Blair

A middle-aged woman’s unlikely and hilarious tardy coming-of-age.

The story follows Laura in her home in Baltimore and elsewhere through her fiftieth year. Each chapter marks her encounter with a new character—a family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangers–each offering their own brand of wisdom or judgement or wacky opinion. Somehow, through these entanglements, Laura begins to gather bits and pieces of the self-knowledge she is lacking. Most, if not all, coming-of-age stories are about young people, but this is a middle-aged coming-of-age.

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance’s life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance’s confidante. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era—labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of communists, the devastation of the environment—and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear’s 2023 inauguration and an interview by Barbara Kingsolver.

Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters—a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in  twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.   

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father. 

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy.

In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. “The reader is left,” the codebreaker wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.” But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.

Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.

Try out Prestwood's cipher at cipherthebook.com!

Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel.

When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events—upending the lives of Leonard’s rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening.

Susan Gilmore’s love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She’s the daughter of a revival preacher’s son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a “homespun Pilgrim’s Progress.”

A little girl magically transforms into a mermaid and goes on an underwater adventure with her new dolphin friend.

Nell lives on the coast of North Carolina and longs to be part of the underwater world she sees off the end of the pier in front of her house. One day her wish is granted by a friendly dolphin carrying a piece of magic pirate gold, and they go off together on a magical adventure.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

WINNER OF THE LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

Grieving her father’s death, Charlotte McConnell seeks solace at the Outer Banks inn owned by her best friend's family, but she finds them dealing with their own family drama and soon lands in the center of an unexpected love triangle.

Her hotel family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty and longing, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Long List

2023 Book of the Year, Southern Literary Review

Named a 2023 Great Group read, Women’s National Book Association

A South Carolina family endures one life-shattering day in 1961 in a town that lies in the shadow of a nuclear bomb plant.

It’s November 1, 1961, in a small town in South Carolina, and nuclear war is coming. Ten-year-old Wilson Porter believes this with every fiber of his being. He prowls his neighborhood for Communists and studies fallout pamphlets and the habits of his father, a scientist at the nuclear plant in town.

Meanwhile, his mother Nellie covertly joins an anti-nuclear movement led by angry housewives—and his father, Dean, must decide what to do with the damning secrets he’s uncovered at the nuclear plant. When tragedy strikes, the Porter family must learn to confront their fears—of the world and of each other.

An Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023

David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Finalist

A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is. 

One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family's door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family's journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core. 

Self-aware and intimate, Letter to My Transgender Daughter asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. 

Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

A wry and witty commentary on college sports and identity in the complicated social landscape of the South.

Ed Southern, lifelong fan of the Wake Forest University Demon Deacons, the smallest school in the NCAA's Power 5, set out to tell the story of how he got tangled, in vines of history and happenstance, with the two giants of his favorite sport: the Crimson Tide and the Clemson Tigers. He set out to tell how a North Carolina native crossed the shifty, unmarked border between Tobacco Road and the Deep South. He set out to tell how the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant, from beyond the grave, introduced him to his wife, a Birmingham native and die-hard Alabama fan.

While he was writing that story, though, 2020 came along.

Suddenly his questions had a new and urgent focus: Why do sports mean so much that so many will play and watch them in the face of a global pandemic? How have the South’s histories shaped its fervor for college sports? How have college sports shaped how southerners construct their identities, priorities, and allegiances? Why is North Carolina passionate about college basketball when its neighbors to the South live and die by college football? Does this have anything to do with North Carolina’s reputation as the most “progressive” southern state, a state many in the Deep South don't think is “really” southern? If college sports really do mean so much in the South, then why didn’t everyone down south wear masks or recognize that Black Lives Matter, even after the coaches told us to?

Fight Songs explores the connections and contradictions between the teams we root for and the places we plant our roots; between the virtues that sports are supposed to teach and the cutthroat business they've become; between the hopes of fans and the demands of the past, present, and future.

This book is the first in a series of small, richly illustrated books about North Carolina history through the decades. Originally published as hugely popular serialized articles for Our State magazine, this book chronicles events in North Carolina in the 1940s—a decade which began with the state gearing up for war just as the last formerly enslaved person passed away. The volume is not a textbook overview of the state’s history. Rather, each chapter focuses on a lively and illuminating set of events in the era, such as the music explosion around John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the eastern part of the state and Earl Scruggs and traditional string band music in the west, the polio pandemic, shipbuilding in wartime, a harsh era of hurricanes and floods, as well as tobacco as the king of the farming and industrial sectors.

