Ordinary objects. Extraordinary tales.As Told by Things is a lighthearted, multi-genre collection of short stories and flash fiction, each told from the perspective of an inanimate object.Fun, witty, and full of charm, As Told by Things will capture your imagination—as well as your heart.What objects do you think have stories to tell?

Social media was made to bring us together. But few things have driven us further apart. Sadly, many Christians are fueling online incivility. Others, exhausted by perpetual outrage and shame-filled from constant comparison, are leaving social media altogether. So, how should Christians behave in this digital age? Is there a better way? Daniel Darling believes we need an approach that applies biblical wisdom to our engagement with social media, an approach that neither retreats from modern...

Stirring, heroic, and wonderfully laced with the musical languages of the Bayou, A Gathering of Old Men is a breathtaking saga from Ernest J. Gaines—the foremost voice in contemporary African-American literature.When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation, he finds a dead Cajun farmer. He knows who committed the crime, but Mapes finds himself powerless when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man’s brutish...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Devil's Dream is an animated, lyrical novel that is meant to be savored as spoken word. Consummate storyteller Lee Smith's creation will delight anyone who enjoys the sound of language and a good story. Preacher's son Moses Bailey believed that the fiddle was the voice of the Devil and denied his wife the pleasure of the music she dearly loved. She fiddled for her three children behind her husband's back. Thus begins a magnificent 150-year sag...

Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. With each chapter, Lee Smith, a master of regional voices, adds another branch to a family tree that sings with secrets and sadness, beauty and joy.Researching an assignment for an Oral History course, Jennifer drives to the Virginia hills where her mother and father grew up. Raised by a stepmother, the young college student wonders why her father n...

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don't know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn o...

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a ...

""Simply the most exciting book on black folklore and culture I have ever read."" --Roger D. AbrahamsMules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her ""native village"" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history ...

To listen to this audiobook is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow...

A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last ""Black Cargo"" ship to arrive in the United States.In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo...

“The Cutting Season is a rare murder mystery with heft, a historical novel that thrills, a page-turner that makes you think. Attica Locke is a dazzling writer with a conscience.”—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, New York Times bestselling author of WenchAttica Locke’s breathtaking debut novel, Black Water Rising, won resounding acclaim from major publications coast-to-coast and from respected crime fiction masters like James Ellroy and George Pelecan...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENTHailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a ...