Avery Stone

Avery Stone is the urban tale of a young woman’s struggle to find love—and herself—as she begins a new chapter. While bravely moving forward on her path through life, she is doing her best to follow her pastor’s advice to focus on God, stop searching for a husband, and live her life. Sometimes her irrational life choices lead into roller coaster relationships that test her inner-strength and character. Avery embarks on a journey of self-discovery where she must learn to rely on her faith and wisdom if she is ever going to find her happily-ever-after.

Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the powerful and repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. Most important, it shows how Faulkner accommodated the conflicting demands of these two cultures by creating a set of dual identities - one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. It is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.

William Faulkner is Phil Stone's contribution to American literature, once remarked a mutual confidant of the Nobel laureate and the Oxford, Mississippi, attorney. Despite his friendship with the writer for nearly fifty years, Stone is generally regarded as a minor figure in Faulkner studies. In her biography Phil Stone of Oxford, Susan Snell offers the first complete critical assessment of Stone's role in the transformation of Billy Falkner, a promising but directionless young man, into William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In the first decades of their friendship, Stone served Faulkner in many ways--as mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent, and publicist. Later, Stone was among Faulkner's first biographers and was a source of archival, biographical, and critical information for such Faulkner scholars as James B. Meriwether and Carvel Collins. Ironically, the most intriguing aspect of Stone's relationship with Faulkner has until now been the least studied. Stone was one of Faulkner's principal character studies, and from his life came the raw material out of which Faulkner constructed a good part of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Stone's Ivy League education, his friendships with gamblers and prostitutes, his family's hunting excursions, even his family's antebellum mansion only begin to suggest the borrowings from Stone's life found in books ranging from The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses to the Snopes trilogy. Faulkner also appropriated Stone's personality and profession to mirror--and sometimes mask--his own insecurities. Such characters as Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren, Horace Benbow, and Gavin Stevens owe much to the author himself but also recall Stone in often subtle ways. The fraternal rivalries for their mother's love that consume Darl Bundren and Quentin Compson, for example, are based on Stone's own unhappy family life. Bundren's and Compson's mothers more closely resemble Stone's mother than Faulkner's. In Stone, Faulkner saw the Old South confronting its twentieth-century crucibles--the teeming, rapacious white lower classes; the Great Depression; and the first stirrings of the civil rights and women's movements. In the 1930s, Faulkner recurrently dealt with the region's decadence and the fall of old patriarchies like the Compson and Sartoris families. During these years, Faulkner's fortunes rose steadily as Stone's declined, but it is Stone's story--not his own--that he chose to tell. Snell says that in a sense Faulkner usurped Stone's place in the South's social order, building his reputation and acquiring real estate as personal and financial failures nearly overwhelmed Stone. Stone's transparent jealousy of Faulkner, personality flaws, and mental instability in his final years have engendered skepticism about his claims concerning the years he had spent "fooling with Bill." But, to hastily relegate Stone to the marginalia of Yoknapatawpha County, Snell suggests, is to leave untapped a rich source of information.Phil Stone of Oxford tells the tragic story of a talented, complex man, bred for power in the declining era of southern patriarchy, yet compelled to pursue the Muse vicariously.

On the Texas border, a brutal massacre threatens to ignite a firestorm of violence that will destabilize an already fragile Mexican government and trigger an international crisis that knows no boundaries. The only clue, a cryptic message: The time for Destiny has arrived! Tam Broderick, leader of an elite CIA task force, code-name: Myrmidon, knows that the Dominion—a quasi-religious extremist group—is behind the attacks; now it’s up to her and her team to find out what the Dominion’s true goals are, and stop them dead in their tracks. From the authors of the bestselling Dane Maddock Adventures and Dane and Bones Origins comes a new series set in the Maddock Universe. Join CIA agent Tamara “Tam” Broderick and her team as they continue their struggle to foil the power of the Dominion. Action, adventure, and thrills abound in The Myrmidon Files

“Sam Sawyer may become my favorite crime fighter. I can’t wait for the next book in this new Florida Keys mystery series …” —Maryjane Elizabeth Jones, Heat Until Boiling They called Arthur Broom “The Glades Man,” not because he lived way out there in the river of grass, but because he was spending all his money trying to save it. And as one of the richest men in Florida there was much he could do to beat back the onslaughts of agriculture and development that were threatening the greatest wetland in North America. But that sort of thing made some powerful enemies. When he ended up dead in the water, Detective Stella Reynard had good reason to suspect it was more than a simple drowning. She recruited fishing guide and part-time sleuth Sam Sawyer to help her with the case, along with Sam’s wife Katie, a full-time forensic botanist. The challenge they faced was not a lack of suspects but too many, such was the list of people whose wealth and power Art Broom had threatened. Carl and Jane Bock are retired Professors of Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Carl received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley, while Jane holds three degrees in Botany, a B.A. from Duke, an M.A. from the University of Indiana, and a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Carl is an ornithologist and conservation biologist. Jane is a plant ecologist and an internationally recognized expert in the use of plant evidence in criminal investigations. Now largely retired from academic life, the Bocks have turned their creative efforts toward fiction writing, and are co-authors of two ongoing series, the Arizona Borderlands Mysteries and the Florida Keys Mysteries.