The book contains color vintage photographs and illustrations. The author, writer, professor, and musician, Philip Gerard, has published widely, including an iconic novel about the Wilmington coup of 1898, Cape Fear Rising, and is beloved in North Carolina, especially among Our State readers.

This book is the second in a series of small, richly illustrated books about North Carolina history through the decades. Originally published as hugely popular serialized articles for Our State magazine, this book chronicles events in North Carolina in the 1950s—a decade which began with a postwar boom in transportation, travel, and progress while some North Carolinians also began to speak out for their rightful piece of prosperity and freedom. The volume is not a textbook overview of the state’s history. Rather, each chapter focuses on a lively and illuminating set of events in the era such as the fight for recognition by the Lumbee Tribe, the opening of an art museum with a collection owned by the people of North Carolina, the formation of Research Triangle Park, and the birth of the civil rights era at a small lunch counter.

The book contains color vintage photographs and illustrations. The author—writer, professor, and musician, Philip Gerard—has published widely, including an iconic novel about the Wilmington coup of 1898, Cape Fear Rising, and is beloved in North Carolina, especially among Our State readers.

Ganador del Concurso de libros infantiles de Emory Global Health Institute de 2020.

¿Busca formas honestas pero positivas de hablar con los niños sobre el Coronavirus-19 (Covid-19)? AYUDANTES EN COVID-19 describe la pandemia de forma objetiva pero optimista. Este cuento asegura a los niños y sus padres que muchas personas, incluidos los niños mismos, están ayudando a combatir el virus. En AYUDANTES EN COVID-19, las bellas y coloridas ilustraciones de Kary Lee y las claras y reconfortantes palabras de Beth Bacon explican a los niños que, aunque se sientan asilados e indefensos, no están solos.

De hecho, al quedarse en casa durante la cuarentena, desempeñan un papel importante para ayudar a bajar la tasa de infección de coronavirus. Este libro ayuda a padres, maestros y bibliotecarios a conversar sobre muchos temas de la pandemia, como por ejemplo:

• El cierre de escuelas, parques y teatros debido a reglas de cuarentena o resguardo en el lugar
• Distanciamiento social
• Uso de mascarillas durante la pandemia
• Sentimientos de impotencia, aislamiento y aburrimiento causados por las reglas de distanciamiento social
• Investigación médica para poner fin a la pandemia
• Cancelación de eventos deportivos y fiestas de cumpleaños

Además, las páginas adicionales explican:

• Datos sobre el virus Covid-19
• Qué pueden hacer los niños para no adquirir Covid-19

Aun durante la pandemia, las comunidades de todo el mundo cuentan con muchos ayudantes para luchar contra esta nueva enfermedad: médicos, enfermeros, investigadores, científicos, agricultores, camioneros, recolectores de basura, comerciantes, empleados de correo, líderes gubernamentales, periodistas, y hasta niños en cuarentena.

A little boy named Alex learns about the wild geese who fly in the sky over the coastal waters of North Carolina. 

By day, his grandfather introduces him to the traditional art of carving decoys of ducks and geese in his workshop, and by night, the geese take Alex on a fantastical adventure.

Kids can do their part to help heal the world and stop the pandemic by getting a COVID vaccine.

After months of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing, kids have another way to help during the COVID-19 pandemic: they need to get a vaccine. With one little prick, kids can get protection from the virus and, in turn, help protect their family, their friends, and their community. In straightforward language, this book explains to kids how vaccines will help us rid the world of COVID-19 and how they have a role to play in that mission.

Coralee Harper struggles for justice for her dead brother and her own sanity in Depression-era rural Arkansas.

In 1926 in rural Green County, Arkansas, where cotton and poverty reign, young Coralee Harper hopes for a family and a place in her community, but when her brother Buddy is killed by a powerful sheriff, she can’t recover from his death or the injustice of his loss. When she begins to spot her dead brother around town, she wonders—is she clairvoyant, mistaken, or is she losing her mind?

What Coralee can’t fathom is that there are forces at work that threaten her and the very fabric of the town: Leroy Harrison, a newly minted, ambitious lawyer who makes a horrible mistake, landing him a judgeship and a guilty conscience for life; an evangelical preacher and his flock of snake-handling parishioners; the women of the town who, along with Coralee’s own mother, make up their own kind of jury for Coralee’s behavior; Sheriff Wiley Slocum who rules the entire field, harboring dark secrets of his own; and finally, Coralee’s husband Earl, who tries to balance his work at the cotton gin with his fight for family and Coralee’s life.

