Who doesn't remember the holiday sights and sounds and smells of Grandma's house? The living room aglow with a tree that touches the ceiling, the clatter of silverware and kitchen pans, the banter of relatives, and especially Grandma's bright face—Donald Davis captures these memories and more and relays them through the eyes of a child.

This is a double set of double stories. The first set is made up of a story my Grandmother told me about when my mother broke her arm...twice! The second story in this set is my story of when we broke my little brother's collarbone...twice! It is about how trouble is genetic in families. The second set follows up with the same neighbor boys, the Leatherwoods, and shows what happens when two big brothers team up against two little brothers. It also shows us that fathers are always smarter t...

For 16 years, Donald Davis has performed during the Christmas season at Fearrington Village, a unique destination community near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Hundreds of people fill the seats in this historic barn, now converted for use as an events venue.Recorded live at Davis's December 15, 2007 performance, this audio captures the familiar and special relationship between a skilled and beloved storyteller and the audience that has sustained him year after year.In three m...

The "home theater" will never replace the drive-in theater in America's imaginary landscape. Donald Davis recalls a summer working under the lax supervision of Daff-Knee Garlic, owner and operator of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater in rural North Carolina in the early 1960s. Davis recalls his duties at the concession stand, catching "slip-ins," and patrolling the back rows. But the story culminates on Labor Day when the last movie, The Guns of Navarrone, is almost over. Dav...

Donald Davis was born into a southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up listening to his father and his Uncle Frank tell stories of their boyhood, all the while taking in the details of his own childhood experience. These stories of growing up in Appalachia in the 1950s are funny and true, nostalgic and bittersweet.The characters are memorable: Miss Martha Anne Butler, "the last surviving member of a failed Southern family", whose grocery deliveries always incl...

A winding highway; children fighting in the back seat; parents suggesting diversionary games and holding onto their own hopes and fears for the vacation ahead. It's not an uncommon scene. But it is Donald Davis's genius that turns a lackluster family vacation into a week to remember. The 1950s-era plastic seat covers were not the only thing to leave a lasting impression. In her spontaneous (and desparate) invention of games like Cow Poker and See Rock City, Mother keeps the rules one step ...

Storyteller Donald Davis had a very sensible mother. She had a pretty good idea what boys would do, so she was always on the lookout. As Davis later learned, always being on the lookout is what mamas do. His vigilant but gentle mother gave her son multiple gifts in life, and—as we learn in the end—gifts that do not end with her passing.

A definitive selection of poetry from a major 20th-century voice. This new selection of Donald Davie's poems spans six decades, showcasing his remarkable poetic evolution. Edited by Sinéad Morrissey, this collection traces Davie's journey from austere beginnings to the riskier dislocations of shape and syntax that defined his later work, and through to his extended late-meditations on form, content, and spirit.Explore Davie's complex relationship with Englishness, ...

First published in 1978, this study considers the impact of dissenting voices upon literature, religion and politics in order to reassess the nonconformist contribution to English culture from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth.This historical survey takes into the account the contribution of a wealth of seminal literary figures such as the poets Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and William Blake; and the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Mark Rutherford and D. H....

A cycle of twenty stories, each of which is focused on childhood friends, the antics of his neighborhood and school chums, and the mysteries of adult life seen through a child’s unerring eye.

There was a time during Donald Davis's college freshman year when he wasn't really sure if he wanted to claim his hometown of Sulpher Springs, North Carolina. But a boy by the name of Stanley Easter changed his mind."The year after that," he recalls, "I did go home from college for Thanksgiving. In fact, I had now become so proud of where I was from that I could hardly wait to get home. I no longer had to lie about where I was from. The world of childhood was quickly becoming a dea...

When Donald Davis walked into his 45th high-school reunion, he had two startling visions. The first was that the only signage he saw read, WELCOME HARLEY RIDERS.After discovering that he and his classmates would be sharing space with the bikers, Davis had his second surprise: "I was amazed to see how many parents had come."In The Time Machine, Davis offers us both the story of the reunion and the collectively remembered story of his classmates' senior year. In 1962...