Voices of the South

"In the admixture of wilderness and elegant society that was 1826 Kentucky, Jeremiah Beaumont, a brilliant, imaginative lawyer, stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont's life story - his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment - and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. He uncovers a burning idealist's search for purpose and his rabid rejection, like other great Promethean heroes of the American mythology, of conventional heroism. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough in Time is, like its precursor All the King's Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion."--BOOK JACKET.

In the New Orleans of the '30s and '40s, things - and people - are supposed to be black and white. Cille and her light-skinned brothers are neither. They are "the color that looks not-quite white next to a white man, and not-quite colored next to a colored man. It was a non-color in a place where you had to be something." The daughter of a dreamy alcoholic father who introduces Cille to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley" but who exits her life too soon, and a mother who teaches her children not the love of God but the fear of him, young Cille struggles for balance and identity in a world where race and class define people for life, and where her brothers destroy themselves beating against the bars of the cage of a divided culture.

"Yellow light filled the attic. The light locked with the dust—tons of dust up here—and the atmosphere of the place stuffed his head like a fever. It seemed that he perceived this light with every nerve of his body. The attic was mostly empty but toward the south wall was a queer arrangement of chains; the ends dangled about seven feet from the floor and had broad iron bands attached. The bands were hinged on one side so they could open and shut. The chains looked red in the yellow light. He held one of the bands and stroked his finger along the inside and it came away reddish. Rust, he thought; but it didn't flake; it wasn't gritty like rust. It was old, caked blood. . . Slowly, Peter is mesmerized and begins a journey into madness where a bloodstained god waits to claim the mind and soul of the last of the Lelands. ""I am honestly convinced that Fred Chappell is one of the finest writers of this time, one of the rare and precious few who are truly 'major.'"" — George Garrett, author of Death of the Foxand The Succession. Fred Chappell is a past Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Boson Books also offers Dagon The Gaudy Place and Moments of Lightby Fred Chappell. For an author bio and photo, reviews and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com."

The story of a deadly love triangle set in New Orleans. Emma Miller, married and the mother of a five-year-old daughter, is obsessed by her increasingly sadomasochistic relationship with Pascal Toussaint, who is himself fixated upon Claire D'Anjou, a young novice with a passion for God.

Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of A. R. Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their inspiration and effects. He takes up the questions that have been central to American poetry over the last forty years and connects them to the larger enterprise of living in a difficult, changing world. At a moment when the arts are under attack, Ammons reminds us of the crucial role poetry plays in teaching us to recognize and use sources of understanding that are irreducible to statement.

Set in Macon, Georgia, this novel-length character study covers three days in the life of "nice guy" Connie Holtzclaw, small-time prizefighter and would-be dreamer turned kidnapper. Connie and his older brother Carl, the mastermind behind the scheme, kidnap and hold a rich college kid for $200,000 ransom. With his hoped-for cut of the money, Connie intends to lure Rita, his waitress-girlfriend, to Montana to start a new life together. As dark events unfold, Connie's naivete is juxtaposed against a reality of double murder and betrayal.

Zut alors! This is not the real McCoy, but the archi-known "Book of Common Prayers."

"Ellen Gilchrist's debut novel expands the thematic and visual landscapes the author made indelibly hers in radiantly spun stories. The Annunciation follows the desires of Amanda McCamey: an unwed mother on a Mississippi Delta plantation at age fourteen, a wealthy New Orleans matron until her early forties, and now a divorced poetry student living in a university community in the Ozarks. When Amanda finds herself infatuated with an intense young musician, what at first appears to be a sexual intrigue becomes a grand and impossible passion that unfolds with striking parallels to the life of the eighteenth-century French poetess whose work she is translating."--BOOK JACKET.

Tragedy dogs the Hunnicutt family in the woods and hills of an East Texas village.

Violence and sex in a small Southern city. Arkie, Clemmie, Oxie, and Johns are linked by a schoolboy's prank. Arkie, Clemmie, and Oxie are three of a kind: cons who grub for small change. They have no history and no future. Johns is their counterpart in a brighter universe. His thievery is sanctioned because he's Family in a small Southern city. Arkie: Suddenly it occurred to him that this street, Gimlet Street, could take you anywhere in the world, it was joined to all the other streets there were. He shook his head, grinning. This was his territory. He was chained to Gimlet and he was chained to Clemmie, that green-eyed girl he was so helplessly in love with. "Chappell has outstanding gifts as a writer!" — Southern Observer "Chappell writes like a whiz!" — Book Week "Chappell writes with imagination and descriptive grace!" — Los Angeles Times "Chappell is a powerful and demanding and uncompromising writer…very powerful and impressive!" —Greensboro Daily NewsFred Chappell is the Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

James Christopher—book editor, husband, and father of two—is headed for trouble. Once a North Carolina farm boy who grew up hoeing, fighting, and listening to his grandmother read from the Bible, James resigns from his job for no apparent reason, drinks too much, fails in his attempt to take up writing, and, following the advice of a skirt-chasing rogue, has an affair with a woman he dislikes. Daring to recall the events of his childhood, especially the fire that destroyed his grandparents’ home, James, obsessed with his past and its deception, struggles to truly understand his history and its influence on the man he has become.Fred Chappell recently served as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate. Boson Books also offers The Inkling, Moments of Light and Dagon by Fred Chappell.For an author bio, photo, and a sample read visit bosonbooks.com.