When Coralee ends up in a sanity hearing before Judge Leroy Harrison, the judge must decide both Coralee’s fate and his own. The chain of events following his decision draws him more deeply into the sheriff’s far-reaching sphere of influence, and reveals the destructive nature of power, even—and especially—his own.

At Gettysburg, PA, during three days of July 1863, 160,000 men fought one of the most fierce and storied battles of the US Civil War.

Nearly one in three of those men ended up a casualty of that battle, and when the two armies departed a few days later, 21,000 wounded remained. This book is the story of how those soldiers were cared for in a town of 2,500 people. Historian and author of several other guides to Gettysburg, 

James Gindlesperger provides a context for the medical and organizational constraints of the era and then provides details about the aid stations and field hospitals created in the aftermath of the battle. Filled with historical and contemporary photos, as well as stories about the soldiers and their healers, this book is a detailed guide for visitors to the site as well as others interested in American Civil War history.

Winner of the 2020 Emory Global Health Institute Competition.

Here’s a book that provides children honest yet positive information about Coronavirus (Covid-19). COVID-19 HELPERS gives kids the facts of the pandemic, but also offers hope. Mr. Rogers said that when things get scary, “Look for the helpers.” Likewise, this story reassures children and parents that many people from all walks of life—including kids themselves—are helping to fight the virus. In COVID-19 HELPERS, Kary Lee’s beautiful illustrations and Beth Bacon’s clear, comforting words help children understand that though they may feel isolated in these times, they are not alone.

In fact, by staying at home during the quarantine, kids are playing an important role in helping to reduce the coronavirus infection rate. This book helps parents, teachers, and librarians discuss many issues of the global pandemic, including:

• School closures, park closures, theater closures due to quarantine or shelter-in-place policies
• Social distancing
• Wearing masks during the pandemic
• Feelings of helplessness, isolation, and boredom caused by social distancing policies
• Medical research to end the pandemic
• Cancelled sporting events, cancelled birthday parties

Plus extra pages explaining:

Even during the global pandemic, communities everywhere have many helpers fighting this new disease, including doctors, nurses, researchers, scientists, farmers, truck drivers, garbage collectors, shopkeepers, postal workers, government leaders, reporters, and even kids living in shelter-in-place quarantines.

This book is also available in a Spanish language edition. It was selected by the Emory Global health Institute as the winner of an international competition for a children’s book coping about COVID from over 250 entries.

A hiking guide and photography book on North Carolina’s lookout towers.

In the 1920s and 1930s, forestry organizations built dozens of lookout structures in Western North Carolina as the backbone of a firefighting system. Many of these lookouts survive in North Carolina today— they represent some of the best destinations for hikers who want to see the incredible vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Part hiking guide and part photography collection, this book contains wonderful stories about the history and folklore of the lookouts and their fire lookout inhabitants, a detailed guide of hikes to each, and details about the views at the top—all provided by a local, long-term land preservationist and lookout fanatic, Peter J. Barr. Barr’s text is augmented by the amazing full-color photographs of well-known nature photographer Kevin Adams (North Carolina Waterfalls).

“Kim Powers's haunting and spellbinding novel Rules for Being Dead reads like an intoxicating blend of the best of Shirley Jackson, Alice Sebold and Fannie Flagg." —STARRED Review, Shelf Awareness

It's the late 1960s in McKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies—James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago—feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome boy in the projector booth. Then Clarke loses his beloved mother, and no one will tell him how she died. No one will tell her either. She is floating above the trees and movie screens of McKinney, trapped between life and death, searching for a glimpse of her final moments on this earth. Clarke must find the shattering truth, which haunts this darkly humorous and incredibly moving novel.

Wilhelmina, the world’s most beloved pet cat, is missing. Or is she? 

This boldly illustrated adventure features one very worried girl, two frayed dads, a backyard of perils, and sneaky references to great works of art. Based on a true story, a real family, and a real cat named Wilhelmina.

WINNER of the LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

“This sun-and-salt-kissed coming-of-age story reads like a wry, honest chat with a close friend.” —Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness

Evie Austin, native of Hatteras Island, North Carolina and baddest girl on the planet, has not lived her life in a straight line. There have been several detours—career snafus, bad romantic choices, a loved but unplanned child—not to mention her ill-advised lifelong obsession with boxer Mike Tyson. Evie is not plucky, but when life’s changes smash over her like the rough surf of the local shoreline, she muddles through—until that moment of loss and longing when muddling will no longer suffice. This is the story of what the baddest girl on the planet must find in herself when a bag of pastries, a new lover, or quick trip to Vegas won’t fix anything, and when something more than casual haplessness is required. The Baddest Girl on the Planet is inventive, sharp, witty, and poignant. Readers will want to jump in and advise this baddest girl on the planet—or at least just give her a shake or a hug—at every fascinating turn.

