Books published by University Press of Mississippi

After Hurricane Katrina laid bare the fragility and environmental peril of South Louisiana, author Ian McNulty set out on a series of daytrips to delve into the area's diverse cultural landscapes. He explored communities staked up and down the Mississippi River. Louisiana Rambles is his richly evocative guide to those journeys.

Originally published in 1993, this was the first volume of essays devoted to the works of Cormac McCarthy. Immediately it was recognised as a major contribution to studies of this acclaimed American author.

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey describes her mode as elegiac. The interviews featured in Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney.

Surveys Eudora Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. The book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature.

Contains eight essays on African American history from the Jacksonian era through the early twentieth century. Taken together, these essays, inspired by noted scholar John F. Marszalek, demonstrate the many nuances of African Americans' struggle to grasp freedom, respect, assimilation, and basic rights of American citizens.

This intelligent and probing analysis of the detective novel shows how the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer is perceived as parallel with the actual world. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance would make it possible for some high-ranking diplomat to outwit his adversaries by emulating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

During the three decades since the Sunday Times trumpeted North Toward Home as "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain", Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books. Conversations with Willie Morris collects twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations with a man who confronted the turbulent issues of his generation.

To read these interviews given between 1969 and 1996 is to gain insights into William Kennedy's high seriousness in pursuing the craft of fiction and to witness the artistic growth of this remarkable writer. The interviews in this collection reveal how the opportunities and challenges in Kennedy's writing life parallel those other contemporary writers have faced in the last years of the century.

Captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America's most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists. In interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers.

How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the story of one woman's discovery of her coal-mining hometown as a potential "literary place". In this first book of interviews with Smith, she revels in character and sense of place as cornerstones to her art.

In 1972 Rudolfo Anaya made a quiet entry into American literature with the publication of Bless Me, Ultima. In this collection of interviews Anaya talks about his life and about how New Mexico, his home state, influences his work. The interviews explore also the importance that myths and spiritual matters play in his writings.

Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. "Writing for me is a way of opening up," he states in one of the interviews in this collection. This book spans thirty-five years. Wideman discusses a wide variety of topics - from postmodernism to genocide, from fatherhood to women's basketball.

This collection of interviews from three decades features one of the South's most prominent contemporary writers, one of America's most dazzling practitioners of postmodern fiction. These conversations with Ellen Douglas reveal her earthy frankness and her disdain for "portentous declaration".

The interviews in this collection will convince the reader that Jerzy Kosinski's public persona was one of the greatest creations. Few authors were ever more adept at press interviews. For Kosinski, the author of nine novels, the interview was part performance, part public relations, part blind date.

In interviews ranging from 1979 to 2004, Ann Beattie discusses her evolving craft, resists the labels placed on her, and articulates her vision of contemporary life. She frequently notes the connection between her prose style and methods of photography, commenting that she intends for her stories and novels to capture scenes and small slices of life rather than broad overviews.

Kenneth Schweitzer blends musical transcription, musical analysis, interviews, ethnographic descriptions, and observations from his own experience as a ritual drummer to highlight the complex variables at work during a live Lucumi performance.

Describes how, between 1865 and 1914, ten Natchez mercantile families emerged as leading purveyors in the wholesale plantation supply and cotton handling business, and soon became a dominant force in the social and economic Reconstruction of the Natchez District. This book digs deep in countless records to explore how these traders functioned as entrepreneurs in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and the effects of those representations. Alexandre compellingly shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with the history of lynching uncovers the profound investment of African American literature.

In addition to detailed discussions of all of Tim O'Brien's work, the sixteen interviews and profiles in Conversations with Tim O'Brien explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O'Brien's youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a Midwestern upbringing.

Presents a collection of essays that explore Oprah Winfrey's broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyse a number of topics touching on the ways in which her cultural output shapes contemporary America.

With his trademark porkpie hat, floppy shoes, and deadpan facial expression, Buster Keaton (1895-1966) is one of the most iconic stars of Hollywood's silent and early sound eras. Buster Keaton: Interviews collects interviews from the beginning of his career in the 1920s to the year before his death. The pieces provide a critical perspective on his acting and cinematic techniques.

Collected interviews with the author of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie.

In this collection of thirty interviews compiled by John Cheever's biographer, Cheever moves from gentlemanly reticence in the early pieces to forthright commentary upon a variety of subjects in the later ones. This admirably articulate author gives answers that are satisfying to the curious, though the expression of his views is very much under his control.

A disproportionate number of male writers continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. In this study, Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement.

David Sterritt is one of the most astute, acclaimed, and thought-provoking critics in America. Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader collects his most incisive essays from 1970 to the present. The collection emphasizes films and filmmakers that are often overlooked or undervalued because they stray from ordinary norms of commercial cinema.

These thirteen original essays examine William Faulkner's texts in terms of their surprising range of gender portrayals. The collection explores such themes as the male homosocial urge ay the heart of warfare, the blurring of gender distinctions in Faulkner's "epicene" figures, and the function of cross-dressing as a form of defiance of traditional hierarchies.

Grace Paley's contribution to American literature, while comparatively small in volume, has been substantial in impact. With a voice very much her own, Paley has been a critical force in post-World War II American culture, particularly at its controversial centers. In this collection of interviews from 1978 to 1995 Paley elaborates on the many forces that have influenced her and her writing.

Interviews with the author of Catch-22

These interviews range over the more than four decades of Clint Eastwood's directorial career, with an emphasis on practical filmmaking issues and his philosophy as a filmmaker. Nearly a third are from European sources -several appearing here in English for the first time.

During the 1890s, North Carolina witnessed a political revolution as the newly formed Populist Party joined with the Republicans to throw out do-nothing, conservative Democrats. James M. Beeby examines the complex history of the rise and fall of the Populist Party in the late nineteenth century, offering the first comprehensive study of the movement.