university press of mississippi us (Over 2,100 results)

Soft cover. Condition: New. No Jacket. A collection of very good and interesting interviews from 1969 to 1994 with this great writer. He discusses his life, his work, and the prejudices he experienced living in the Southern United States. Part of the 'Literary Conversations' series of books. A 1st edition paperback, in new condition. (335 pages & 19 pages of introduction).

Paperback. Condition: New. Born in the South Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, artist and writer George Pérez (1954-2022) cut his teeth in the 1970s as an artist at Marvel who worked on lesser titles like The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu and Creatures on the Loose, and then mainstays like Fantastic Four and The Avengers. In the 1980s, Pérez jumped ship to DC where he helped turn The New Teen Titans into a top-selling title and cocreated Crisis on Infinite Earths, which marked the publisher's fiftieth anniversary and consolidated its sprawling universe. As writer and artist, Pérez relaunched DC's Wonder Woman, a run that later inspired much of the 2017 film.Though Pérez's style is highly recognizable, his contributions to comic art and history have not been fully acknowledged. In George Pérez, author Patrick L. Hamilton addresses this neglect, first, by discussing Pérez's artistic style within the context of Bronze Age superhero art, and second, by analyzing Pérez's work for its representations of race, disability, and gender. Though he struggled with deadlines and health issues in the 1990s, Pérez would reintroduce himself and his work to a new generation of comics fans with a return to Marvel's The Avengers, as well as attempts at various creator-owned comics, the last of these being Sirens from Boom! Studios in 2014. Throughout his career, Pérez established a dynamic and minutely detailed style of comic art that was both unique and influential.

Paperback. Condition: New. Best known for his alternative comics, Chester Brown (b. 1960) is one of the most acclaimed and influential cartoonists of the last half century. This first biography provides a critical account of Brown's life and career, highlighting his role in the evolving comics landscape and tracing his journey from self-publishing minicomics on the streets of Toronto to creating award-winning graphic novels.Characterized by often minimalist art and unconventional themes, comics such as Yummy Fur, Ed the Happy Clown, I Never Liked You, Louis Riel, and Paying for It have consistently pushed boundaries and confronted taboos. Chester Brown offers unique insight into Brown's creative process as well the scope of his work and its larger cultural contexts. Organized chronologically, the book provides a full account of the artist's career, beginning with his failed attempts to break into superhero comics and ending with discussions of his most recent work, in which he blends autobiography with political views on sex work and religion.The book also examines Brown's extensive authorial revisions and considers how he has deployed both these and an increasingly voluminous amount of paratextual material in the service of creating a highly distinctive authorial persona that in turn cannot help but influence how we encounter and read his work. Chester Brown pulls back the curtain on this pioneering artist and emphasizes the inseparability of Brown's art and life, including the myriad ways they have informed each other across the last four decades of comics history.

Paperback. Condition: New. Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane. Tom Piazza's debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact. New to this volume is an introduction written by the author. Drawing themes, forms, and stylistic approaches from blues and country music, these stories present a tough, haunting vision of a landscape where the social and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot.

Paperback. Condition: New. The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist's career from 1988 to 2020. In some of his early strips published in the 1980s in the New York Press and Forward, Katchor introduced one of his quintessential characters, Julius Knipl, a real estate photographer. By crafting Knipl as an urban flâneur prone to wandering, Katchor was able to variously demonstrate his absurd humor and linguistic whimsy alongside narratives packed with social critique. Three volumes collecting the Julius Knipl strips, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay; and The Beauty Supply District, helped cement Katchor as a distinguished comics artist and social commentator. Later works, such as The Cardboard Valise, Hand-Drying in America, and The Dairy Restaurant, have diversified his comics legacy. Rooted in close analyses of the artist's numerous series and collections, each chapter in Ben Katchor is dedicated to a distinct aspect of the urban experience. Individual pages from Katchor's work depict not only the visual, but also the auditory, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of life in the city.