"Holding On To Nothing is a resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them." —Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.
In luminous prose, debut novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne brings us a present-day Appalachian story in the tradition of Lee Smith, Silas House, and Ron Rash, cast without sentiment or cliché, but with a genuine and profound understanding of the place and its people.

Little Turkle hatches into a world full of wonder on a barrier island off the Atlantic Coast where some people call turtles "turkles." 

He must journey from his nest in the warm beach sand to the cool, foaming waters of the ocean. When Little Turkle runs into trouble, a special friend helps him on his way to the waves.

"I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin," wrote journalist Molly Ivins. Ivins is one of the biggest hell-raisers profiled in this collection of essays by Hal Crowther, but there is plenty hell-raising and freedom-fighting to go around. 

Crowther is a writer whose own career is marked by sharp political and social commentary in the pages of national and regional outlets, from Time to the Atlanta Constitution to The Oxford American. In this collection, he turns his attention to best and the brightest of the recently departed generation in the South. 

These essays commemorate the passing of iconic Southern figures such as John Hope Franklin, Doc Watson, Judy Bonds, and James Dickey. Crowther has known most of the folks he profiles and has lived in their particular landscape for decades; he has some stories to tell, and he does so with a particular appreciation for his subjects’ accomplishments, their surroundings, and even, in the case of politicos Jesse Helms and George Wallace, their particular brand of notoriousness. Novelist and commentator Silas House, author of Southernmost and A Parchment of Leaves, introduces the collection.

Every September, on the first night of the new moon, there are those who vow they see a flaming ship sail three times past the coast of Ocracoke. No matter the direction or velocity of the wind, this fiery vessel moves swiftly toward the northeast, they say, always accompanied by an eerie wailing sound. The story of this ship is but one of the colorful legends intrinsic to the charm of North Carolina's historic coastland. From the northern tip of the Outer Banks to the lower end of the sweeping shoreline, there are stories to be found . . . and to be told with gusto, or awe, or sometimes with horror.

Charles Harry Whedbee was an elected judge in his native Greenville, North Carolina, for thirty-plus years, but his favorite place was the Outer Banks, Nags Head in particular. Whedbee was the author of five folklore collections. He died in 1990.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest.

From Blackbeard's den at Ocracoke, to the Hills of the Seven Sisters at Nags Head, to the misty swamps of Shallote, there is hardly an inch of territory along North Carolina's coast without a legend attached to it. Inlanders may be skeptical regarding the sometimes miraculous, often horror-filled tales that make up coastal folklore, but Outer Bankers accept the incredible as fact. But this book is more than a collection of coastal legends. It is an affectionate portrait of the people who daily pull a living out of the treacherous waters of the Atlantic . . . a tribute to the hardiness and courage that have made the Banker a rare breed . . . a breed whose true stories are, indeed, stranger than fiction.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest. Charles Harry Whedbee was an elected judge in his native Greenville, North Carolina, for thirty-plus years, but his favorite place was the Outer Banks, Nags Head in particular. Whedbee was the author of five folklore collections. He died in 1990.

Whedbee's collections of legends and folklore have become regional classics. The continuing popularity of these books stems from the author's intimate knowledge of the places, people, and events of which he writes. He gathers the mysteries, tales, legends, and lore that have been handed down for generations on the North Carolina coast and recounts them with a sensitivity for tradition that makes him a master at what he does.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest.

Charles Harry Whedbee was an elected judge in his native Greenville, North Carolina, for thirty-plus years, but his favorite place was the Outer Banks, Nags Head in particular. Whedbee was the author of five folklore collections. He died in 1990.

One August night, two young law students knocked three times on the huge door to Blackbeard's castle, spoke the secret password, and gained admission to a ceremony steeped in local legend. Judge Charles Harry Whedbee was one of those students, and he waited for over fifty years to tell the story of the night he drank from Blackbeard's Cup—the legendary silver-plated skull of Blackbeard the Pirate. For centuries, the people of eastern North Carolina have spun tales to explain local phenomena and bizarre happenings. For decades, Judge Whedbee collected and preserved that lore. In Blackbeard's Cup and Stories of the Outer Banks, he once again went to the source and returned with sixteen tales that attest to the rich oral tradition of the coastal area. Why does the stone arch over the entrance to Cedar Grove Cemetery in New Bern drip blood on passing mourners? Who carved the name CORA in the gigantic live oak tree on Hatteras Island? What causes the sound of cannons firing off the coast of Vandemere in the summer? How did the rare creature known as the sea angel come to be? Why did an Edenton doctor spend a fortune searching for buried treasure? These are only a few of the mysteries contained in this fifth collection from North Carolina's beloved raconteur.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest.

