Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P691
ISBN: 9780881469240
Price: $20.00
LOCAL SIGNS AND WONDERS is an essay collection describing how attachment to a family homestead creates a sense of wellbeing, fulfillment, and belonging. Richard Rankin lives on family property settled in the mid 1760s and farmed until the 1970s. The Rankin home place sits in a shrinking countryside about twenty miles west of fast-growing Charlotte, North Carolina. Despite rural decline and environmental peril, these essays show how staying on family land benefits personal wholeness, rich relationships with family, neighbors and wildlife, and service to creation.
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Product Code: P245
ISBN: 9780865548619
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $19.00
Hirschman's research indicates the earliest American settlers were of Mediterranean extraction, and of a Jewish or Muslim religious persuasion. Sometimes called “Melungeons,” these early settlers were among the earliest nonnative “Americans” to live in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, perhaps including Daniel Boone, John Sevier, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Andrew Jackson.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P469
ISBN: 9780881464481
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $17.00
“Maizee Hurd was an easy target for hard times,” according to Burdy Luttrell, the town healer. Burdy is a Melungeon woman with striking features and mysterious ways. She owns the land the Hurds leased following their marriage on June 3, 1940.
Maizee moved upriver at the age of ten after tragedy struck, and she was sent off to be raised by a childless aunt and her doctor husband. Shortly after Maizee’s ferry boat arrival in the rural mountain community of Christian Bend—carrying only a small suitcase, her mama’s Bible, and her doll Hitty—the young girl began hearing the voices that would continue to torment her.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: HH1042
ISBN: 9780881469196
Price: $25.00
There is much about her hometown that Carrie Buck loves: Venable Elementary where she first learned to read; Starr Hill because that's where Miss Mora lives; Chancellor's Drugstore where she sometimes gets a free cola; and Anderson's Bookstore where a girl can look through all the books she likes. While 1920s Charlottesville, Virginia, is a charming place to grow up, there's one thing Carrie doesn't like about her hometown--her home.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P535
ISBN: 9780881465846
Price: $17.00
Imagine the relationship triangle from “East of Eden” and set it deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Add a couple of ghosts, a good measure of dysfunction, and a whole lot of twists and turns, and you have Ann Hite’s new Black Mountain novel, SLEEPING ABOVE CHAO. Hite’s fourth novel returns to Swannanoa Gap, a small town at the foot of Black Mountain, and introduces new characters while revisiting some favorites from her previous novels.
The reader will travel to a ranch in Montana, to Pearl Harbor, and to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, while watching the cast of characters struggle through World War II, emerging into adulthoods which would weigh heavy on anyone’s shoulders. The story ends as the Civil Rights Movement ignites.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P562
ISBN: 9780881466539
Price: $16.00
SPECTER MOUNTAIN is a book-length poetry collaboration between Jesse Graves and William Wright that imagines the spiritual and ecological life of an embattled landscape. The collection fuses two striking poetic visions into a cohesive and innovative new perspective on nature and the inevitable imprint of human interaction with wilderness. Readers will gain a sense of the permanent beauty of rivers and mountains, timeless images of the sublime, and the grandeur that reaches beyond human life and influence.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H851
ISBN: 9780881463866
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $24.00
Stormy Weather & Other Stories is probably as close as Lisa Alther will ever come to writing an autobiography. These stories, written over the course of her career, are set in the three places that have meant the most to her—the Southern mountains, Vermont, and New York City. Most of these stories were published in journals or anthologies, though three are previously unpublished.
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Product Code: P226
ISBN: 9780865547988
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $19.00
In Taking Up Serpents: A History of Snake Handling Kimbrough explains the history and practice of serpent-handling believers from the perspective of a respectful and scholarly participant-observer.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P646
ISBN: 9780881468489
Price: $20.00
At the age of seventy-one, the recluse Amelia finally leaves her home in the North Carolina mountains to find the world grown strange and almost deserted. In her quest to unravel the mysteries of this apocalyptic landscape, she encounters a neighbor turned into an apple tree, children trapped in mica, and her doppelgänger. THE GOSPEL OF ROT is a creative intervention into the Appalachian imaginary, steeped in the Southern gothic. It explores lesser-known, idiosyncratic, and historically taboo subjects: Biblical apocrypha, heterodoxy, mysticism, queerness, Cherokee lore, and the weird and the fantastic. It strives to upend and complicate any static conception of the Appalachian experience
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Product Code: P143
ISBN: 9780865545168
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $17.95
The Melungeons shares the story of a people ravaged, and nearly destroyed, by the senseless excesses of racism and genocide, a people who were, a century ad a half later, crushed beneath the violent onslaught of unbridled Anglo jingoism. Recognizing the truth of who the Melungeons were, and are, will redefine our view of the settlement of this nation, and, more to the point, of our own self-identity. It will also render incomplete and possibly obsolete much of what has been written and preserved about our Southern ethnic heritage.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P550
ISBN: 9780881466270
Price: $20.00
Fresh hams cook slowly for eight hours over hickory wood as smoke drifts through Bullock’s Hollow in Northeast Tennessee. It’s a smell both ancient and alluring. The technique is as old as cooking itself. Gas and electricity play no part. Wood, fire, and smoke are the elements. Pressures to modernize are constant, but labor-intensive tradition prevails at Ridgewood Barbecue near Bluff City. The restaurant has been located at the same spot since 1948, and it has been owned and operated by the Proffitt family all that time. THE PROFFITTS OF RIDGEWOOD: AN APPALACHIAN FAMILY'S LIFE IN BARBECUE, by Fred W. Sauceman, tells a story of persistence, respect for tradition, and loyalty to the land.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P581
ISBN: 9780881467024
Price: $17.00
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.
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