Amantha Starr, who was sent to Ohio at age nine to receive an education, does not return to her father's Kentucky plantation until she learns of his death. At his graveside she is shocked to learn that her mother had been a plantation slave, and now she, Amantha, is being sold by her father's creditors. This is her story for a search of freedom.

Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a terrible slump. He's batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife; and he secretly fears he's inherited his mother's insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his record of Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," his record player, and his new saxophone and flees, negotiating his way through madcap adventures and flashbacks to childhood ("If you folks believed more strongly in God, maybe you wouldn't be colored"). Pursued by a raging dope dealer, saddled with a mishandled elephant and an abused little white girl, he manages in the end to fly free, both transcending and inspired by the pull of so much life.

Published in 1930, Poor Fool was Erskine Caldwell's second novel. Like most of his fiction, it revolves around a gallery of grotesque characters motivated by the basest urges. The novel's central figure is Blondy Niles, a down-and-out boxer who exists at the very fringes of society. The garish nighttime world of bars and prostitutes, con men and petty crimes is the milieu in which he moves. When he is approached by Salty Banks to be an unwitting fall guy in a rigged boxing scheme, a calamitous chain of events is set in motion, and death is the inevitable result. Blondy is befriended by a good-hearted prostitute, Louise, but then comes under the powerful, mysterious spell of the gruesome Mrs. Boxx, an enormous, soulless woman who lures him to her house, which has been converted into the most primitive of abortion mills. Despite the terrible acts Mrs. Boxx oversees and that Blondy is compelled to participate in, he inexplicably finds himself unable - or unwilling - to leave this chamber of horror. Only with the help of Dorothy, Mrs. Boxx's younger, daughter, does he finally free himself from the clutches of this demonic, madwoman. Yet freedom proves elusive, for by the end of this surreal, phantasmagoric adventure, Blondy and everyone he cares for have come to a bloody end. . Caldwell himself likened Poor Fool to a "diabolical dream." Written early in his career, it foreshadows many of the themes that were to characterize his later novels.

The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, "in some important senses, a new work." Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. "R.P.W." is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.

Elizabeth Spencer is the author of several justly praised short story collections and novels, among them The Light in the Piazza, which was made into a motion picture. Beginning with her youth in Mississippi and her sheltered upbringing among family and friends, she tells not only her own story but that of a place and time that have since disappeared. She writes also of her friendships with Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and others who have sustained her. Elizabeth Spencer earned a masters degree in literature at Vanderbilt University and taught for a time in the South before setting out for New York, where her first novel was published. Having acquired a taste for other places, and feeling increasingly estranged from the South owing to the racial tension there, she traveled extensively, living for some years in Italy and Canada, before returning "home" to North Carolina. Elizabeth Spencer describes her encounters with writers - William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Alberto Moravia - without hero worship or embellishment; her portraits are respectful, honest, and often witty.

THE INKLING by Fred Chappell is, says the New York Times, "A work of genuine talent…. Chappell writes with power and passion and with flashes of humor."This early novel of Chappell's takes sixteen-year-old Jan to where we often try to go—the place where all is right just before it goes wrong. The novel begins and ends with Jan's vision in just that place and with his searing pain of ignorance and failure. Chappell gives us characters for tragedy: a mother, bereaved and weak; her two children, a retarded older girl and, in contrast, a bright younger boy deeply frightened by what he perceives as his responsibility to take care of his mother and sister in the absence of his dead soldier father. Uncle Hake, the mother's brother, is the intruder whose admittance stems from an idea of necessity and family decency. It is this outsider, his desires, and death (always the intruder), who tear at the tenuous family bonds of mother, dead father, and starkly contrasted children.Chappell skillfully and quickly catches us in the artful net of his concept and his lucid and vibrant prose.Fred Chappell is the Poet Laureate of the state of North Carolina. BOSON BOOKS also offers DAGON, MOMENTS OF LIGHT, and THE GAUDY PLACE by Fred Chappell.

George Webber, a man raised and schooled in the south, moves to New York City where he aspires to become a successful writer, but his ambition is sidetracked when he becomes tragically obsessed with the beautiful, wealthy, and married socialite Esther Jack.

A family chronicle of the Ordways, tenacious Tennessee farm folk who crossed into Texas after the Civil War.