Paperback. Condition: New. Culberson, Jim (illustrator). The Native American tribes of what is now the southeastern United States left intriguing relics of their ancient cultural life. Arrowheads, spear points, stone tools, and other artifacts are found in newly plowed fields, on hillsides after a fresh rain, or in washed-out creek beds. These are tangible clues to the anthropology of the Paleo-Indians, and the highly developed Mississippian peoples.This indispensable guide to identifying and understanding such finds is for conscientious amateur archeologists who make their discoveries in surface terrain. Many are eager to understand the culture that produced the artifact, what kind of people created it, how it was made, how old it is, and what its purpose was.Here is a handbook that seeks identification through the clues of cultural history. In discussing materials used, the process of manufacture, and the relationship between the artifacts and the environments, it reveals ancient discoveries to be not merely interesting trinkets but by-products from the once vital societies in areas that are now Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, as well as in southeastern Texas, southern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southern Indiana.The text is documented by more than a hundred drawings in the actual size of the artifacts, as well as by a glossary of archeological terms and a helpful list of state and regional archeological societies.

Paperback. Condition: New. Racoons are not the only bandits wearing masks in the wilderness. Growing up, author Kennie Prince spent most of his time in the woods and creeks near his home in Rankin County, Mississippi. A highly skilled outdoorsman, Prince began his career with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Conservation in 1983 and dedicated his life to protecting Mississippi's fish and wildlife resources in dangerous undercover work. The Poacher's Nightmare: Stories of an Undercover Game Warden contains dozens of hair-raising accounts of covert wildlife operations, often spanning years, requiring ingenious planning, complicated secrecy, and deft coordination.Prince infiltrated bloody-minded, wary criminal groups, winning their trust. When his traps were fully set, he involved other state and federal law enforcement officials to bring an abrupt halt to abominable thefts of vast fish and wildlife resources from the public trust. Smart, creative, knowledgeable, tenacious, disciplined, passionate, and a natural-born actor, Prince bore a unique skillset that made him an ideal fit for this perilous undertaking. This memoir details how Prince gained the confidence of tightly knit circles of loyal, leery poachers and put an end to their destructive evil.

Paperback. Condition: New. Wading In: Desegregation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast frames the fight for beach and school desegregation within the history of Black life in Biloxi, beginning with the arrival of slave ships on the Gulf Coast islands in 1721. Detailing the buildup of Back-of-Town businesses, lynchings in the early 1900s, and national and state legislation repressing Black progress, author Amy Lemco contextualizes the regional atmosphere Dr. Gilbert Mason-a resilient civic leader, humanitarian, and lover of the water-and his family encountered in 1955. Using extensive archival records and interviews with survivors, the book chronicles how Dr. Mason inspired and helped organize local Black activists to peacefully protest the apartheid of Biloxi's beaches. Dr. Mason operated under the surveillance of the State Sovereignty Commission, assaults by private citizens, and the terrors of a decade riddled with the assassinations of civil rights workers. Grassroots efforts he led and inspired in Biloxi joined with the national movement to weaken the hold of white supremacy in the state. With unwavering perseverance and bravery, Dr. Mason and fellow activists achieved the desegregation of Mississippi's beaches and made Harrison County schools the first primary school district in the state to integrate. Wading In firmly establishes Dr. Mason as a national civil rights role model and presents the story of Mississippi's struggle to a new generation of readers.

