When Professor Lauren Goldberg drops dead in her windowless office, her job in the English Department (a line item in the budget) is up for grabs. Her opportunistic colleagues eye this nifty nugget, snub ...

When the matron of an Alabama catering family dies, Fin Sweetleaf, thirty-ish and single, inherits a business in disarray and a sixteen-year-old nephew yearning for normalcy.

These two mismatched orphans, ...

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

Although most of these are not ...

Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks features sparkling interviews with one of America's most valued poets. Throughout this book, which spans three decades, Brooks (1917-2000) speaks with simplicity, depth, ...

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) and William Faulkner (1897–1962) were almost unquestionably Mississippi's leading literary lions during the twentieth century. Their influence on American literature is immeasurable. ...

Fishing alone on a Tennessee lake, Miller Sharp sees a young man dive into the water and not come up. Two tense minutes pass. Then Miller dives in to rescue him.

Beware: A drowning victim will likely ...

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her.

Having published over a half-dozen ...

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century.

After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky ...

The Mississippi river country from Vicksburg to Natchez was a source and a setting for several of Eudora Welty's early stories and for her novel The Robber Bridegroom. Her eloquent essay about this region, ...

When Arnulfo Carmelas saves the life of his patron's son, he gains the right to bring his wife from Mexico. The barrio of Carmelas is born, a village on a patch of difficult, southern California farmland. ...