The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Author: Grady Hendrix
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 168369144X

“This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good.”—Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town. Bonus features: • Reading group guide for book clubs • Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant • Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix • And more! Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 1476
Release: 2008-05-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416548947

The story of the tempestuous romance between Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara is set amid the drama of the Civil War.

Stories of the South

Stories of the South
Author: K. Stephen Prince
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469614189

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

The South

The South
Author: Colm Toibin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 147670449X

A highly acclaimed novel from the author of Brooklyn and an “immensely gifted and accomplished writer” (The Washington Post), about an Irishwoman who creates a new life in post-war Spain. In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew. The South is a novel of classic themes—of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom—to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.

The Southern Novels

The Southern Novels
Author: Robert McCammon
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 2346
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504052129

Four chilling tales from the New York Times–bestselling author of Swan Song and the “true master of the Gothic novel” (Booklist). From rural Alabama to the Louisiana bayou to the North Carolina mountains, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning author Robert R. McCammon has made the American South his own Gothic playground in these four unforgettable novels. A Boy’s Life: “Strongly echoing the childhood-elegies of King and Bradbury, and every bit their equal,” McCammon’s World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning novel takes place in 1964 Alabama, where a twelve-year-old boy’s idyllic life takes an abrupt turn into a dark world of mystery when he and his father witness a car roll into a lake—only to discover a corpse handcuffed to the steering wheel (Kirkus Reviews). “It’s McCammon’s The Prince of Tides. . . . Incredibly moving.” —Peter Straub Mystery Walk: Two boys with mysterious powers—a psychic who speaks with the dead and a faith healer—share a common bond and hold mankind’s fate in their hands in an epic showdown of good versus evil. “As finely a turned tale of horror as the best of them.” —Houston Chronicle Gone South: A veteran’s moment of rage leads to a grisly murder and a heated chase deep into the bayou, where he encounters a pair of bizarre bounty hunters—and a strange new friend, who might help him find redemption. “A gothic picaresque that mixes gritty plot and black comedy.” —The Wall Street Journal Usher’s Passing: Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is no fiction in this Gothic novel of ancestral madness in the mountains of modern-day North Carolina, as the heir to the Usher legacy—a horror novelist—confronts his terrifying inheritance. “A frightening pleasure.” —St. Louis Dispatch

Still in Print

Still in Print
Author: Jan Nordby Gretlund
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2013-01-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611172640

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

The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2003-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780142001745

The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

After Southern Modernism

After Southern Modernism
Author: Matthew Guinn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1604738898

The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.

The History of Southern Women's Literature

The History of Southern Women's Literature
Author: Carolyn Perry
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2002-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780807127537

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

The Southern Side of Paradise

The Southern Side of Paradise
Author: Kristy Woodson Harvey
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982116633

The internationally bestselling Peachtree Bluff series concludes with this “deliciously authentic Southern tale of family and the often messy, complex relationships between sisters, mothers, and daughters” (Susan Boyer, USA TODAY bestselling author). With the man of her dreams back in her life and all three of her daughters happy, Ansley Murphy should be content. But she can’t help but feel like it’s all a little too good to be true. Her youngest daughter, actress Emerson, is recently engaged and has just landed the role of a lifetime. She seemingly has the world by the tail and yet something she can’t quite put her finger on is worrying her—and it has nothing to do with her recent health scare. When two new women arrive in Peachtree Bluff—one who has the potential to wreck Ansley’s happiness and one who could tear Emerson’s world apart—everything is put in perspective. And after secrets that were never meant to be told come to light, the powerful bond between the Murphy sisters and their mother comes crumbling down, testing their devotion to each other and forcing them to evaluate the meaning of family. “Kristy Woodson Harvey has done it again….The Southern Side of Paradise is full of humor, charm, and family” (Lauren K. Denton, USA TODAY bestselling author) and is the ultimate satisfying beach read.