Paperback. Condition: New. The Pascagoula River is the largest unobstructed river in the contiguous United States. Because of this lack of restraint, the river has been left to rise and fall naturally with the seasons, overflowing annually into the adjoining bottomland forest.?This phenomenon makes the Pascagoula River one of the wildest rivers, surrounded by some of the most ecologically diverse woodlands, in North America.Herman Murrah (1935-2002) lived his entire life on the banks and in the swamp surrounding this river in southeast Mississippi. Watershed: Herman Murrah and the Pascagoula River Swamp recounts pivotal moments in Herman's life and in Mississippi's conservation history more broadly. In this book, Herman's eldest son, Davy, details the adventures that continue to inspire young conservationists in the fight to protect our remaining natural ecosystems.As a young adult, Herman worked as a game warden in the Pascagoula River Swamp. When the Pascagoula Hardwood Company, then owners of the swamp, decided to sell the vast tract of forest for clearcutting, Herman was incensed. Determined to protect this natural wonder, Herman teamed up with other visionaries to persuade the State of Mississippi to purchase the land and preserve it in perpetuity to the benefit of future generations of humans and wildlife alike. Eventually, the state agreed and finalized the purchase. Herman was appointed area manager for the upper portion of the newly designated Pascagoula River Wildlife Management Area. He dedicated the remainder of his life to preserving, protecting, and improving the swamp for the good of south Mississippi.

Paperback. Condition: New. They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches.Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river.They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching.Today Fry is among the senior generation of "River Rats" living in a vestigial colony of twelve "camps" on New Orleans's river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Hardback. Condition: New. William Faulkner (1897-1962) once said of his novels and stories, ""I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world."" This biography provides an overview of the life and career of the famous author, demonstrating the interrelationships of that life, centered in Oxford, Mississippi, with the characters and events of his fictional world. The book begins with a chapter on Faulkner's most famous ancestor, W. C. Falkner, ""the Old Colonel,"" who greatly influenced both the content and the form of Faulkner's fiction. Robert W. Hamblin then proceeds to examine the highlights of Faulkner's biography, from his childhood to his youthful days as a fledgling poet, through his time in New Orleans, the creation of Yoknapatawpha, the years of struggle and his season of prolific genius, and through his time in Hollywood and his winning of the Nobel Prize. The book concludes with a description of his last years as a revered author, cultural ambassador, and university writer-in-residence.In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner spoke of ""the agony and sweat of the human spirit"" that goes into artistic creation. For Faulkner, that struggle was especially acute. Poor and neglected for much of his life, suffering from chronic depression and alcoholism, and unhappy in his personal life, Faulkner overcame tremendous obstacles to achieve literary success. One of the major themes of his novels and stories remains endurance, and his biography exhibits that quality in abundance. Faulkner the man endured and ultimately prevailed.

Paperback. Condition: New. Eclectic British author Alan Moore (b. 1953) is one of the most acclaimed and controversial comics writers to emerge since the late 1970s. He has produced a large number of well-regarded comic books and graphic novels while also making occasional forays into music, poetry, performance, and prose.In Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Annalisa Di Liddo argues that Moore employs the comics form to dissect the literary canon, the tradition of comics, contemporary society, and our understanding of history. The book considers Moore's narrative strategies and pinpoints the main thematic threads in his works: the subversion of genre and pulp fiction, the interrogation of superhero tropes, the manipulation of space and time, the uses of magic and mythology, the instability of gender and ethnic identity, and the accumulation of imagery to create satire that comments on politics and art history. Examining Moore's use of comics to scrutinize contemporary culture, Di Liddo analyzes his best-known works--Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, Promethea, and Lost Girls. The study also highlights Moore's lesser-known output, such as Halo Jones, Skizz, and Big Numbers, and his prose novel Voice of the Fire. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel reveals Moore to be one of the most significant and distinctly postmodern comics creators of the last quarter-century.

Paperback. Condition: New. The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where's the Friend's House? His films defy established conventions, placing audiences as active viewers who must make decisions about actions and characters while watching the narratives unfold. He asks viewers to question the genre construct (Close-Up) and challenges them to determine how to watch and imagine a narrative (Ten and Shirin). In recognition for his approach to the craft, Kiarostami was awarded many honors during his lifetime, including the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. In Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews, editor Monika Raesch collects eighteen interviews (several translated into English for the first time), lectures, and other materials that span Kiarostami's career in the film industry. In addition to exploring his expertise, the texts provide insight into his life philosophy. This volume offers a well-rounded picture of the filmmaker through his conversations with journalists, film scholars, critics, students, and audience members.

