Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: HH1007
ISBN: 9780881467963
Price: $25.00
LIFE LESSONS covers topics of the heart and mind, often with related stories from the Scriptures. Ninety concise and to-the-point chapters speak to everyday topics we all may experience on any given day from dawn to bedtime. There are stories that will transport you back to your youth and then bring you back to the present with a jolt or two of truth. The chapters cover feelings and insights from both secular and Biblical standpoints and often offer a humorous touch to subjects we all enjoy.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P540
ISBN: 9780881465969
Price: $16.00
In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel’s horse is struck by lightning—dead and gone, she hopes— out of her life “as though he’d never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another.” But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family’s farm.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H999
ISBN: 9780881467680
Price: $35.00
We live in a secular age, where the world and its ways seem to indicate the absence of God. The testimony of ancient and latter-day prophets requires more faith (or credulity) than most of us can manage. Can we still find spiritual truths that will restore a sense of a higher meaning to our lives? For millennia, people have looked to literature, to scriptures, epics, poems, plays, novels, and films for insights into the human condition. In our increasingly rationalized world, some of these contemporary storytellers--like a Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, or Toni Morrison--stretch their art to find new words for the sacred. Brown invites us to reread them to listen for this elusive transcendence, a sacred mystery that rebukes both the atheist's weak humanism and the believer's naïve supernaturalism.
|
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.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P558
ISBN: 9780881466485
Price: $20.00
Founded in fieldwork and reflection, LOST PLACES follows the author from small towns and rural landscapes, through a transitional city neighborhood, to the challenging construction of an urban renewal loft, as she struggles to renovate living spaces and transform relationships after an early divorce. In a voice droll and lyrical by turns, Hankla charts a path through enigmatic encounters with snakes and contemplations of Thomas Jefferson's problematic biography homes, underground and ancient cities, Star Trek, the contradictory nature of Appalachia, desire, our families, spiritual callings, and definitions of home.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H905
ISBN: 9780881465365
Price: $24.00
Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start.
In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P567
ISBN: 9780881466591
Price: $20.00
In MEMORY & COMPLICITY, we feel Georgia red clay under Eve Hoffman's bare feet on the dairy farm where she grew up; walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. We see a girl in a yellow dress at the synagogue her great-grandparents founded--the synagogue bombed four hours later by white racists.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P476
ISBN: 9780881464641
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
MEMEORY"S MIST is a collection of personal essays about life in the South as seen through the eyes of author Jackie K. Cooper. The stories contained hold up a mirror upon which the shared traits and experiences of life can be seen. Some of the experiences shared are humorous, some are sad, some are dramatic, and some are life affirming. Through them all runs a ribbon of hope and optimism. As Cooper reflects back on his past, the vision has been somewhat dimmed by the mist of memory but—with the help of family and friends—he is able to part the mist and have a clear view of the past which in many ways signals the future. As with his other books Cooper finds life full of surprises and simple joys amid the tumultuous and uncertain lives we all live.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P611
ISBN: 9780881467567
Price: $16.00
MERCIFUL DAYS is the fourth collection of poems by East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves, recipient of the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachia from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In a language that is both plainspoken and lyrical, Graves examines the connections that hold people together across generations and against the breaches of time and distance. The landscapes of his native region possess a mythic beauty and Graves writes of the animating force it can become in a poet's imagination.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P700
ISBN: 9780881469462
Price: $28.00
Edgar Allan Poe's legacy continues to thrive more than 175 years since his mysterious death. Poe's ubiquitous presence is evident not only in literature but also in film, television, music, visual arts, the tourism industry, and other fields. The essays collected here feature creators who have direct knowledge of his significance for contemporary U.S. culture.
|
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.
|
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H989
ISBN: 9780881467116
Price: $45.00
This collection of essays, presented in honor of Ronna Burger, addresses questions and themes that have animated her thinking, teaching, and writing over the years. With a view to the scope of her writings, these essays range broadly: from the Bible and Ancient Greek authors--including not only Plato and Aristotle, but also Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon--to medieval thinkers, Maimonides, Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as modern philosophers, from Descartes and Montesquieu to Kant, Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.
|