Sleeping At The Starlite Motel

Anyone who has read her bestseller Mama Makes Up Her Mind--or who has heard her on National Public Radio--knows that Bailey White is one of the keenest observers of Southern eccentricity since Mark Twain. Sleeping at the Starlite Motel revives White's reputation as a master storyteller, Southern division, as it catalogs the oddities of the Georgia town she knows so well.

For more than a decade, Bailey White has delivered a story each Thanksgiving to National Public Radio's All Things Considered listeners. Long awaited by her many fans, Nothing with Strings is the entire collection of these Thanksgiving stories, published together for the first time. With wit and charm, Bailey White writes about an almost-gone little town where a spoon player is a guardian angel, an old woman fears that John James Audubon is living in her attic, and a homely governess wins a baby bull in a raffle and loses her heart. It's the kind of place where Heavenly Blue morning glories grow in through the windows of old houses and funeral food is shared on a Greyhound bus on a fall afternoon. You may not have ever been there, but you will feel right at home in these pages. Bailey White's beautifully written stories, teetering on the edge of the unreal, are sure to bring back memories you don't really have.

Anyone who has read the best-selling Mama Makes Up Her Mind or listened to Bailey White's commentaries on NPR knows that she is a storyteller of inimitable wit and charm. Now, in her stunningly accomplished first novel, she introduces us to the peculiar yet lovable people who inhabit a small town in south Georgia. Meet serious, studious Roger, the peanut pathologist and unlikely love object of half the town's women. Meet Roger's ex-mother-in-law, Louise, who teams up with an ardent typographer in an attempt to attract outer-space invaders with specific combinations of letters and numbers. And meet Della, the bird artist who captivates Roger with the sensible but enigmatic notes she leaves on things she throws away at the Dumpster ("This fan works, but makes a clicking sound and will not oscillate"). Heartbreakingly tender, often hilarious, Quite a Year for Plums is a delectable treat from a writer who has been called a national treasure.

Georgia has produced some of the major figures of modern literature, including Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell and, most notably, Flannery O'Connor. While such writers are firmly established in American literary history, all too few readers are aware of how the state's tradition of literary excellence persists in the present day. The thirty stories in After O'Connor were written during the past fifteen years by authors who were born in Georgia or spent a significant part of their lives and careers in this state. Embracing the social, cultural, and ethnic variety in today's Georgia, After O'Connor both advances and helps redefine the great southern storytelling tradition.

Of Women and the Essay brings together forty-six American and British women essayists whose work spans nearly four centuries. The contributions of these essayists prove that women have been significant participants in the essay tradition since the genre’s modern beginnings in the sixteenth century. Many of these essayists, such as Eliza Haywood, Fanny Fern, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, and Alice Meynell, achieved significant success as writers within whatever essay form ruled the day; others bent the rules, though often imperceptibly, to make room for themselves. Collectively they represent a missing piece in the larger history of the essay. In Of Women and the Essay Jenny Spinner contextualizes the broad range of literary essays included within the chronological development of the genre. She makes a compelling argument that women have constructed their own tradition in the essay genre, often utilizing periodic traits of the essay to their own advantage. At the same time, she suggests that the personal essay’s demands on the essayist required both a public and personal authorization that proved challenging for women essayists in general and for women of color in particular. The appendix catalogs the works of nearly 200 female essayists and should inspire further reading. As a whole, the volume lifts women writers from the cutting-room floor of essay scholarship and returns them to their rightful place in the essay canon.

For over a decade, syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson has been spending several months a year in Southwest Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun Country. Unlike many other writers who have parachuted into the swampy paradise for a few days or weeks, Rheta fell in love with the place, bought a second home and set in planting doomed azaleas and deep roots. She has found an assortment of beautiful people in a homely little town called Henderson, right on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp. These days, much is labeled Cajun that is not, and the popularity of the unique culture’s food, songs and dance has been a mixed blessing. The revival of French Louisiana’s traditional music and cuisine often has been cheapened by counterfeits. Confused pilgrims sometimes look to New Orleans for a sampler platter of all things Cajun. Close, but no cigar. Poor Man’s Provence helps define what’s what through lively characters and stories. The book is both personal odyssey and good reporting, travelogue and memoir, funny and frank. This beguiling place is as exotic as it gets without a passport. The author shares what keeps her coming home to French Louisiana. And as NPR commentator Bailey White observes in her foreword, "Both Rheta's readers and the people she writes about will be comfortable, well fed, highly entertained, and happy they came to Poor Man's Provence."