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Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams’s poetry we hear “the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it.”

Good ole boy Dickie Frye vanishes from the Georgia hills and the urbane Fletcher Carlyle bursts onto the New York publishing scene, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But when a psychotic rampage lands Carlyle in Weatherhaven, eminent psychologist Anton Kohl finds himself talking to Dickie Frye. Kohl’s instincts tell him Frye is not lying—but what he says can’t possibly be true. A fallen priest comes out of Sumerian mythology, the love of Kohl’s life comes out of his past, and a chicken comes out of a posh apartment on Central Park West to meet his fate. Anton Kohl’s carefully constructed world is about to be deconstructed.One part fable and one part Southern yarn, Kiss of the Jewel Bird soars from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Manhattan, rewriting history and opening a window onto a wider, more magical world, where the path to destiny is anything but straight.

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.

In Watershed Days, the reader embarks on a wide array of adventures shared in seasonal order over a period of two years, 2005-2007, yet spanning in memory back to the author’s youth. 

The twenty-four adventures are woven into a subtle, cohesive whole, providing a textured portrait of a young man, his family, and their evolving intimacy and distance with each other and the natural world, the 18-acre homestead to which they have just moved and started working, as well as the woods and rivers of Virginia’s Jefferson National Forest just down Arcadia Road.

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.

Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.

WHERE THE SOULS GO is Ann Hite’s third novel set in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Readers who loved GHOST ON BLACK MOUNTAIN, Hite’s first novel, will find many of the characters familiar. This book follows three generations of the Pritchard family, not only telling the story of how Hobbs Pritchard became the villain of Black Mountain, but highlighting women’s struggles in Appalachia, beginning in the Depression Era and ending in the mid-sixties.

Sequel to the award-winning MOTHER OF RAIN. When it is a healing they need, the people at Christian Bend, Tennessee, turn to one woman—Burdy Luttrell. Melungeon by birth, Burdy learned the therapeutic properties of roots from the women in her family. When Burdy discovers that Lincoln Memorial University is hosting a class on healing roots, she persuades her friend, Mayne, to drive her up. The two women make a fateful stop at Laidlow Pharmacy at Bean Station where an armed gunman executes three people and critically injures another. Burdy—the woman able to cure others—is now fighting for her life at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. Karen Spears Zacharias has crafted a mesmerizing novel of tragedy and transformation, a beautiful rendering of fact and fiction, and a tenderhearted narrative of survivors and the battles they face.

What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals. Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question. Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.

Based on the writings of renowned British actress, Fanny Kemble, and her life in 19th-century England and the American South. THE POISONED TABLE portrays a passionate rivalry between fictional actress Isabel Graves and real-life Shakespearian stage sensation Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble. In this tale of ambition, romance, and betrayal, Graves harbors early resentment, convinced that Kemble’s family theatre connections assured Fanny’s selection for the lead role in Romeo and Juliet despite Isabel’s superior beauty and talent. The novel traces their unconnected adventures and acting careers in the Old and New Worlds, as well as their introduction to the horrors of American slavery and to romance with one of the wealthiest men in America, Pierce Butler, owner of Georgia cotton and rice plantations and master of more than 800 slaves.

FIREFLIES is a collection of lyric poems—formal and informal— that seek solace in nature and memory for the heartache of being human. From children chasing fireflies at night to middle agers chasing lost loves at three in the morning, they trace the compromises we make to make it—the dead mice, cats, fetuses, and loves left in our wakes. And they celebrate the tenuous survival of trees, love, and innocence.

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.