Paperback. Condition: New. Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters begins with a moment lifted from a young musician's dreams. Brian Bisesi, a guitarist barely out of his teens, is invited on stage to fill in for a missing member of the band backing blues legend Muddy Waters. This life-changing quirk of fate opens the door into a world of challenges and opportunities that Bisesi, an Italian American reared in the comforts of a New York City suburb, can barely imagine. Despite their differences, Bisesi and Waters hit it off, and what might have been a one-night stand turns into a career. From 1978-1980, Bisesi works for Waters as his road manager, bean-counter, and at times his confidant, while often sitting in with the band. Bisesi's years with the band take him to Europe, Japan, Canada, and across the United States as Waters tours-and parties-with rock gods like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, a Beatle, and the gamut of musicians who came of age with Waters and introduced a younger generation to the blues. In Out of the Blue, Bisesi captures it all: from the pranks and tensions among bluesmen enduring a hard life on the road, to observations about Waters's technique, his love of champagne and reefer, his eye for women, and his sometimes-acrid views of contemporary music. Bisesi has sharp insights into the ill-conceived management decisions that led to the dissolution of Waters's longest-serving band in June of 1980. This book will rivet, amuse, and occasionally infuriate blues aficionados. It is a raucous and intimate portrait of the blues scene at a pivotal moment in time that fascinates music historians and blues fans alike.

Paperback. Condition: New. Sofia Coppola (b. 1971) was baptized on film. After appearing in The Godfather as an infant, it took twenty-five years for Coppola to take her place behind the camera, helming her own adaptation of Jeffery Eugenides's celebrated novel The Virgin Suicides. Following her debut, Coppola was the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director and became an Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay for her sophomore feature, Lost in Translation. She has also been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and Best Director at Cannes. In addition to her filmmaking, Coppola is recognized as an influential tastemaker. She sequenced the so-called Tokyo dream pop of the Lost in Translation soundtrack like an album, a success in its own right. Her third film, Marie Antoinette, further showcased Coppola's ear for the unexpected needle drop, soundtracking the controversial queen's life with a series of New Romantic bangers popular during the director's adolescence. The conversations compiled within Sofia Coppola: Interviews mark the filmmaker's progression from dismissed dilettante to acclaimed auteur of among the most visually arresting, melancholy, and wryly funny films of the twenty-first century. Coppola discusses her approach to collaboration, Bill Murray as muse, and how Purple Rain blew her twelve-year-old mind. There are interviews from major publications, but Coppola speaks with musician Kim Gordon for indie magazine Bust and Tavi Gevinson, then-adolescent founder of online teen magazine Rookie as well. The volume also features a new and previously unpublished interview conducted with volume editor Amy N. Monaghan. To read these interviews is to witness Sofia Coppola coming into her own as a world-renowned artist.

Paperback. Condition: New. When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party's identity became increasingly secular and urban by attrition, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of the emerging decade. But it was not politics that would define President Carter in the end: it would be his humble Christian faith and his enduring commitment to the poor, to peace, and to human rights.In Conversations with Jimmy Carter, eleven interviews, drawn from Carter's five decades as a national public figure, capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him-and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

Paperback. Condition: New. Asia Booth Clarke's memoir is an indispensable resource for perceiving the complexities of her ill-fated brother. Indeed, as has been said, she ""turns on the light in the Booth family living room."" Certainly no outsider could give such insights into the turbulent Booth's childhood or share such unique personal knowledge of the gifted actor. Asia portrays him as an enigmatic figure, at once gentle and romantic while passionate and fanatical. She writes with a sister's affection and even with indulgence, but she mingles these with horror as she confronts the calamitous aftermath the assassination of Lincoln brought to Booth and to his family.

Paperback. Condition: New. Howitt, Chuck (illustrator). Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, A Concise Dictionary of Comics guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations, and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics.

