A #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller in hardcover! Lila Mae Wooten is leaving her home in Kentucky and, with her four children, is driving to meet her husband in California, where they aim to pursue the American Dream and escape a few bill collectors on the way. But since Lila never fails to find treasure on the road less traveled, what should be a four-day trip turns into an adventure of grand proportions. Each encounter, be it with a gas station attendant or a distant relative, draws Lila and her troupe into a new escapade-each one a wildly comedic diversion from their path. Dreaming Southern has been called "zany" (Los Angeles Times), "a sheer delight" (Rita Mae Brown), and "a remarkable first novel" (Joan Didion). It will no doubt delight paperback readers with its fresh, humorous taste of 1950s Americana. "A comic odyssey guaranteed to induce grins of recognition from anyone who's ever experienced the joys of intergenerational travel."-Marie Claire

The masterpiece, Dream Journey in the Xiao and Xiang Rivers has been celebrated by critics throughout its long history. Now for the first time this study locates its original historical and social context, and traces its subsequent history and the role it fulfilled at various times.

From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chival

Assembles for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheidExplores the history of how the future in South Africa after the end of apartheid was imagined Provides the first literary-cultural history of South African speculative fictionStudies the literary-political cultures of the five major traditions of South African anti-colonial/ anti-segregationist/ anti-apartheid thoughtFocusing on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, the Communist Party of South Africa, the Non-European Unity Movement and the Pan-Africanist Congress. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.

Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on “immoral” popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. In Tehrangeles Dreaming Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations. The transnational circulation of Tehrangeles culture, she contends, transgresses Iran's geographical, legal, and moral boundaries while allowing all Iranians the ability to imagine new forms of identity and belonging.

From the award-winning Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun comes this rich collection of some of the South’s most notable women. For too long, the Southern woman has been synonymous with the Southern belle, a “moonlight and magnolias” myth that gets nowhere close to describing the strong, richly diverse women who have thrived because of—and in some cases, despite of—the South. No more. Garden & Gun’s Southern Women: More than 100 Stories of Trail Blazers, Visionaries, and Icons obliterates that stereotype by sharing the stories of more than 100 of the region’s brilliant women, groundbreakers who have by turns embraced the South’s proud traditions and overcome its equally pervasive barriers and challenges. Through interviews, essays, photos, and illustrations these remarkable chefs, musicians, actors, writers, artists, entrepreneurs, designers, and public servants will offer a dynamic portrait of who the Southern woman is now. The voices of bona fide icons such as Sissy Spacek, Leah Chase, and Loretta Lynn join those whose stories for too long have been overlooked or underestimated, from the pioneering Texas rancher Minnie Lou Bradley to the Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilter Mary Margaret Pettway—all visionaries who have left their indelible mark not just on Southern culture, but on America itself. By reading these stories of triumph, grit, and grace, the ties that bind the sisterhood of Southern women emerge: an unflinching resilience and resourcefulness, an inherent love of the land, a singular style and wit. And while the wisdom shared may be rooted in the Southern experience, the universal themes are sure to resonate beyond the Mason-Dixon.

In 1916, on the immigrant blocks of the Southern port city of Mobile, Alabama, a Romanian Jewish shopkeeper, Morris Kleinman, is sweeping his walk in preparation for the Confederate veterans parade about to pass by. "Daddy?" his son asks, "are we Rebels?" "Today?" muses Morris. "Yes, we are Rebels." Thus opens a novel set, like many, in a languid Southern town. But, in a rarity for Southern novels, this one centers on a character who mixes Yiddish with his Southern and has for his neighbors small merchants from Poland, Lebanon, and Greece. As Morris resides with his family over his Dauphin Street store, enjoys cigars with his Cuban friend Pablo Pastor, and makes "a living not a killing," his tale begins with glimpses of the old Confederacy, continues through a tumultuous Armistice Day, and leads up to the hard-won victories of World War II. Along the way Morris sells shoes and sofas and endures Klan violence, religious zealotry, and financial triumphs and heartbreaks. With his devoted Miriam, who nurses memories of Brooklyn and Romania, he raises four adventurous children whose own journeys take them to New Orleans and Atlanta and involve romance, ambition and tragic loss. At turns lyrical, comic, and melancholy, this tale takes inspiration from its title. This Romanian expression with an Alabama twist is symbolic of the strivings of ordinary folks for sustenance, for the realization of their hopes and dreams. Set largely on a few humble blocks yet engaging many parts of the world, this Southern Jewish novel is, ultimately, richly American.