Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2002)

Set in 1917, A Parchment of Leaves tells the story of Vine, a beautiful Cherokee woman who marries a white man, forsaking her family and their homeland to settle in with his people and make a home in the heart of the mountains. Her mother has strange forebodings that all will not go well, and she's right. Vine is viewed as an outsider, treated with contempt by other townspeople. Add to that her brother-in-law's fixation on her, and Vine's life becomes more complicated than she could have ever imagined. In the violent turn of events that ensues, she learns what it means to forgive others and, most important, how to forgive herself. As haunting as an old-time ballad, A Parchment of Leaves is filled with the imagery, dialect, music, and thrumming life of the Kentucky mountains. For Silas House, whose great-grandmother was Cherokee, this novel is also a tribute to the family whose spirit formed him.

New York, NY: Knopf (2002)

Fine in dust jacket.

From Library Journal: It has been a decade since Tartt blazed forth with The Secret History, but it was worth the wait. Set in small-town Mississippi, her new work centers on the family of Harriet Cleve, shattered forever after the murder by hanging of Harriets nine-year-old brother, Robin, when Harriet was still a baby. Harriets mother has withdrawn, her father has left town (though he still supports the family), and Harriet and sister Allison are essentially raised by their redoubtable grandmother, Edie, and a gaggle of aunts who, though mostly married, are ultimately "spinsters at heart." Harriet grows up an ornery and precocious child who at age 12 determines that she will finally uncover her brothers murderer. Whether or not she solves the crime is hardly the point; what matters here is the writing-dense, luscious, and exact-and Tartts ability to reconstruct the life of this family in vivid detail. Harriet in particular is an extraordinary creation; shes a believable child who is also persuasively wise beyond her years. That debut was no fluke; highly recommended. --Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

New York, NY: Broadway Books (2002)

In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her Southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small Georgia town. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archaeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years earlier, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine's death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that would prefer to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the Deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America's best-loved writers.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (2002)

The Hermit's Story is Rick Bass's best and most varied fiction yet. In the title story, a man and a woman travel across an eerily frozen lake--under the ice. "The Distance" casts a skeptical eye on Thomas Jefferson through the lens of a Montana man's visit to Monticello. "Eating" begins with an owl being sucked into a canoe and ends with a man eating a town out of house and home, and "The Cave" is a stunning story of a man and woman lost in an abandoned mine. Other stories include "The Fireman, " "Swans, " "The Prisoners, " "Presidents' Day, " "Real Town, " and "Two Deer." Some of these stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, but for many readers, they won't even be the best in this collection. Every story in this book is remarkable in its own way, sure to please both new readers and avid fans of Rick Bass's passionate, unmistakable voice.

New York, NY: W.W. Norton (2002)

This First Edition Club pick for August of 2002 was a finalist for the National Book Award. Brad Watson is from Meridian, Mississippi, and now teaches creative writing at The University of Wyoming, Laramie.

Finus Bates has Loved chatty, elegant Birdie Wells ever since he saw her cartwheel naked through the woods near the backwater town of Mercury, Mississippi, in 1917. He's loved her for some eighty years: through their marriages to other people, through the mysterious early death of Birdie's womanizing husband, Earl, and through all the poisonous accusations against Birdie by Earl's no-good relatives. With "graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious" prose (USA Today), Brad Watson chronicles Finus's steadfast devotion and Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city. With this "tragicomic story of missed opportunities and unjust necessities" (Fred Chappell), "Southern storytelling is alive and well in Watson's capable hands" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). "His work may remind readers of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Flannery O'Connor, but has a power--and a charm--all its own, more pellucid than the first, gentler than the second, and kinder than the third" (Baltimore Sun).

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2002)

Fine in dust jacket.

Set in the early nineteenth century, Lost Nation is about a man known only as Blood. A man of learning and wisdom with a secret past that has scorched his soul, Blood remakes himself as a trader, hauling with him Sally, a sixteen-year-old girl won from the madam of a brothel over a game of cards. Their arrival in Indian Stream -- a land where the luckless or outlawed have made a fresh start -- triggers an escalating series of clashes that will not only sever the master-servant bond between Blood and Sally, but also force Blood to confront his own dreaded past and offer Sally a final escape. In prose both lucid and seductive, the story carries us deeply into human and natural conditions of extreme desolation and harrowing hardship, and at the same time gives us the relentless beat of hope and, finally, the redeeming strength of love.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (2001)

With the publication of his first collection of short stories, "Doghouse Roses, " singer, songwriter, and activist Earle reflects the many facets of his life and his hard-fought struggles--the defeats, and the eventual triumphs he has experienced during a career spanning three decades.

