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...

Continuing a two-decade tradition of excellence in literature, New Stories from the South presents the 20 best stories of from 1996 to 2005 selected by Anne Tyler. With such authors as Lee Smith, Judy Troy, William Gay, Stephen Coyne, Max Steele, Jill McCorkle and Chris Offutt, Best of the South elegantly portrays an old man's struggle with Alzheimer's, a death row inmate's confusion over his own guilt, and a young girl seeking comfort in a motel room with a trucker, and many more memorabl...

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...

IRA/CBC Teachers' Choice • Horn Book Fanfare • Library of Congress Children's 2019 Books • ALA Booklist Editor's 2019 Choice • Publishers Weekly Best Book • ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults • School Library Journal Best Book • Winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction • ALA Best Book for Young Adults • ALA Notable Children's Book

From the author of Gap Creek—an international bestseller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award—comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their mountain world in 1920s Appalachia.The Powell brothers—Muir and Moody—are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother—embittered by the death of his father, by years of fightin...

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...