New York, NY: MP Publishing (2010)

List of Contributors: Barb Johnson; Brad Watson; Cassandra King; Clay Risen; Connie May Fowler; Daniel Wallace; George Singleton; Howard Bahr; Janis Owens; John Grisham; Joshilyn Jackson; Larry Brown; Matthew Teague; Michelle Richmond; Pat Conroy; Rick Bragg; Silas House; Steve Yarbrough.; Suzanne Hudson; Tim Gautreaux; Tom Franklin; William Gay; Winston Groom.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2009)

The magnificent Ghosthead Oak has stood watch over coastal Alabama’s mysterious backwater bays and slow-running rivers, where bull alligators rumble the nerves of lesser creatures and every living thing has the capacity to kill, for five hundred years. Some say the fabled giant tree was once a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. No other tree along the entire coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola can rival its majesty or its power to draw people to it.
In silence and with dignity, the Ghosthead has served as sentinel to the widow’s family land for countless generations. It was a childhood friend and a spirit guide in troubled times. Her father is buried in its shade.
So why would the widow walk into a biker bar and hire a man to fire his chainsaw and inflict fatal gashes around its trunk, ending in a few minutes what took five centuries to create?
“The Widow and the Tree” is a tale of dark deeds committed with mercy in mind, provoking the reader to ask: Would I have done the same thing? This book is based on a true story. Cover art by Barry Moser.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2004)

Contributors Include:
Rick Bragg, Sonny Brewer, Mary Ward Brown, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, Matt Baggett, Garic Barranger, Bart Barton, Barry Bradford, Matthew Brock, Grayson Capps, Jan Chabreck, Brock Clarke, Doug Crandall, Joe Formichella, Juliana Gray, Wayne Greenhaw, Donald Hays, Bret Anthony Johnston, Jack Kerley, Michael Knight, Mack Lewis, Chip Livingston, Jonathan Odell, Jack Pendarvis, David Poindexter, Brewster Milton Robertson, Dayne Sherman, Alix Strauss, Brad Vice, Daniel Wallace, D.B. Wells, and James Whorton

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2005)

Proving that the waters of Southern talent run deep and traditions are meant to be both honored and stood on their ear, the third volume of Stories from the Blue Moon Caf? IV presents the most talented practitioners of Southern writing. This year’s anthology includes writing from Rick Bragg, William Gay, and Suzanne Hudson amongst others. Readers need not ever have set a foot south of the Mason-Dixon Line to appreciate the bold, the brash, the horrifying and the humorous short stories, essays, poems, and even songs from the South’s preeminent authors and its strongest new voices gathered together for a feast in Stories from the Blue Moon Caf? IV. Fans of Southern literature cannot miss this!

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2006)

Contributions by: Howard Bahr, Stuart Bloodworth, Rick Bragg, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Tom Franklin, William Gay, L.A. Hoffer, Frank Turner Hollon, Chip Livingston, Thomas McGuane, Jack Pendarvis, Ron Rash, James Whorton Jr., and Karen Spears Zacharias.

New York, NY: Ballantine (2006)

Approaching eighty, Rove MacNee sets out to write the story of his youth– “I will be forgiven, I’m sure, if I don’t remember things with stunning clarity.” What memories clearly remain resonate within him like rolling thunder and shower down like rain in Sonny Brewer’s superb and richly rewarding new novel of fathers and sons, family and betrayal.

Set in the small gulf town of Fairhope, Alabama, this lyrical coming-of-age tale begins in the winter of 1941. Named for his father’s drowned Labrador retriever, Rove is a strong-shouldered and self-reliant sixteen-year-old, an uneven match for his volatile father, Captain Dominus MacNee. Though he sometimes wishes the whiskey-soaked man would be lost at sea, Rove himself is in danger of sinking in the troubled waters of his home life.

Navigating between memoir and memory, past and present, Rove reflects upon the people and pursuits that have influenced his life: his passion for fishing, where the toss of the net is more thrilling than the catch in the bucket; his much-loved grandmother, who gives him a copy of Huckleberry Finn, saying, “Boys sometimes run away, you know”; and Anna Pearl Anderson, “the prettiest girl on the Eastern shore,” who ignites in Rove the first flickers of romance. Yet his greatest treasure, perhaps, is his twenty-five-foot sloop, the Sea Bird. Given to him as a gift, the Sea Bird brings with it both the possibility of salvation and the threat of disaster. As Rove dreams of escaping his tumultuous surroundings, it becomes apparent that he can never truly shake the hold of his seaside home unless he confronts, head on, a startling truth.

Returning to the setting of his much-lauded debut novel, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, Sonny Brewer, once again, gives a skillful performance in the Southern storytelling tradition. A Sound Like Thunder is a magnificently crafted tale of a man revisiting the crossroads of his life, connecting the fragmented keepsakes in his heart and mind, and reemerging with a clear understanding of his defining moment.

New York, NY: Ballantine (2005)

Told by his doctor that he would die within a year, Henry Stuart decides not to accept his fate and moves to Alabama. For the next twenty years visitors traveled to visit the wise Stuart, who named his ten-acre property after Leo Tolstoy.