Southern Literature Collection

"An important and vital story"-- Donna Everhart, USA Today bestselling author of The Saints of Swallow Hill

A searing book club read for fans of Ellen Marie Wiseman and The Girls with No Names set in the Baby Scoop Era of 1960s and the women of a certain condition swept up in a dark history.

It's the 1960s and Lorraine Delford has it all - an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and a white picket fence home in North Carolina. Yet every time she looks through her father's telescope, she dreams of the stars. It's ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional.

But when this darling girl-next-door gets pregnant, she's forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded.

To hide their daughter's secret shame, the Delfords send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe haven - it's a house with dark secrets and suffocating rules. And as Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of a society she once admired.

Powerful and affecting, The Girls We Sent Away is a timely novel that explores autonomy, belonging, and a quest for agency when the illusions of life-as-you-know-it fall away.

From the author of The Saints of Swallow Hill, an evocative, morally complex novel set in rural 19th century North Carolina, as one woman fights to keep her family united, her farm running, and her convictions whole during the most devastating and divisive period in American history, perfect for readers of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles.

Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy’s position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight. 

Her opinion is not favored by many in their community, including Joetta’s own father-in-law, Rudean. A staunch Confederate supporter, he fills his grandsons’ heads with stories about the glory of battle and the Southern cause until one night Henry runs off to join the war. At Joetta’s frantic insistence, Ennis leaves to find their son and bring him home.

But soon weeks pass with no word from father or son and Joetta is battered by the strain of running a farm with so little help. As the country becomes further entangled in the ramifications of war, Joetta finds herself increasingly at odds with those around her – until one act of kindness brings her family to the edge of even greater disaster.

Though shunned and struggling to survive, Joetta remains committed to her principles, and to her belief that her family will survive. But the greatest tests are still to come – for a fractured nation, for Joetta, and for those she loves . . .

Competition for a Southern bridal magazine cover unleashes mayhem, forcing a mastermind maid of honor to stop being a people pleaser and start figuring out what she wants out of life. A hilarious, smart coming-of-age story.

Olivia "Liv" Fitzgerald's life is on ambition autopilot. The soon-to-be-lawyer has her life plan set and can talk anyone into anything. Well, almost anything. When her scheming aunt throws her cousin, Kali, into a competition for Southern Charm's cover alongside Liv's best friend, Leighton, all hell breaks loose. To save the day, Liv only has to:

a) Secure the Southern Charm cover for Leighton

b) Keep Aunt Charlotte happy--and keep Kali's Atlanta wedding running smoothly

c) Finish her final year of law school in Nashville and nab a coveted NYC big law job

d) Win over the guy of her dreams

Easy, right? From engagement parties to rehearsal dinners, readers will root for Liv as she balances her schemes, dreams, and double maid of honor duties.

In the world of literary journals and little magazines, the Carolina Quarterly is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the South. Founded in 1948 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the magazine has published many luminaries of modern and contemporary literature, including Robert Morgan, Evie Shockley, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Betts, and others. This anthology gathers some of the best work from the last three-quarters of a century, along with an informative essay about the journal's history and impact. The volume reminds us of the ways small literary journals reflect the voices of their region and changed the literary landscape. This work reaches beyond the imagined boundaries of a single university or single state. Thus the anthology also celebrates a form--the student-run literary journal--that has shaped the regional and national conversation and reflects the astounding accomplishment of the Carolina Quarterly over the past seventy-five years.

Wildcraft Your Way to Wellness

In Southeast Medicinal Plants, herbalist CoreyPine Shane is your trusted guide to finding, identifying, harvesting, and using 106 of the region’s most powerful wild plants. Readers will learn how to safely and ethically forage, and how to use wild plants in herbal medicines, including teas, tinctures, and salves. Plant profiles include clear, color photographs, identification tips, medicinal uses and herbal preparations, and harvesting suggestions. Lists of what to forage for each season makes the guide useful year-round.
Thorough, comprehensive, and safe, this is a must-have for foragers, naturalists, and herbalists in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

 

Bitter Southerner 2024 Summer Reading pick - Garden & Gun fall cookbooks pick - The Nosher Best Jewish Cookbooks of 2023 - The Local Palate Best Cookbooks of 2023 - Food Network 35 Best Jewish-Authored Cookbooks

A poignant--and delicious--compendium of South Carolina Jewish life revealed through food and story

Where people go, so goes their food. In Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey celebrate the unique and diverse food history of Jewish South Carolina. They gather stories and recipes from diverse Jewish sources--Sephardic and Ashkenazi families who have been in the state for hundreds of years, descendants of Holocaust survivors, and more recent immigrants from Russia and Israel--and explore how cherished dishes were influenced by available ingredients and complemented by African American and regional culinary traditions. These stories are a vital part of the South's "Jewish geography" and foodways, stretching across state lines to shape southern culture. On the southern Jewish table, many cultures are savored. Extensively illustrated with original and archival photographs, Kugels & Collards collects includes more than eighty recipes from seventy contributors. Barnett and Harvey draw on family cookbooks and troves of personal recipes and highlight Jewish staples like kreplach dumplings and stuffed cabbage as well as adaptations of southern favorites such as peach cobbler, plus modern fusions like grits and lox casserole, and of course kugels and collards. Kugels & Collards invites readers into family homes, businesses, and community centers to share meals and memories.

Lead from the Outside is a necessary guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider by Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent black female politicians in the U.S.

Leadership is hard. Convincing others—and often yourself—that you possess the answers and are capable of world-affecting change requires confidence, insight, and sheer bravado. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with the awareness of the experiences and challenges that hinder anyone who exists beyond the structure of traditional white male power—women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make a difference.

In Lead from the Outside, Stacey Abrams argues that knowing your own passion is the key to success, regardless of the scale or target. From launching a company, to starting a day care center for homeless teen moms, to running a successful political campaign, finding what you want to fight for is as critical as knowing how to turn thought into action. Stacey uses her experience and hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, while offering personal stories that illuminate practical strategies.

Stacey includes exercises to help you hone your skills and realize your aspirations. She discusses candidly what she has learned over the course of her impressive career: that differences in race, gender, and class are surmountable. With direction and dedication, being in the minority actually provides unique and vital strength, which we can employ to rise to the top and make real change.

Southern Beauty explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.

In a trio of popular gender rituals-sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage-young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties' racial work or their investment in it.

With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion-stylized and predictable but ephemeral-has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.