New York, NY: Doubleday (2002)

David Anthony Durham, the critically acclaimed author of Gabriel's Story, presents us with a brilliantly drawn account of America before the Civil War and a provocative meditation on freedom and equality. After learning that his pregnant wife has been taken to Philadelphia, William flees a harsh Maryland plantation and begins a desperate flight north to reunite with her and establish a new life as a free man. But as a fugitive slave in hostile country, William must endure a terrifying journey and elude the many who wish to capture and return him to the plantation. Among those tracking him is Morrison, who as a young man fled the miseries of his native Scotland only to encounter the brutal realities of the New World. Bearing his own scars, Morrison follows William with an agenda much more personal than returning him to slavery.

New York, NY: Knopf (2002)

Only a storyteller of Ford's remarkable agility and seriousness could produce such a rich array of stories on the single, dramatic theme of love and intimacy. A Multitude of Sins evokes, with unflinching candor, our failures to achieve what we consider to be most important: to be faithful and sincere, empathetic and patient, to be honest and passionate and finally loving toward those we care for or merely, if desperately, desire. As in all of Ford's work, the settings are as distinct as Montreal is from New Orleans, or Maine from the Grand Canyon. Yet in each he is drawn to the relations between women and men -- liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. It is in these relations, his extraordinary stories suggest, that our entire sense of right and wrong is enacted, and the fierce intensity he brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2002)

A haunting thriller of blood and treachery from the author of "Wildwood Boys." Set in 1928 New Orleans, "A World of Thieves" revolves around Sonny LaSalle, a young student who worships his uncles until he discovers that life as an outlaw isn't quite what he expected it to be.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2002)

Girls love Dennis Lenahan, he's cool and he's a daredevil. Dennis is performing in a Tunica, Mississippi casino, when he witnesses a murder and the local Dixie Mafia warns him, "You talk, you're dead." Along comes Robert Taylor, a black gangsta from Detroit. Robert has his own agenda for taking on the Cornbread Cosa Nostra and wants Dennis to come in with him. Readers will wonder: is Dennis hooked up with the bad guys or the really bad guys?

New York, NY: Doubleday (2002)

Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He's forty-three, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep. And he has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known to all only as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for forty years. No longer on the bench, the judge has withdrawn to the Atlee mansion and become a recluse. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. It is typed by the Judge himself, on his handsome old stationary, and gives the date and time for Ray and Forrest to appear in his study. Ray reluctantly heads south, to his hometown, to the place where he grew up, which he prefers now to avoid. But the family meeting does not take place. The judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray. And perhaps someone else.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press (2002)

This eagerly anticipated second volume of short stories is offered by nationally acclaimed writer Mary Ward Brown, often referred to as the "first lady" of Alabama letters.

With the 11 stories in this long-awaited collectiong, Mary Ward Brown once again offers her devoted fans a palette of new literary pleasures. The hallmarks of her style, so finely wrought in the award-winning Tongues of Flame (1986)--the fully realized characters, her deep sensitivity, a defining sense of place and time--are back in all their richness to involve and enchant the reader.

All but one of the stories are set in Alabama. They deal with dramatic turning points in the lives of charcaters who happen to be southerners, many jaxtaposed between Old South sensibility and manners and New South modernity and expectations. Among these is a new widow who is not consoled by well-meaning, proselytizing Christians; a middle-aged waitress in love with the town "catch"; a bedridden belle dependent upon her black nurse; a "special" young man in a newspaper shop; a young faculty wife who attempts generosity with a lower-class neighbor; and a lawyer caught in the dilemma of race issues. Through their diverse voices, Brown proves herself a graceful and gifted storyteller who writes with an authoritative pen, inventing and inhabiting the worlds of her set of characters with insight, compassion, and wit.

Most of the stories in It Wasn't All Dancing have appeared previously in prominent national magazines and literary journals, including the Atlantinc Monthly, Grand Street, and Threepenny Review. This fine collection should appeal to a wide audience among writers, literature scholars, and general readers alike.