Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P409
ISBN: 9780881462005
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $35.00
Despite that they didn’t know each other, the writing styles of American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) complement each other, especially their humor, irony, penchants for paradox, and passions for imagery and poetics. In addition, their works similarly address issues of the world and time. Esthetic, ethical, social, philosophical, and theological paths on which they walk reveal similar footprints.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P470
ISBN: 9780881464498
Price: $20.00
Alexander Smith stated that a good essayist needed “an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things.” Arthur Benson seconded the idea, saying an essayist needed a “far-ranging curiosity.” For three decades Sam Pickering has written essays, his words rolling in a fine frenzy over ordinary life discovering the marvelous and the absurd. His curiosity ranges, but it also rumpuses and rollicks. He wanders the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, rural Connecticut, farmland in Nova Scotia, and islands in the sun. Strangers tell him their life stories—tales that are almost as odd as the fictional characters he meets. He runs half-marathons and wins prizes, but finishes so late in the day that he misses award ceremonies. His good friend David tells him, “Sam, if you weren’t so damn smart, you would have been a great success.”
Add smiles and laughter, a smidgen of melancholy, and a pinch or two of happy lies, and you have Pickering the essayist.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H953
ISBN: 9780881466669
Price: $27.00
SET LIST begins in 1970, when Blanchard Shankles and John Covey come together and start making music in a rock and roll band named Skyye. They were two young men from Sequoyah, Georgia, with limited prospects and big dreams, who were joined in their quest for fame and fortune by their friends Ford Man Cooper, Chicken Raines, Jimbo Tant, Tucker McFry, and Simpson Taggart. These fledgling musicians set out upon a musical voyage that spanned four decades, fifty states, and uncounted miles as they pursued the elusive success that was always just one song ahead of them.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P548
ISBN: 9780881466232
Price: $17.00
Christian Bend isn’t the kind of place where one expects to find the sorts of secrets the widow Burdy Luttrell has been harboring. Tucked in the hills of East Tennessee, Christian Bend is a place of piercing beauty, where the rivers and love run constant. Burdy never could bring herself to tell Rain Hurd the truth about his father. She’d always meant to, but put it off until that day she was nearly killed in the shooting at Bean Station. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Rain left his job in Rhode Island and flew to Burdy’s bedside at that Knoxville hospital. That’s when Burdy told him about the letters.
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Edited by: Susan Cushman Foreword by: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P542
ISBN: 9780881466126
Price: $18.00
A SECOND BLOOMING is a collection of essays by twenty-one authors who are emerging from the chrysalis they built for their younger selves and transforming into the women they are meant to be. They are not all elders, but all have embraced the second half of their lives with a generative spirit.
These women of all ages have made it over a wall to find their true selves. As Agatha Christie says of the second blooming, “…a whole new life has opened before you…. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P530
ISBN: 9780881465730
Price: $18.00
Margaret Norman lives in a family with secrets, not the least of which is her own. But what concerns Margaret more is that her family will not talk about her mother, “Weezie,” an artist who died shortly after Margaret was born. Her father, Jim Norman, a brooding attorney, is too obsessed with his own pain to share. Louisa, her older sister, is hostile toward Margaret and ignores her. Black housekeeper, Ida, who is helping to raise Margaret, does not think it her place to tell what others will not. And gentle great aunt, Maggie, did not know Margaret’s mother.
Set in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, CARDINAL HILL takes place in a world where blacks and whites, although separated by custom and law, often thrive in personal relationships; where half a world away, a war disrupts lives of those close to home; and where little girls suspect that kissing causes babies.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P453
ISBN: 9780881463903
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $16.00
Winner of the 2011 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry The House Began to Pitch is a collection of poems that begins by following the lives of a man and a woman who grow up in the rural South in the fifties and sixties. Many of the poems are told through the lens of fairy tales as a comment on archetypal constructs that make up our ideals of home and family.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H844
ISBN: 9780881462821
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
Near its heart, English Romanticism—across many writers—acknowledges and celebrates a community that is not just secular but that derives meaning from a religious association and, in fact, a particularly defined religion, that is, Anglican Christianity.
William Wordsworth and Jane Austen, premier English Romantic poet and novelist, were baptized, confirmed, and buried (and for Wordsworth, married) in conformity with the Church of England. Of course, Wordsworth’s commitment flagged in his twenties, but with marriage and responsibility came respectability and parishioner status. However, most twentieth-century critics interpret these writers’ works outside the Christian realities with which their lives were much imbued, except for late Wordsworthian poems from his purported decline into conservative politics and religion and evident poetic senility.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P615
ISBN: 9780881467727
Price: $18.00
When Arthur Benjamin steps from a Greyhound bus in Savannah, Georgia, he is immediately robbed by an affable street magician named Hamby Cahill. It is Hamby's first act of thievery and the remorse of it so overwhelms him that he finds lodging for Arthur in The Castle, a warehouse supposedly owned by Melinda McFadden, an eccentric and fragile grande dame of imagined aristocracy who is known as Lady to the strange assembly of street people she has arbitrarily selected to be her Guests. There, Arthur finds his family--an ex-con shoplifter, a disgruntled seamstress, a young artist suspected of being a hooker, and a former boxer known as Lightning.
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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.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H993
ISBN: 9780881467611
Price: $24.00
WHOSE WOODS THESE ARE takes place on Thanksgiving Day in a deep river bottom in a mythical Piedmont county, Morgan, South Carolina, a creation carried over from John Lane's first novel, the award-winning FATE MORELAND'S WIDOW. The story is told in four perspectives on the possible death and certain disappearance of Old Doc, an 85-year-old land owner/deer hunter and centers on a contested property boundary shared with the resident Mitchell family who have lived on the land since colonial times.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P561
ISBN: 9780881466522
Price: $16.00
In her first collection of poems, Sara Pirkle Hughes explores the role memory plays in shaping identity and a person’s perception of the past. The book’s title, THE DISAPPEARING ACT, posits that time is a magician causing every moment in a person's life to disappear, and every poem in the collection is the poet's attempt to recapture what has vanished, while also acknowledging the inherent paradox of writing about the past. The fallible nature of memory makes it impossible to preserve an experience free of distortion.
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