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By turns elegiac and eccentric, inscribing the South's hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, Lives of the Saints is the debut novel that marked Nancy Lemann as a rising literary star.

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. This is a sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

The 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.

Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, this poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew.

Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a terrible slump. He's batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife; and he secretly fears he's inherited his mother's insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder flees, negotiating his way through madcap adventures and flashbacks to childhood.

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. Band of Angels displays Robert Penn Warren's prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

This novel is based on the murder case known as the "Kentucky Tragedy". In 1826, Jeremiah Beaumont stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. This is the story of his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment.

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. 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.

The dissolution of Molly and Will's marriage is gradual - a casualty of carelessness and neglect. Bewildered, overwhelmed with guilt and their love for their three children, Molly and Will begin to disentangle themselves from each other as the surge of family life continues around them.

Originally published in 1963, this powerful novel spools a rewarding, dramatic storyline while it probes the deeper philosophical search for self-definition in modern life and the symbolic demise of the agrarian South from technological progress.

Fred Chappell's The Gaudy Place is perhaps the first novel to depict the society of the street people of the New South and their relationship to the middle class. For its wry portrayal of displacement and injustice this novel was awarded the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize. The street-smart teenager Arkie triggers the events of the story with his ambition to rise in economic status. He proposes business deals to the prostitute Clemmie and the successful con man Oxie, a hustler who aspires to political office. When the prank of a middle-class teenager, Linn Harper, offers Oxie the surprising opportunity to gain a foothold in respectable society, an unexpected climax reveals the interdependence of all social levels in a culture too quickly changing from a rural to an urban character. Here is a small world in which quick wits and wily survival skills are necessary and admirable, even though the race is not always to the swift. Originally published in 1973, The Gaudy Place is drily humorous, darkly ironic, fast-moving, and entertaining. Its best strength is its gallery of sharply drawn, fondly observed characters unknowingly at odds with one another.

When Thea Tamborella returns to New Orleans after a ten-year absence, she finds a city gripped by fear. The city's haves and have-nots glare at each other across a yawning racial divide as fear turns to hate and an us-against-them mentality.

The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories and novellas takes its title is credited as Wolfe's final effort. It tells the story of the Joyner family and conveys Wolfe's fine sense of family traits, rooted in a traceable past.

Anson Page thought he had left beautiful old Pompey's Head, South Carolina for good. Now as a lawyer, he's going back to investigate the mystery of a novelist. As he sets about resolving business matters, he collides headlong with the power of lineage.

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.

Ethyl Mae Coco's rambling Victorian home on North Gladiola - the Main Street of Tula Springs, Louisiana - is the only residence left at the business end of town, but it's a hotbed for chaotic comedy.