Books in the Voices of the South series

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.