Paperback. Condition: New. On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash (1932-2003) took the stage at Folsom Prison in California. The concert and the live album, At Folsom Prison, propelled him to worldwide superstardom. He reached new Audiences, ignited tremendous growth in the country music industry, and connected with fans in a way no other artist has before or since. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Revised and Updated is a riveting account of that day, what led to it, and what followed. Michael Streissguth skillfully places the album and the concert in the larger context of Cash's artistic development, the era's popular music, and California's prison system, uncovering new angles and exploding a few myths along the way. Scrupulously researched, rich with the author's unprecedented archival access to Folsom Prison's and Columbia Records' archives, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison shows how Cash forever became a champion of the downtrodden, as well as one of the more enduring forces in American music.This revised edition includes new images and updates throughout the volume, including previously unpublished material.

Hardback. Condition: New. What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ""Family and History,"" includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ""Writers and Writing,"" offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ""Politics and Society,"" includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

Paperback. Condition: New. Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world in ways that transcended the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it not only as a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies.McSweeney argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008-). The MCU has become the largest film franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an African nation-never colonized by Europe-as the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American history.

Paperback. Condition: New. Over the past thirty years, Stephen King has received enormous attention from both the popular press as well as academics seeking to explain the unique phenomenon of his success. Books on King explore his canon in religious contexts, in political and historical contexts, in mythic-specifically Jungian-contexts, in Gothic/horror (especially American literary) contexts, and in a wide variety of other contexts appropriate to a writer who, over the past half century, has become "America's Storyteller." Beginning with a never-published chapter authored by Stephen King himself on the influence of the genre on his own writing, King Noir makes an invaluable contribution to King scholarship by placing King's works in conversation with American crime fiction.This is the third book that Tony Magistrale and Michael J. Blouin have coauthored on the work of Stephen King, and the first to consider King's canon through the lens of crime fiction. King Noir examines not only King's own efforts at writing in the detective genre, but also how the detective genre finds its way into work typically regarded as horror fiction. In interviews, King has acknowledged his debt to earlier writers in the genre, such as Ed McBain and Raymond Chandler, and he much more often references hardboiled writers than he does horror writers. One could speculate that King became a writer because of his love of pulpy crime fiction, which he continues to hold in high esteem. From The Dead Zone to Mr. Mercedes, from the crime fiction of his pseudonym Richard Bachman to his most recent novel Holly, King returns obsessively to patterns established by American sleuths of every stripe, paying homage to them at the same time as he innovates on the formulas he has inherited. To focus upon a hardboiled Stephen King is to discover exciting new avenues for inquiry into one of America's most enduring, and adaptable, storytellers.

Paperback. Condition: New. The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called "the batture." On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region-ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that-for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater-provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

Paperback. Condition: New. The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer. Representative of Gifford's body of work, this volume is divided into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within these sections, Gifford's best work is showcased, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in the film, producing an innovative framework for the movie. New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Álvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford's schooling under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his novel, Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and Lula.

Paperback. Condition: New. Brimming with his rich humor, Jerry Clower's book manifests the unsurpassed southern art of yarn spinning. It shows as well the nature of the man for whom good storytelling is more than just show business.Nashville's funniest man had a serious side. Deep in the merry heart of this comic entertainer were the codes and values that made him an esteemed humanitarian.He was named America's best country comic for nine years in a row and was called ""the funniest American storyteller since Will Rogers"" and ""the Mouth of the Mighty Mississippi."" This boisterous, down-home man's loving, extroverted manner and his forthright display of positive feelings for others arose from the substance of sober, rock-solid regional values he gained from maturing in the rural South. Stories from Home embraces both Jerry Clowers, the funny man and the serious man, and shows his anecdotal humor in the mainstream of the South's great oral tradition of folktales and narratives.Jerry Clower's hilarious stories about possum hunting, coon dogs, and the rambunctious Ledbetter clan were standards in his stage routines, videos, and albums. In Stories from Home many of his fans' favorite Clower tales are included. Here, too, is a long interview in which he explored his beliefs and tells how he gained firm convictions about race, religion, education, and family as well as an intolerance of negativism.

