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: P421
ISBN: 9780881462319
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
One of the most beloved books in American literature, Walden is must reading for any American or anyone interested in reading great literature. But for those who go there looking for reasons Thoreau became a recluse they are sure to
be disappointed. Instead, reading Walden is more of a journey to the self and how that self can live in the world.
This new edition has an insightful and lyrical essay introducing the text by Sam Pickering, the inspiration for the Dead Poets Society. His essay is the most provocative piece on Walden since E. B. White.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H857
ISBN: 9780881463958
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $26.00
Will Sammy Levitt’s bar mitzvah plans be derailed by a Christian pilgrimage? Cliff Graubart in his first novel writes a humorous and touching tale of 1950s Washington Heights Jewish life in The Curious Vision of Sammy Levitt and Other Stories. Sammy Levitt, about to become the first bar mitzvah in the new synagogue sees an image that threatens to bring him unwelcome celebrity. Can the hopes of a priest and a rabbi keep the community from blowing apart? These stories are woven together by Cliff Graubart’s fresh, authentic voice documenting the American Jewish experience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P541
ISBN: 9780881465976
Price: $18.00
Frannie Lewis has a lot of bad history with men, starting with the first one she ever met. She’s watched her aloof father disappear in the summers to work with a traveling carnival, seen her mother grow ever more suspicious and resentful. All her life, Frannie has kept their secrets and told their stories. Now thirty-six, she remains a pawn in their longstanding marital chess game—and at this point, it has devolved into a grudge match.
Even so, she longs to be a mother. Motherhood seems like a chance to reinvent what it means to be a family—to rectify her childhood, to start fresh. Still single, she isn’t sure if this will ever happen. When her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to have a baby on her own to encourage him to live and to please her mother, who still grieves over the baby she lost twenty-five years ago.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P528
ISBN: 9780881465716
Price: $17.00
Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life.
Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.
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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: 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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