Books by Fred Chappell

A good thief barters in goods. A great one deals in shadows.A Shadow all of Light is a stylish, elegant, episodic fantasy novel by award-winning author and former poet laureate Fred Chappell.Falco, a young man from the country, arrives in the port city of Tardocco with the ambition of becoming an apprentice shadow thief. Falco's tests and adventures teach him to break through ingenious security traps and drop him among con men, monsters, pirates, and the King of Cats.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Solitary, graceful, and contemplative, cats have inspired poets from Charles Baudelaire to Margaret Atwood to serve as their chroniclers and celebrants. With Familiars, Fred Chappell proves himself a worthy addition to the fellowship of poets who have sought to immortalize their beloved cats.

Together now, the four poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain and Earthsleep counterpoint one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred to as "something like a verse novel," Fred Chappell has summoned up the rich veins of memory and brings this to bear on the contemporary sensibility.

A Southeast Booksellers Association Best Book of the YearJess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to tend to his ailing mother, and clean out his deceased father's workroom. What he discovers there leads him-and the reader-on an unforgettable journey through the secret life of Jess's father, Joe Robert, which culminates in a moment of profound mystery and comedy.