Paperback. Condition: New. In Brother to a Dragonfly, Will D. Campbell writes about his life growing up poor in Amite County, Mississippi, during the 1930s alongside his older brother, Joe. Though they grew up in a close-knit family and cared for each other, the two went on to lead very different lives. After serving together in World War II, Will became a highly educated Baptist minister who later became a major figure in the early years of the civil rights movement, and Joe became a pharmacist who developed a substance abuse problem that ultimately took his life.Brother to a Dragonfly also serves as a historical record. Though Will's love and dedication to his brother are the primary story, interwoven throughout the narrative is the story of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement. Will is present through many of the most pivotal moments in history--he was one of four people who escorted black students integrating the Little Rock public schools; he was the only white person present at the founding of the SCLC; he helped CORE and SNCC Freedom Riders integrate interstate bus travel; he joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches in Birmingham; and he was at the Lorraine Motel the night Dr. King was assassinated.Will's accomplishments, however, never take the spotlight from his brother, and as his relationship with Joe evolves, so does Will's faith. Featuring a new foreword by Congressman John Lewis, this book brings back to print the combined lives of Will Campbell--Will the brother and Will the preacher.

Paperback. Condition: New. A Sportsman's Journey lyrically and spiritually connects readers with the natural world. Donald C. Jackson explores the rhythms and ways of hunting and fishing, particularly in America's Deep South, and in so doing helps readers understand and find meaning in why hunters and anglers venture far afield. Journeying alongside the author, readers will savor the magic of sunrises and the mystery of twilight. Hearts will quicken as deer drift from shadows and ducks circle a woodland pond. The ocean will challenge them as they fight large fish from the deck of a wave-tossed boat far out at sea. Restless winds will whisper messages during a spring squirrel hunt on a Mississippi farm. Bird dogs, old guns, old friends, and times shared with loved ones will remind anglers and hunters of those special, shared memories. Ancient forests and powerful rivers remind us of our fragile, ephemeral state. Quail hunts strengthen cherished relationships with companions. Encounters with a mountain man will take us into a world thought to have vanished generations ago. A gathering of anglers on a Gulf Coast fishing pier at night reminds us of those hidden communities that exist around us, and are often unrecognized or perhaps even unknown. Jackson reveals how all of us depend on the natural world and share very personal interactions with it and with each other. This book reminds us that rediscovering, resurrecting, and celebrating these primal linkages are the real reasons we explore the world.

Paperback. Condition: New. During the Civil War, Mississippi's strategic location bordering the Mississippi River and the state's system of railroads drew the attention of opposing forces who clashed in major battles for control over these resources. The names of these engagements-Vicksburg, Jackson, Port Gibson, Corinth, Iuka, Tupelo, and Brice's Crossroads-along with the narratives of the men who fought there resonate in Civil War literature. However, Mississippi's chronicle of military involvement in the Civil War is not one of men alone. Surprisingly, there were a number of female soldiers disguised as males who stood shoulder to shoulder with them on the firing lines across the state.Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi is a groundbreaking study that discusses women soldiers with a connection to Mississippi-either those who hailed from the Magnolia State or those from elsewhere who fought in Mississippi battles. Readers will learn who they were, why they chose to fight at a time when military service for women was banned, and the horrors they experienced. Included are two maps and over twenty period photographs of locations relative to the stories of these female fighters along with images of some of the women themselves.The product of over ten years of research, this work provides new details of formerly recorded female fighters, debunks some cases, and introduces over twenty previously undocumented ones. Among these are women soldiers who were involved in such battles beyond Mississippi as Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Readers will also find new documentation regarding female fighters held as prisoners of war in such notorious prisons as Andersonville.

Hardback. Condition: New. Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She's also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. "Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location," she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband's business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society. But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern-make that American-white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white "segregation academies," a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications. The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region's history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.

Hardback. Condition: New. In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer.The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ""the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.""In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called ""Faulkner's best-informed critic,"" illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.""For the reader of Faulkner,"" Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, ""the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights."" ""We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,"" states the Book Exchange (London). ""The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times."".