Post), including the novella “Light in the Piazza”—featuring an introduction by Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women Over the course of a fifty-year career, Elizabeth Spencer wrote masterly, lyrical fiction about southerners. An outstanding storyteller who was unjustly denied a Pulitzer for her anti-racist novel The Voice at the Back Door despite being the unanimous choice of the judges, she is recognized as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction, infusing her work with elegant precision and empathy. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s short stories, displaying her range of place—the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after World War II, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance
Download or read book This Crooked Way written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amos Dudley's obsession with the idea that he is particularly blessed by God leads him into a strange isolationism.
Download or read book HRH written by Elizabeth Holmes and published by Celadon Books. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** Veteran style journalist Elizabeth Holmes expands her popular Instagram series, So Many Thoughts, into a nuanced look at the fashion and branding of the four most influential members of the British Royal Family: Queen Elizabeth II; Diana, Princess of Wales; Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge; and Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex. Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle are global style icons, their every fashion choice chronicled and celebrated. With all eyes on them, the duchesses select clothes that send a message about their values, interests, and priorities. Their thoughtful sartorial strategies follow in the footsteps of Queen Elizabeth II and Diana, Princess of Wales, two towering figures known for using their personal style to great acclaim. With one section devoted to each woman, HRH is a celebration of their stories and their style, pairing hundreds of gorgeous photographs with extensive research. A picture emerges of the British monarchy’s evolution and the power of royal fashion, showing there’s always more than what meets the eye.
Download or read book Country Churchyards written by Eudora Welty and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2000 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her 91st year, this book includes 90 of Welty's photos along with a conversation in which she shares her impressions and memories of the 1930s and 1940s when she rambled through Mississippi cemeteries taking pictures.
Download or read book The Edward Tales written by Elizabeth Spencer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-03-25 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In conferring upon Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer (1921–2019) the 2013 Rea Award for the Short Story, the jury said that at the then age of ninety-two, she “has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters.” Over a celebrated six-decade career, Spencer published every type of literary fiction: novels and short stories, a memoir, and a play. Like her best-known work, The Light in the Piazza, most of her narratives explore the inner lives of restless, searching southern women. Yet one mercurial male character, Edward Glenn, deserves attention for the way he insists on returning to her pages. Speaking of Edward in unusually personal terms, Spencer admitted a strong attraction to his type: the elusive, intelligent southern man, “maybe an unresolved part of my psyche.” In The Edward Tales, Sally Greene brings together the four narratives in which Edward figures: the play For Lease or Sale (1989) and three short stories, “The Runaways” (1994), “Master of Shongalo” (1996), and “Return Trip” (2009). The collection allows readers to observe Spencer’s evolving style while offering glimpses of the moral reasoning that lies at the heart of all her work. Greene’s critical introduction helpfully places these narratives within the context of Spencer’s entire body of writing. The Edward Tales confirms Spencer’s place as one of our most beloved and accomplished writers.
Download or read book The Secret Gospel of Mark written by Spencer Reece and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exquisite memoir of a life saved by poetry. "This is a portrait of the artist, narrated by a priest and a poet and a gay man with tenderness and searing honesty. Spencer Reece weaves the poetry he loves into how he has lived, the poetry as solace and relief, as confirmation and rescue, as redemption." —Colm Toíbín The Secret Gospel of Mark is a powerful dynamo of a story that delicately weaves the author's experiences with an appreciation for seven great literary touchstones: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Mark Strand, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In speaking to the beauty these poets' works inspire in him, Reece finds the beauty of his own life's journey, a path that runs from coming of age as a gay teenager in the 1980s, Yale, alcoholism, a long stint as a Brooks Brothers salesman, Harvard Divinity School, and leads finally to hard-won success as a poet, reconciliation with his family, and the fulfillment of finding his life's work as an Episcopal priest. Reece's writing approaches the truth and beauty of the writers who have influenced him; elliptical and direct, always beautifully rendered.
Download or read book The Dark Fantastic written by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
Download or read book The Creep written by Michael LaPointe and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A deep, weird and uncanny tale" —Sheila Heti "A book to devour"—Iain Reid "Sinister good fun" —Lee Henderson "Gripping and unassumingly smart" —Lauren Oyler A journalist with a history of bending the facts uncovers a story about a medical breakthrough so astonishing it needs no embellishment--but behind the game-changing science lies a gruesome secret. A respected byline in the culture pages of the venerable New York magazine The Bystander, journalist Whitney Chase grapples with a mysterious compulsion to enhance her coverage with intriguing untruths and undetectable white lies. She calls it "the creep"--an overpowering need to improve the story in the telling. And she has a particular genius for getting away with it. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Whitney yearns to transition from profiling rock stars and novelists to covering the stories that "really matter." When a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with a potentially massive story about a game-changing medical discovery, Whitney believes she's finally found a story that doesn't need any enhancement. The brilliant and charismatic doctor behind the breakthrough claims she's found "the Holy Grail of medical science": a synthetic blood substitute that, if viable, promises to save millions of lives, and make her corporate backers rich beyond measure. But when Whitney's investigation of this apparent medical miracle puts her on the trail of a string of grisly fatalities across the country, she becomes inexorably tied to a much darker and more nefarious story than even she could imagine. Set against the ramp-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the decline of print journalism, Michael LaPointe's panoramic, ingeniously plotted debut paints an affecting portrait of an increasingly unequal twenty-first century, exploring how deceitfulness, self-enhancement, and confidently delivered lies can be transfused into fact and constitute a broader violence against the social fabric and public trust.
Download or read book The Drowning House written by Elizabeth Black and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping suspense story about a woman who returns to Galveston, Texas after a personal tragedy and is irresistibly drawn into the insular world she’s struggled to leave. Photographer Clare Porterfield's once-happy marriage is coming apart, unraveling under the strain of a family tragedy. When she receives an invitation to direct an exhibition in her hometown of Galveston, Texas, she jumps at the chance to escape her grief and reconnect with the island she hasn't seen for ten years. There Clare will have the time and space to search for answers about her troubled past and her family's complicated relationship with the wealthy and influential Carraday family. Soon she finds herself drawn into a century-old mystery involving Stella Carraday. Local legend has it that Stella drowned in her family's house during the Great Hurricane of 1900, hanged by her long hair from the drawing room chandelier. Could Stella have been saved? What is the true nature of Clare's family's involvement? The questions grow like the wildflower vines that climb up the walls and fences of the island. And the closer Clare gets to the answers, the darker and more disturbing the truth becomes. Steeped in the rich local history of Galveston, The Drowning House portrays two families, inextricably linked by tragedy and time. "The Drowning House marks the emergence of an impressive new literary voice. Elizabeth Black's suspenseful inquiry into dark family secrets is enriched by a remarkable succession of images, often minutely observed, that bring characters, setting, and story sharply into focus." —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
