Captain Billy’s Troopers is a frank, literary memoir about William Cobb’s life as a southern writer—his struggles with addiction and illness, his career as a teacher and novelist, and his hard‑won return to creative life.In this audacious memoir, William Cobb reveals the tumultuous creative life of a distinguished practitioner of southern and Alabama storytelling. As poignant and inspiring as his own fiction, Captain Billy’s Troopers traces Cobb’s...

Nineteen acclaimed writers reflect on the Alabama landscapes, memories, and experiences that shaped their voices.In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the u...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s BazaarJoan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interv...

“A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity.”—The New York Times Book Review“This is Smith at her finest.”—Library Journal, starred reviewSet deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. When she was sent off to c...

Chosen by Paul Auster out of the four thousand stories submitted to his radio programme on National Public Radio, these 180 stories provide a wonderful portrait of America in the twentieth century. The requirement for selection was that each of the stories should be true, and each of the writers should not have been previously published. The collection that has emerged provides a richly varied and authentic voice for the American people, whose lives, loves, griefs, regrets, joys and sense ...

**New York Times BestsellerThe creator of The New Yorker’s long running satirical column, and “one of the funniest people in America,” pays tribute to comedic geniuses both past and present, including Mark Twain, George Saunders, Nora Ephron, and more (CBS Sunday Morning).**Library of America’s collection of hilarious stories, essays, and articles is an exclusive Who’s Who of the very best American comic writing. Classic pieces of American humor appear her...

Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader’s dream" (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites f...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lesso...

"One of the more readable, insightful and entertaining celebrity autobiographies in recent memory—a tragicomedy that could be turned into its own movie." — Chicago Sun-TimesThere is—and could only ever be—one Billy Bob Thornton: actor, musician, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and accidental Hollywood badass. In The Billy Bob Tapes, he leads us into his Cave Full of Ghosts, spinning colorful tales of his modest (to say the least) Southern upbri...

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life.The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the ide...

**National Bestseller · A CBC Best Nonfiction Book of the Year · Finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize · Finalist for the Hamilton Literary Awards"Bunny told me there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one would ever hear, including me . . ."**Tom Wilson always felt something wasn't quite right. His parents, Bunny and George, were much older than other kids' parents. There were no baby photos of him in the house. At school, classma...

A Local Kid (Does Only O.K.) is a witty and affectionate account of one boys growing up in Rogers, Arkansas in the late forties and the fifties in the days before malls, credit cards, and big-box stores when people shopped and found entertainment in what is now the historic town center. A 1960 graduate of Rogers High School, Bassham recalls his checkered employment history as a soda jerk, dishwasher, fry cook, carpenter, and sports reporter (at age 17) for the old Roge...