Lee Smith

A collection of fourteen short stories by Lee Smith.

Discovered in the ruins of a North Carolina plantation, an old box of mementos brings to life the world of young Molly Petree, an orphan growing up in the smoldering remains of the post-Civil War American South.

"Revered for her powerful female characters, Lee Smith tells a perceptive story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as women. Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to escape her Southern Living lifestyle. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury - along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals."--BOOK JACKET.

In "Live Bottomless," thirteen-year-old Jenny tells the painful and hilarious tale of her philandering father's fall from grace and the family's subsequent trip to Keys West as her parents attempt a "geographical cure" for their troubled marriage. In "The Southern Cross," Chanel, a girl of easy virtue and dubious reputation, chronicles her cruise around the Caribbean with three Atlanta developers. "I may be old, but I'm not dead," begins Alice Scully, scandalizing her retirement-home writers' group in "The Happy Memories Club." And prim, old-maid Sarah is titillated by the housekeeper's horrific account of her daughter's "blue wedding.". In "The Bubba Stories," Charlene Christian explains, "I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends"; but this legendary brother takes on a life of his own. Paula's damaged brother Johnny, in the title story, is "writing a new kind of book," constructing another narrative of his tragic life. Brothers, sisters, and friends appear in these stories as the narrators' other selves, offering other possibilities. Here we have news of the spirit, indeed: stories about longing and despair and imagination and grace, about love in all its strange and shifting forms.

In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women. Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel: Dear Friends, Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page. In The Christmas Letters, I have used this familiar format to illumine the lives, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of three generations of American women. Much of the story of The Christmas Letters is also told through shared recipes. As Mary, my favorite character, says, "I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crepes phase, and now it's these salsa years." I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday--Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are. With warmest greetings, Lee Smith

Moses Bailey forbade his wife to play the fiddle, judging it to be the voice of the Devil.

Focusing on ordinary people faced with the eclipses of life--death, divorce, illness, loss--this collection of stories includes "Life on the Moon," "Intensive Care," and "Tongues of Fire."

Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork. Through births and deaths, marriages and funerals, the decades of Ivy's life are captured in a rich dialect that carries the sounds and sights of the Appalachians in each syllable.

Gathered at Miss Elizabeth's deathbed, the whole Hesse family learns unexpected secrets about Elizabeth and each other.

A curse laid on the inhabitants of Hoot Owl Holler follows each succeeding generation for a century, in a tale of love, murder, obsession, and betrayal set in Appalachia.

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummy--and crumby--childhood.Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father's sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kate's beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante--"We're the girls, we have to stick together"--and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate's father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them "delicious."Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate's youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.

Crystal Spangler leaves Appalachia to attend college and follow her dreams, but something lurking in the shadow of Black Mountain is calling her back, something that will change her life forever.

Evenly divided between a book about Smith's process and her life, first as a Southern mountain child and, later, as the parent of a schizophrenic child, this book is interesting and compelling. Despite being surrounded by loving family and being blessed with an active imagination, Lee copes with a mentally ill mother. Later, her son's mental illness and early death brings her to the breaking point but she is saved by her writing.