Product Code: H378
ISBN: 9780865544826
Product Format: Hardback
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
Price: $35.00
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P480
ISBN: 9780881464702
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen- month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction.
His new volume of poems, CONCERTINA, recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gang, the other venturing beyond the manacles of history into a realm of second chances, while the country, in the throes of its bicentennial celebration, still swoons from Watergate and its aftermath.
What’s more, CONCERTINA, is an outsider’s meditation on the American South and the power of place to transform not only language, but to instill in the speaker the impulse to tell the story of everything his eye lights upon. Indeed, Bathanti’s world is as much about the geography, the very ether, of North Carolina, as it is about prisons. His voice is contemplative, poised on a tightrope of its own making, pitched near detonation.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P612
ISBN: 9780881467574
Price: $18.00
Fifteen-year-old Lucas Webster doesn't mind working in the fields and chopping cotton on his grandparents' farm in South Georgia, but he hates getting stuck caring for his Uncle Robert who was born with Down Syndrome. After his grandpa dies in the spring of 1948, things change. His grandmother withdraws in her grief and Alvin Earl, Robert's half-brother, returns to manage the farm with his guns and stash of liquor. Despite Lucas's objections, Alvin Earl plans to pull him out of school to work on the farm full-time and send Robert to the state asylum.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P553
ISBN: 9780881466386
Price: $20.00
Michael McFee’s new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” All of us have appointed rounds in our lives--essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays--many of them pointed, a page or so, addresses McFee’s appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P583
ISBN: 9780881467062
Price: $30.00
THE INCARNATIONAL ART OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR argues that O’Connor designed a unique asthetic to defy the Gnostic dualisms that characterize American intellectual and spiritual life. Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d’art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O’Connor’s fiction actively resists romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O’Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman.
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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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By author: Terry Kay Afterword by: Jeff Fields
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H991
ISBN: 9780881467536
Price: $24.00
Middy Sweet Young, a wealthy widow, returns to her hometown in Northeast Georgia in search of her youth, lured by a dreamy wish shared with Luke Mercer, her high school boyfriend: "One day we’ll be together…" THE FOREVER WISH OF MIDDY SWEET is the story of that prophecy--the former beauty queen and the retired history teacher reuniting fifty years after her vow.
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Product Code: H894
ISBN: 9780881465099
Price: $25.00
Former United States Attorney General Griffin Bell, a partner with Robert L. Steed in the prestigious Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding, once described Steed as "half lawyer, half wit. His law partners insist he's a writer, and his writer friends insist he's a lawyer." In fact, Steed built an enviable career in both fields. A graduate of Mercer Law School, Steed became one of the nation’s leading bond attorneys during an era of rapid economic development. All the while he wrote humorous essays that were published in the Atlanta Constitution and collected into books; his barbs were targeted at the vainglorious in politics, entertainment, and society, always imploring them, "Don't take yourself so damn serious." That attitude also served Steed well as a member of the Mercer University Board of Trustees from 1974 till the present. His insight, humor, and love of Mercer helped him to guide the university, as chairman of the Board, through some tempestuous times. Long-time Mercer President Dr. Kirby Godsey said, "I can honestly say that Mercer never had a more loyal alumnus than Bob Steed." Greatness often sprouts from modest roots, and such was the case with Steed. Shared here for the first time is the story behind the persona--the family, wife, wit, and commitment that coalesced to form an extraordinary scholar, writer, and philanthropist.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P428
ISBN: 9780881462418
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Abandoned Quarry publishes for the first time in a trade edition Lane’s poems from Quarries, As the World Around us Sleeps, Against Information & Other Poems, The Dead Father Poems, Noble Trees, and other chapbooks, broadsides, and little magazines. Mostly out of print, or simply unavailable except in rare book collections, the selection of poems in Abandoned Quarry shows the growth and fullness of spirit of one of the important Southern poets to emerge in the 1980s.
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Product Code: H891
ISBN: 9780881465020
Price: $35.00
John Updike once wrote that many of his works are "illustrations of Kierkegaard," and yet no current study provides an extended, convincing reason why this is so, why Updike came to live by Søren Kierkegaard's ideas. This study does, telling the story of Updike's life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career, and tracing the subsequent evolution of Updike's complex and coherent theology.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P545
ISBN: 9780881466164
Price: $16.00
As the opening poem “The Labyrinth Galaxy” suggests, this is not a book of astronomy, but a book of seeking and beseeching. Cathryn Hankla’s GALAXIES forms a collective of connected but disparate things. Each galaxy grouping constitutes a gravitational system of concern, finding its own music and approach to what a poem can be. Together the poems create a spiritual pilgrimage, a sequence sending up an alarm for the earth, inviting the reader to walk a path to the heart’s center.
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Product Code: P511
ISBN: 9780881465532
Price: $16.00
In spring 1962, a young black girl named Etta Hemsley is killed at a civil rights demonstration on a university campus in Atlanta. The next day, the home of Jovita Curry, a black woman in Overton, Georgia, is burned.
Both events are etched into the memory of Cole Bishop and eerily play out the predictions of a former classmate named Marie Fitzpatrick. Both Cole and Marie are high school seniors when they first meet in fall 1954. Cole, like his classmates, is a native-born Southerner influenced by the traditions of segregation as a way of life. Marie is a recent transplant from Washington, DC, a brilliant and assertive nonconformist with bold predictions about a new world that is about to be ushered in by the force of desegregation. Included in her prophecy is a warning for Cole that will cause him to leave the South to live and teach in Vermont. The odd friendship between the two of them continues after high school in a series of tender and revealing letters.
THE BOOK OF MARIE is the story of a generation—whites and blacks—who ignited the war of change. Yet, it is also as much about the power of place— the finding of home—as it is about the history of events.
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