In the always compelling yet simple style that made Roy Reed one of the country's foremost journalists, he shows us--as we share with him delightful moments and rich insights on the way to Hogeye, Arkansas--Southerners still different for being Southerners, and country Southerners who are even more so. This book is a special admission into those hills, to Vacation Bible School, tent meetings, sale barns, back roads and pool halls, to dog days--to the special place that Reed calls home.

In that always compelling yet simple style that has made Roy Reed one of the country’s foremost journalists, he shows us—as we share with him delightful moments and rich insights on the way to Hogeye—Southerners still different for being Southerners, and country Southerners who are even more so, pained by bruises and comforted by salves that are peculiarly their own. “I hope that my city friends will not be upset to learn that this book is a little more sympathetic to the Arkansas hill people than it is to New Yorkers,” he says. “I have grown attached to cities over the years, but I am still, somewhere near my heart, a hillbilly. I have gone to a lot of trouble to remember that.” This book is a special admission into those hills, to Vacation Bible School, tent meetings, sale barns, back roads and pool halls, to dog days in Hogeye. To read Looking for Hogeye is to sit with Roy Reed on his wide front porch as he tells by the life he lives why, after Washington, London, and New York, he made his home in the north Arkansas hills, where he felt—as he puts it—”like Brer Rabbit reentering the briar patch.” It is a visit not to be missed, and not to be forgotten.

With a legendary beginning as a printing press floated up the Arkansas River in 1819, the Arkansas Gazette is inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting on every major Arkansas event until the paper’s demise in 1991 after a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over a hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late forties to the paper’s end. The result is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a publication known for its progressive stance in a conservative Southern state, a newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country’s greatest. The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry, and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas’s always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is a fascinating remembrance of a great newspaper.

From the expeditions of de Soto in the sixteenth century to the celebrated work of such contemporary writers as Maya Angelou, Ellen Gilchrist, and Miller Williams, Arkansas has enjoyed a rich history of letters. These two volumes gather the best work from Arkansas's rich literary history celebrating the variety of its voices and the national treasure those voices have become.

Yonder Mountain, inspired by poet Miller Williams's Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader, is rooted in the literary legacy of the Ozarks while reflecting the diversity and change of the region. Readers will find fresh, creative, honest voices profoundly influenced by the landscape and culture of the Ozark Mountains. Poets, novelists, columnists, and historians are represented--Donald Harington, Sara Burge, Marcus Cafagna, Art Homer, Pattiann Rogers, Miller Williams, Roy Reed, Dan Woodrell, and more.

The essays in Instinct for Survival explore fundamental ideas about the ties of community, the trials and tribulations of family life, the sacrif cial nature of public service, the yearnings of the spirit, and the tangled joys of teaching. From his childhood in Arkansas to his career as both Army off cer and professor of literature, Pat Hoy uses his rich experiences as departure points in his quest for meaning. In "Mosaics of Southern Masculinity," Hoy recalls his absent father and develops a multilayered inquiry into male identity that includes memories of his own sons and ref ections on the ways other southern writers have grappled with father-son relationships. "The Spirit Was Willing and So Was the Flesh" stems from Hoy's attempts to come to terms with the feminine aspects of his own personality and with the apparent dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. Hoy toys with his own personal poetics and philosophy of writing in "Conversing with Images," where he articulates the unspoken power of images. A fascination with life's mysteries informs these essays, which together create a transcendent and marvelous mosaic of life.