Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H951
ISBN: 9780881466577
Price: $28.00
"When the bullets start flying, I hope the first one gets you." The man in the crosshairs was the author's father. It was an era of seismic social change in the American South. Four decades later, his son visited the National September 11 Museum. In a young firefighter's heroism on 9/11, the author glimpsed a truth about his father's lifelong devotion to duty, law, and justice. So he sat down and began writing him letters. THE BURDENS OF AENEAS is that series of letters--a fascinating collection of wide-ranging essays, invented conversations, reminiscences, interior monologues, and vivid descriptions of life in a vanishing America. Part memoir, part extended reflection on paternal duty and love, it breaks new ground in blending deeply personal writing with scholarly meditation on a masterwork of world literature, Virgil's AENEID.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H973
ISBN: 9780881466980
Price: $27.00
TALES FROM GEORGIA'S GNAT LINE is about the South--the Deep South; Larry Walker’s part of the world. It’s about good people, and some not so good. It’s about a part of the United States that was, and is, somewhat different from the rest. And it’s about cotton, because in many ways cotton caused Southerners to do some of the things that otherwise good people would not have done. It’s never been easy to be a Southerner, black or white. This book is about the South of the past, the present, and, if read carefully, of the future.
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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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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.
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Product Code: H742
ISBN: 9780881460827
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $23.00
In spring 1962, a young black girl is killed at a civil rights demonstration on a university campus in Atlanta. The next day, the home of a black woman in Overton, Georgia, is burned. Both events are etched into the memory of Cole Bishop, eerily playing out the predictions of a former classmate named Marie. The story revolves around the fiftieth-year reunion of the Overton High School class of 1955, rekindling for Cole memories of the two earlier tragedies. 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.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P468
ISBN: 9780881464474
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
These poems, written over a period of thirty years, reflect both the experience of growing up and growing old.
The poems seek to find a primitive connection to a natural world that is fast disappearing. They look at what is lost and what is still present, though ignored, in twenty-first-century life.
The familiar subjects of love, death, disaster, discovery, grief, loss, and joy are explored; but the underlying power that keeps emerging lies in the need to rely on images that try to speak a language that cannot be spoken, of music/rhythm to enter that familiar place of the heart, and of a river, the Tennessee River, that drives the heart of this poet.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P590
ISBN: 9780881467215
Price: $16.00
On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H982
ISBN: 9780881467369
Price: $25.00
Lucy McKay, a high school English teacher from Mississippi, is estranged from her divorced parents. Her father, Pratt McKay, is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her mother a professor of art history at Duke. Pratt, who is ill with multiple sclerosis, invites Lucy to spend her summer vacation with him at his second home, which is in an expensive gated community 250 miles west of Chapel Hill in the Great Smoky Mountains. The visit begins with difficulty for Lucy, who is 35, also divorced, and unhappy. She and her father have trouble talking about his progressing illness. Told in a double-journal form by Lucy and her father, this is a story of love's cost and necessity.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H821
ISBN: 9780881462302
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $26.00
When Cooper Coghlan arrives in Ireland with the cremains of his grandfather, Finn Coghlan, he has one instruction: Let my ashes blow in the wind. Mesmerized by his romantic vision of Ireland, and in those landmarks—Waterford, Youghal, Cork, Killarney, the Ring of Kerry, Tralee, Kenmare, Dingle—the fate of the Irish that Finn Coghlan talked of magically brings Cooper and Kathleen O’Reilly, a public relations specialist, together.
Yet, there is a truth between the two of them that not even the enchanting tale of Finn McCool and Sally Cavanaugh, or of Patrick the Believer, can resolve. For that, Cooper must use the one gift bestowed on him as a child by his grandfather—Bogmeadow’s wish.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P467
ISBN: 9780881464467
Price: $18.00
After tragedy at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia, to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes.
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Product Code: H888
ISBN: 9780881464818
Price: $26.00
When he arrives on Neal's Island to begin ten days of intensive group therapy to treat his obsession for a woman he cannot forget, he brings with him the pseudonym of Bloodworth.
Vastly different as individuals, yet suffering the same crippling malady of obsession, five men are not prepared for the antics of Dr. Carson X. Willingham. He is maverick and madman, a brilliant investigator of his subjects, a mesmerizing performer, and either a genius or a charlatan with a rare gift of persuasion. Willingham is also a man with his own demons, caused by his own history of obsession.
It is in this environment that Bloodworth finds himself faced with the delicate question of honesty as he tries to free the memory of his Kalee, and begin his new journey into the uncertainty of what might be.
This book also available in e-book format through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P587
ISBN: 9780881467130
Price: $18.00
John Wesley O'Toole, a disbarred former attorney, is trying to make a new start in life as an art dealer in Savannah, Georgia, after his release from prison. He is struggling financially when he is approached by a prominent wealthy businessman and offered a significant sum to help recover a painting that’s been stolen by the man's estranged granddaughter, Lucy. It’s an offer O'Toole can’t afford to refuse, and seemingly his one chance to avoid losing everything he’s worked for. With the help of Jenna, O'Toole’s friend and sometimes lover, he sets out to find the missing painting, and with it, the missing granddaughter.
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