Bøger udgivet af University of Georgia Press

Featuring seven stories and a novella, David Crouses powerful debut collection depicts people staring down the complicated mysteries of their own identities. Who are you? a homeless man asks his would-be benefactor in the title story. On the surface its a simple question, but one that would stump many of the characters who inhabit these carefully rendered tales.In the edgy novella Click Jonathans ongoing photo-documentary of a prostitute exposes how little intensity remains between him and his fiance, Margaret. While Jonathan is plagued with doubts about his motivations and abilities as an artist, Margaret is worn out by her obligations not just to her needy husband-to-be but to all the men in her life. In The Ugliest Boy, Justin develops an odd friendship with Steven, his girlfriends brother. Steven was disfigured by fire in a childhood accident. Justin bears wounds more deeply hidden. The two forge a strange bond based on their anger and pain.Crouses stories often involve people trapped on the margins of society, confronted by diminishing possibilities and various forms of mental illness. The junior executive in Code worries about his joband his sanityamid a sudden and wide-sweeping corporate layoff. A manic-depressive father and his teenage daughter dress as vampires and embark on a strange Halloween journey through their suburban neighborhood in the darkly humorous Morte Infinita. In Swimming in the Dark a family gives up on itself. Shredded slowly over the years since the accidental drowning of the eldest son, the remaining family members seek their own separate peace, however imperfect.The men and women in Copy Cats are unwilling and often unable to differentiate reality from fantasy. Cursed with what one of them calls a pollution of ideas, these are people at war with their own imaginations.

Flannery OConnor spent most of her life in Georgia. Most of OConnors fiction is also set in the state, in locales rich in symbolism and the ambience of southern rural and small-town life. Filled with contemporary and historical photos, this guide introduces OConnors readers to the places where the great writer lived and workedplaces whose features and details sometimes found their way into her fiction.

Retired professor Andrew Lachlan has returned to his family home on a lake in central Georgia to die. And yet he has never felt so alive, so ready to learn about the natural world around him. Having taught all his life, he is ready for solitude. But a young country boy, Willie Sullivan, disrupts Lachlan's search for order and rekindles memories he thought long dead.Lachlan also finds Callie McKenzie, a woman he loved years earlier, and they soon begin to see in each other reflections of the lives they once led. Lachlan's journal of his year by the lake leads him to a deeper understanding of himself and the world.

Reading the Roots is an unprecedented anthology of outstanding early writings about American nature--a rich, influential, yet critically underappreciated body of work. Rather than begin with Henry David Thoreau, who is often identified as the progenitor of American nature writing, editor Michael P. Branch instead surveys the long tradition that prefigures and anticipates Thoreau and his literary descendants. The selections in Reading the Roots describe a diversity of landscapes, wildlife, and natural phenomena, and their authors represent many different nationalities, cultural affiliations, religious views, and ideological perspectives. The writings gathered here also range widely in terms of subject, rhetorical form, and disciplinary approach--from promotional tracts and European narratives of contact with Native Americans to examples of scientific theology and romantic nature writing. The volume also includes a critical introduction discussing the cultural, scientific, and literary value of early American nature writing; headnotes that contextualize all authors and selections; and a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary sources in the field. Reading the Roots at last makes early American landscapes--and a range of literary responses to them--accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

A fresh look at the great writer in relation to six contemporaries he had contact with on both sides of the Atlantic.

Has pop burnt itself out?Paul Morley takes the reader on an epic drive through the history of music to find out. A succession of celebrities, geniuses and other protagonists led by Madonna, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, John Cage and Wittgenstein appear to give their points of view. Detours and sights along the way include Missy Elliot, Jarvis Cocker, Eminem, Human League, Radiohead, Lou Reed, "Now! That's What I Call Music," Ornette Coleman and the ghost of Elvis Presley.

This haunting debut novel invites us to explore the boundaries between beliefs, desires, obsessions, and madness. Karen Salyer McElmurray's story is set in Mining Hollow, Kentucky, where we meet Ruth Blue Wallen; her husband, Earl; and their son, Andrew. Ruth longs to know God, the only escape she can find in a world that has shown her spiritual, emotional, and sensual defeat. Earl yearns for the music-making of his past, now lost as he makes a living as a coal miner. Andrew desires the affection of a boyhood friend, an expression of love considered sinful in rural Kentucky. And with the divinely inspired yet tormenting help of his mother, in a world of deeply and tragically conflicting desires, Andrew must choose to live or die--he must choose an uncertain love or nothing at all.

A loamy volume of verse thematically inspired, Working the Dirt celebrates Southerners' connections to the land. The selected poems share themes of gardening, farming, and the rich Southern soil. The approximately one hundred poets, known and lesser-known, living and dead, include: Fred Chappell, Walter McDonald, A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, Tom Dent, Jesse Stuart, Jim Wayne Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marion Montgomery, James Whitehead, C. D. Wright, George Scarbrough, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Thad Stem, Jr., William Sprunt, Donald Justice, Thomas Rabbitt, James Dickey, Rick Lott, John Allison, Edwin Godsey, Richard Jackson, Nikki Giovanni, Alvin Aubert, Margaret Walker, Emily Hiestand, Robert Gibbons, John Stone, Coppie Green, Bonnie Roberts, Coleman Barks, Anne George, Edward Eaton, Margaret Gibson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, Jane Gentry, Rodney Jones, Dannye Romine, Miller Williams, George Garrett, Sandra Agricola, Patricia Hooper, Gerald Berrax, Gibbons Ruark, Catherine Savage Brosman, Loretta Cobb, and Pattiann Rogers.

Jacob Smith, a prominent black lawyer and political and civil rights leader in New York in the segregated 1950s, was assassinated when his son, Jock, was eight years old. If this memoir told only of a child's loving remembrance of his father (and a desire to follow in his footsteps, thus Climbing Jacob's Ladder), it would be a success. But Jock Smith grew up to become a lawyer himself, a college professor, one of the first African American assistant attorneys general in Alabama, and then a highly successful plaintiff's lawyer, sports agent, sports memorabilia collector, and inspirational speaker. Now a national partner to superlawyer Johnnie Cochran, Smith operates in a fascinating world of power, wealth, fame, and faith. Climbing Jacob's Ladder tells it all. Jock Smith is a great storyteller, and co-author Paul Hemphill is a great writer. Their collaboration brings us an insider's view of the legal system, big-time sports collecting, contemporary black life, evangelism, and civil rights.

I volunteered to go to Vietnam, but as a conscientious objector to war. . . . While most of these events took place in the midst of the war, this is not exactly a story about the war, but a story of rescue. Most of the children I helped save--scalped, burned, blasted, or shot when I found them--are now adults, parents or even grandparents themselves. . . . And while many of my funny, wise, reckless, young American friends of those days are dead, what they did and what they learned is not. It is as if all of us were being watched, all of us journeying under a brilliant blue sky that is the face of heaven.--from the preface

Analyzing his own writing and that of his teachers, and reflecting on the writing advice he had been given over the years, Carroll Dale Short's epiphany was the recognition of a dozen practical fundamentals of good writing. As one would expect from the author of The Shining Shining Path (available from NewSouth Books), the book is also fun to read. Drawing upon example after example, Short reveals the shortcuts and techniques of strong writing, providing easy ways to use transitions, enhance narrative sequence, and spice up dialogue. Reading this tool kit will improve any writer, from expert to novice.

Dillingham shows how Melville used the novels as a workshop for his own salvation by investing his characters with the ideas and philosophies that he found compelling. Linking Melville's enigmatic narratives with the artist's own epic of self-exploration, Melville's Later Novels presents a deeply original portrait of a life sustained by art.