A collection of essays written for the column "The high & the low" in the magazine Garden & gun.

"Fascinating…Eby lyrically uncovers a bit of the magic that makes a Southern writer Southern." —Josh Steele, Entertainment Weekly What is it about the South that has inspired so much of America’s greatest literature? And why do we think of the authors it influenced not just as writers, but as Southern writers? In South Toward Home, Margaret Eby goes in search of answers to these questions, visiting the stomping grounds of ten Southern authors, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and Flannery O’Connor. Combining biographical detail with expert criticism, Eby delivers a rich and evocative tribute to the literary South.

Southerners love to tell stories. In these twenty-six stories, Alice Joyner Irby recalls her blessed yet turbulent life in and out of the South. Her childhood adventures begin in the 1930s on the Roanoke River in Weldon, a close-knit town in Northeastern North Carolina, where she and her brother, George, kept Granny's boarding house lively with pranks on customers and neighborhood playmates. Every decade brought unforeseen opportunities, painful disruptions, and life-altering choices-from the controversial McCarthy hearings to the heroic school-integration efforts of the 1950s; from the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins when Alice was Director of Admissions at UNCG, to her role within LBJ's Job Corps in Washington, D.C. These were exciting and formative times for the Republic. Alice witnessed all of it-and more.Alice's guiding "celebrities" come to life in South Toward Home. Unconditional love and support from her parents, siblings, and daughter enabled her journey and sustained her resilience. Alice may have been an upstart daredevil who climbed the sheer walls of success in a man's world, but this young Southern woman never entirely left behind the open-hearted, unpretentious people of Halifax County-or the black-delta banks of the timeless Roanoke River.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER GREAT NEW WRITERS PICK * OPRAH MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 READING LIST SELECTION * NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE “A soul-shaking chronicle of the 2015 Charleston massacre and its aftermath... [Hawes is] a writer with the exceedingly rare ability to observe sympathetically both particular events and the horizon against which they take place without sentimentalizing her subjects. Hawes is so admirably steadfast in her commitment to bearing witness that one is compelled to consider the story she tells from every possible angle.” —The New York Times Book Review A deeply moving work of narrative nonfiction on the tragic shootings at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes. On June 17, 2015, twelve members of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina welcomed a young white man to their evening Bible study. He arrived with a pistol, 88 bullets, and hopes of starting a race war. Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine innocents during their closing prayer horrified the nation. Two days later, some relatives of the dead stood at Roof’s hearing and said, “I forgive you.” That grace offered the country a hopeful ending to an awful story. But for the survivors and victims’ families, the journey had just begun. In Grace Will Lead Us Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes provides a definitive account of the tragedy’s aftermath. With unprecedented access to the grieving families and other key figures, Hawes offers a nuanced and moving portrait of the events and emotions that emerged in the massacre’s wake. The two adult survivors of the shooting begin to make sense of their lives again. Rifts form between some of the victims’ families and the church. A group of relatives fights to end gun violence, capturing the attention of President Obama. And a city in the Deep South must confront its racist past. This is the story of how, beyond the headlines, a community of people begins to heal. An unforgettable and deeply human portrait of grief, faith, and forgiveness, Grace Will Lead Us Home is destined to be a classic in the finest tradition of journalism.

More than twenty years after the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back called upon feminists to envision new forms of communities and practices, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating have painstakingly assembled a new collection of over eighty original writings that offers a bold new vision of women-of-color consciousness for the twenty-first century. Written by women and men--both "of color" and "white"--this bridge we call home will challenge readers to rethink existing categories and invent new individual and collective identities.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a most-anticipated summer book by USA Today, People, E! News, Cosmopolitan, PureWow, CNN.com, New York Post, CrimeReads, POPSUGAR, and more The bestselling author of Final Girls and Survive the Night is back with his “best plot twist yet.” (People, "Best Summer Books") Be careful what you watch for . . . Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing—a tech innovator, Tom is powerful; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous. One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other—and the longer Casey watches—it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey immediately suspects Tom of foul play. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye—and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces. Packed with sharp characters, psychological suspense, and gasp-worthy plot twists, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake is the ultimate escapist read . . . no lake house required.

Facing South to Africa is a bold synthesis of the ideas that have made Afrocentric theorists the leading voices of the African renaissance. Written from the vantage point of the philosophical and political discourse that emerged over the past twenty-five years, this is a highly readable and accessible introduction to African social and cultural criticism. Molefi Kete Asante engages in the practice of critical thinking by raising fundamental questions about how Africans view themselves and the world. Tackling the themes of culture, education, social sciences, the university, politics, African unity, and the prospects for peace in Africa, Facing South to Africa is a fresh, daring, and popularizing synthesis of the best critical thought on the issues of modern knowledge. Asante’s plan is to reorient our thinking on Africa by asking questions of Africa and Africans rather than imposing preconceived, external ideas on African issues.