Charles Harry Whedbee was an elected judge in his native Greenville, North Carolina, for thirty-plus years, but his favorite place was the Outer Banks, Nags Head in particular. Whedbee was the author of five folklore collections. He died in 1990.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest.

When Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg arrived at Muddy Creek in January 1753, he deserved a rest. Sent by the Moravian Church to find land for a settlement, he headed west from Edenton, North Carolina, and spent a tortuous 3 ½ months locating a site, nearly dying of malaria in Granville County, nearly freezing to death near Boone. Today, most people would judge his efforts worth the hardship. He christened the tract on Muddy Creek Der Wachau—Wachovia. It was the future site of Winston-Salem. The people who followed came by an easier route. The Moravians who built Salem came from the north on the Great Wagon Road. R. J. Reynolds, the man who built Winston-Salem, came from the north, too, 120 years after the Moravians. A local writer once said the moving forces behind the hyphenated city were "the Salem conscience and the Winston purse." The Moravians established a tradition of diligence, resourcefulness, piety, and charity. The city's capitalists—chief among them the Reynolds, Hanes, and Gray families—built the greatest industrial center south of Richmond and east of Mississippi. Wachovia Bank and Trust Company grew into one of the best-run banks in the country. P. H. Hanes Knitting Company became the nation's greatest producer of knitwear. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company imported so much cigarette paper and tobacco that Winston-Salem—200 miles inland—was declared a port of entry. During its heyday, the company paid its local taxes by delivering a truckload of money to the courthouse steps—daily.

Winston-Salem: A History tells about the city's personalities: Marshall Kurfees, the persistent politician; Simon Green Atkins, who educated the African-Americans who made the city run; Z. Smith Reynolds, whose mysterious death defies explanation; F. Ross Johnson, the most hated man in town; Joe Camel, the reluctant advertising icon. It also tells about the city's coming of age. Since the traumatic buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989—one of the largest business deals in history—Winston-Salem has started redefining itself. In its efforts to attract new companies, cultivate new leadership, and address problems like race relations, it is confronting its future head-on and pointing confidently toward a new millennium.

Frank Tursi was a newspaper journalist for almost 30 years—the last 23 at the Winston-Salem Journal where he was the environmental and special-projects reporter. He has won numerous state and national writing awards for his environmental reporting, including the Scripps-Howard National Environmental Award and The Sierra Club's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. A graduate of East Carolina University, Tursi has contributed to such publications as USA Today and Civil War Times Illustrated. Frank is currently the Cape Lookout Coastkeeper for the N.C. Coastal Federation. He lives in Swansboro, North Carolina.

Over its fifty-year existence, John F. Blair, Publisher, was known for its Southern folklore—its tales of ghosts, goblins, ghouls, spirits, witches, devils, phantoms, haints, boogers, boo-daddies, plat-eyes, demons, apparitions, Doppelgangers, banshees, disappearing hitchhikers, pirate legends, ghost dogs, dog ghosts, dogs who see ghosts . . . In recognition of its golden anniversary, the company published this volume of twenty stories culled from its folklore collections. Readers will likely be impressed at the timeless quality of the tales, some of which have never been out of print since they first appeared in the 1960s. And you may be surprised to learn of their broad appeal, the collections having sold a total of over six hundred thousand copies. Some of these tales are now being enjoyed by their third generation of readers.

If you don’t know what a coffin baby is, read “Milk and Candy” by Randy Russell and Janet Barnett. If you’d like to meet a real-life pirate who’d make a better Hollywood character than any swashbuckler yet seen on celluloid, you’ll enjoy “Stede Bonnet” by Nancy Roberts. If there’s a place in your heart for a pair of lifesaving little dogs who’ve scampered on the same South Carolina beach for over a hundred years, try “Pawleys Island Terriers” by Elizabeth Robertson Huntsinger. If you prefer folklore with a historical touch, you can learn about Theodosia Burr Alston in Charles Harry Whedbee’s “Lady in Distress” and about Francis Marion in Daniel W. Barefoot’s “Ghostly Legacy of the Swamp Fox.” The folklorists included here claim stomping grounds from the high peaks and mountain hollows to the flatlands to the swamps to the barrier islands to the briny deep. What they share is a love of their subject and the ability to bring it to life on the page.

This anthology was compiled by the staff of John F. Blair, Publisher.

In 1963, Judge Charles Whedbee was asked to substitute on a Greenville, NC, morning show called Carolina Today while one of the program's regulars was in the hospital. Whedbee took the opportunity to tell some of the Outer Banks stories he'd heard during his many summers at Nags Head. The station received such a volume of mail in praise of his tale-telling that he was invited to remain even after the man he was substituting for returned to the air. "He had a way of telling a story that really captured me," said one of the program's co-hosts. "Whether he was talking about a sunset, a ghost, or a shipwreck, I was there, living every minute of it." Word traveled as far as Winston-Salem, where John F. Blair proposed to Whedbee that he compile his stories in book form. Whedbee welcomed the challenge, though his expectations for the manuscript that became Legends of the Outer Banks and Tar Heel Tidewater were modest. "I wrote it out of a love for this region and the people whom I'd known all my life," he said. "I didn't think it would sell a hundred copies." From the very first sentence of the foreword, Whedbee stamped the collection with his inimitable style: "You are handed herewith a small pod or school of legends about various portions of that magical region known as the Outer Banks of North Carolina as well as stories from other sections of the broad bays, sounds, and estuaries that make up tidewater Tarheelia." The Lost Colony, Indians, Blackbeard, an albino porpoise that guided ships into harbor—the tales in that volume form the core of Outer Banks folklore. Whedbee liked to tell people that his stories were of three kinds: those he knew to be true, those he believed to be true, and those he fabricated. But despite much prodding, he never revealed which were which.

Legends of the Outer Banks went through three printings in 1966, its first year. Demand for Whedbee's tales and the author's supply of good material were such that further volumes were inevitable. The Flaming Ship of Ocracoke & Other Tales of the Outer Banks was published in 1971, Outer Banks Mysteries & Seaside Stories in 1978, Outer Banks Tales to Remember in 1985, and Blackbeard's Cup and Stories of the Outer Banks in 1989. In 2004, the staff of John F. Blair, Publisher, collected 13 of Judge Whedbee's finest stories for Pirates, Ghosts, and Coastal Lore. If this is your introduction to Charles Harry Whedbee, you'll soon understand his love for the people and the history of the Outer Banks.

For decades, the folk tales of Charles Harry Whedbee have been available wherever you care to look on the Outer Banks. Their popularity has transcended Whedbee's loyal readership among North Carolinians and visitors from the Northeast and the Midwest. Charles Harry Whedbee was an elected judge in his native Greenville, North Carolina, for thirty-plus years, but his favorite place was the Outer Banks, Nags Head in particular. Whedbee was the author of five folklore collections. He died in 1990.

“Family stories grow to be bigger than the experiences themselves,” writes Judy Goldman in her memoir, Losing My Sister. “They become home to us, tell us who we are, who we want to be. Over the years, they take on more and more embellishments and adornments until they eclipse the actual memory. They become our past—just as a snapshot will, at first, enhance a memory, then replace it.” 

As she remembers it now, Goldman’s was an idyllic childhood, charmed even, filled with parental love and sisterly confidences. Growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Judy and her older sister, Brenda, did everything together. Though it was clear from an early age that their personalities were very different (Judy was the “sweet” one, Brenda, the "strong" one), they continued to be fairly inseparable into adulthood. But the love between sisters is complex. 

Though Judy and Brenda remained close, Goldman recalls struggling to break free of her prescribed role as the agreeable little sister and to assert herself even as she built her own life and started a family. The sisters’ relationship became further strained by the illnesses and deaths of their parents, and later, by the discovery that each had tumors in their breasts—Judy’s benign, Brenda’s malignant. The two sisters came back together shortly before the possibility of permanent loss became very real. In her uniquely lyrical and poignant style, Goldman deftly navigates past events and present emotions, drawing readers in as she explores the joys and sorrows of family, friendship, and sisterhood.

Judy Goldman is the author of two novels, Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back, and two books of poetry. Her work has been published in Real Simple magazine, and in many literary journals—including Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner—as well as in numerous anthologies. Her commentaries have aired on public radio and she teaches at writers’ conferences throughout the country. She received the Fortner Writer and Community Award for "outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger community." She’s also the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction, the Gerald Cable Poetry Prize, the Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry, the Oscar Arnold Young Prize for Poetry, and the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for Poetry. The Slow Way Back was shortlisted for the Southeastern Independent Bookseller Alliance’s Novel of the Year. Judy lives with her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 1994, Bob Garner began doing short features about barbecue for UNC-TV’s statewide public-television magazine program, North Carolina Now. In 1996, he published North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time, taking readers on a delectable journey across the state in search of the best examples of this distinctive North Carolina delicacy. After Garner produced a one-hour television special based on his book, he quickly became known throughout North Carolina as “the barbecue man.” In 2002, he published Bob Garner’s Guide to North Carolina Barbecue, which describes the 100 best barbecue restaurants from the mountains to the sea. Bob Garner’s Book of Barbecue: North Carolina’s Favorite Food preserves the heritage and tradition of a disappearing rural lifestyle while showing how barbecue continues to evolve. Packed full of recipes for barbecue and popular side dishes (above and beyond the traditional hush puppies, slaw, and ’nana pudding); sidebars with useful tips, barbecue-related news, and features; and profiles of past and present influential pit masters and barbecue aficionados, this tome is the definitive guide to anything and everything pertaining to North Carolina’s favorite food.

Television personality, restaurant reviewer, speaker, author, pit master, and connoisseur of North Carolina barbecue, Bob Garner is the author of two previous books about barbecue. He has written extensively for Our State magazine, including “Bob Garner Eats,” a 10-part series on traditional Southern foods. He has appeared on the Food Network’s Paula’s Home Cookin’ featuring Paula Deen, and Food Nation with Bobby Flay; the Travel Channel’s Road Trip; and ABC’s Good Morning America. Garner was executive producer and host of the UNC-TV series Carolina Countryside and has been a featured speaker at the annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York and the Southern Foodway Alliance’s annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. He speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences across North Carolina. In 2011, Garner joined with Empire Properties in Raleigh, North Carolina, to work with Ed Mitchell at The Pit to promote barbecue heritage; plans include traveling across the state to host heritage dinners and pig pickings, accompanied by live bluegrass music. Garner divides his time between Burlington and Raleigh, North Carolina.

From 1971 to his retirement in 2011, Woody Durham was the “Voice of the Tar Heels,” the radio play-by-play man for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this autobiography, Woody takes the reader on a nostalgic stroll down memory lane—from his descriptions of a sleepy Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and the days of football legend ChooChoo Justice to the enormous changes in college sports and how they are covered to his dozens of behind-the-scenes stories about the coaches and players he worked with during his tenure. An appendix offers Woody’s thoughts on every football and basketball player he covered who has an honored jersey at UNC.

Adam Lucas grew up dreaming of becoming a Carolina basketball player. A severe lack of both height and talent curtailed that dream, but he discovered another way to get as close as possible to the Tar Heels--writing about Carolina sports. He is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and Tar Heels Today and a columnist on GoHeels.com. He is author of seven books about Carolina basketball. Adam lives in Cary with his wife, Jennifer, and four children.

"Woody Durham is the epitome of a professional broadcaster, who just so happened to also love the Tar Heels as much as he did his craft. He prepared for each game as if it were the national championship and spoke about each player and coach with an enthusiasm that connected them to his listeners in a unique way. Woody helped bring the Tar Heels to life for generations of Carolina fans." Roy Williams

While working as a reporter and producer for North Carolina’s public television network, Bob Garner took his “love of good food to work” where he created a weekly program devoted to the state’s barbecue culture. That evolved into several programs about traditional cooking. Over the course of his many years with UNC-TV, Garner established himself as a country-cooking connoisseur and viewers came to love his trademark “mmm-mmm” whenever he tasted a dish that met his standards. In Foods that Make You Say Mmm-mmm, Garner discusses such signature North Carolina dishes as Brunswick stew, livermush, calabash-style fish, Moravian chicken pie, persimmon pudding, fish stew, and scuppernong grapes. Each chapter provides historical background, recipes and preparation tips, and listings of the best venues where the readers can sample for themselves. In addition to the classic dishes, sidebars about favorite brand-name food and beverages, including Krispy Kreme donuts, Texas Pete hot sauce, Cheerwine, and Mt. Olive pickles, are interspersed throughout the book.

Television personality, restaurant reviewer, speaker, author, pit master, and connoisseur of North Carolina barbecue, Bob Garner is the author of two previous books about barbecue. He has written extensively for Our State magazine, including “Bob Garner Eats,” a 10-part series on traditional Southern foods. He has appeared on the Food Network’s Paula’s Home Cookin’ featuring Paula Deen, and Food Nation with Bobby Flay; the Travel Channel’s Road Trip; and ABC’s Good Morning America. Garner was executive producer and host of the UNC-TV series Carolina Countryside and has been a featured speaker at the annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York and the Southern Foodway Alliance’s annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. He speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences across North Carolina. In 2011, Garner joined with Empire Properties in Raleigh, North Carolina, to work with Ed Mitchell at The Pit to promote barbecue heritage; plans include traveling across the state to host heritage dinners and pig pickings, accompanied by live bluegrass music. Garner divides his time between Burlington and Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Drunken Spelunker’s Guide to Plato is based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from The Republic. In this novel, the Cave is a dank basement bar in the small Southern town of Waterville, overflowing with cheap beer, good blues, and local oddballs. There’s Vera, the tough but tender owner; Pancho, the philosophical piano tuner; Billy Joe, the former rising star back home after a stop in Memphis; and Commie Tom, the exceedingly generous proprietor of the Hammer and Sickle Bookstore. The newest bartender is whip-smart tomboy Josie, who hopped a bus from the Appalachian backwoods on a quest to discover who she is and where she belongs. What she finds is the Cave and the love of a charming regular named Danny. Armed with lessons from mythology and Plato’s philosophy, Josie navigates the ups and downs of first love and begins to understand that something much greater is waiting for her just outside the Cave. With Josie as our brave guide, we are submerged in a rarely explored subculture. Her journey into the Cave and back out is filled with trials and tragedy, but Josie is helped along by her newfound community of large-hearted hard drinkers. The Drunken Spelunker’s Guide to Plato is a love letter to the families we build for ourselves and the unexpected ways life can answer the question, "What if?"

KATHY GIUFFRE is a professor and sociologist specializing in social networks, cultural sociology, and Polynesian society. Giuffre was invited to present a TED Talk about her research in 2013. She is the author of a memoir, An Afternoon in Summer: My Year in the South Seas (Awa Press, 2010), as well as two academic books covering her areas of expertise. Giuffre received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from Harvard University. Currently, she and her family live in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she is the A.E. and Ethel Irene Carlton Professor of Social Sciences at Colorado College.

". . . [A] novel of love and life that is humorous and delicate. The regulars at the Cavern Tavern in the small southern town of Waterville, located somewhere in the Appalachian Piedmont, partake of all the quirkiness expected of literary denizens of dive bars in the South . . . Passages drawn from Plato's allegory of the cave and Edith Hamilton's Mythology weave through the story, elevating Josie's struggles to the level of the universal. This is warm, sweet, and inviting, like pie fresh from the oven." — Publishers Weekly

"A young woman living in a college town in the early 1990s learns about life, love, and ancient Greek philosophy in this episodic, often comic tale. With its evenhanded narrator, this low-key novel succinctly evokes the supportive dynamics of the community at its heart." — Kirkus Reviews

• Winner: SIBA Summer 2015 Okra Pick Best Book
• Winner: Seven Sisters Book Award, Fiction
• Long List: Pat Conroy Award for Southern Fiction, Prince of Tides Award in Literary Fiction
• Long List: Crook's Corner Book Prize
• Finalist: Foreword INDIEFAB Book of the Year, Literary Fiction

This richly illustrated book tells the story of the successful collaboration of Jacques and Juliana Royster Busbee in the creation of a remarkable folkcraft enterprise called Jugtown. This improbable venture, founded in a most unlikely setting, has left its indelible mark on a remote Southern community.

Fully illustrated with numerous black-and-white and color photographs of the place, the people who made pottery there, and the pottery produced by them, the book tells how the Busbees convinced a few of rural Moore County’s old-time utilitarian potters to make new-fangled wares for them to sell in Juliana’s Greenwich Village tea room and shop. Following New Yorkers’ wild acceptance of their primitive-looking and alluring pottery offerings, the Busbees built their own workshop in rural Moore County and called it Jugtown. Today, nearly one hundred potters make and sell their wares within a few miles of Jugtown—all because a hundred years ago, the Busbees and their Jugtown potters found a new way to make old jugs.

Stephen C. Compton is an independent scholar and an avid collector of historic, traditional North Carolina pottery. Steve has written numerous articles and books about the state’s pottery. Widely recognized for his North Carolina pottery expertise, the author is frequently called upon as a lecturer and exhibit consultant and curator. He has served as president of the North Carolina Pottery Center, a museum and educational center located in Seagrove, North Carolina, and is a founding organizer, and former president, of the North Carolina Pottery Collectors’ Guild.