Stories were collective, as in the case of the antebellum proslavery argument or Confederate discourses about women. Sometimes they were personal, as in the private writings of figures such as Lizzie Neblett, Mary Chesnut, Thornton Stringfellow, or James Henry Hammond. These men and women regularly employed their pens to create coherence and order amid the tangled circumstances of their particular lives and within a context of social prescriptions and expectations.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

From celebrated New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Rick Bragg, comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the south. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, he explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoonbread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of his writing, with many never-before-published essays written specifically for this edition, My Southern Journey is an entertaining and engaging read, especially for Southerners (or feel Southern at heart) and anyone who appreciates great writing.

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.

A “soul-stirring debut,” Boys of Alabama tells the “bewitching” (Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine) tale of sixteen-year-old Max’s first year in America. “Daring, unusual . . . and startlingly fresh” (Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio), Boys of Alabama announced Genevieve Hudson’s place in the canon of the southern gothic alongside Donna Tartt and Harper Lee. Newly arrived in Alabama, Max falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. Although his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives after being taken in by the football team. But when he meets fishnet-wearing Pan in physics class, they embark on a quixotic, consuming relationship. Writing in “prose that is always imaginative and sensual” (Sarah Neilson, Believer), Hudson offers a complex portrait of masculinity, religion, immigration, and the adolescent pressures that require total conformity.

In recent years, food writers and historians have begun to retell the story of southern food. Heirloom ingredients and traditional recipes have been rediscovered, the foundational role that African Americans played in the evolution of southern cuisine is coming to be recognized, and writers are finally clearing away the cobwebs of romantic myth that have long distorted the picture. The story of southern dining, however, remains incomplete. The Lost Southern Chefs begins to fill that niche by charting the evolution of commercial dining in the nineteenth-century South. Robert F. Moss punctures long-accepted notions that dining outside the home was universally poor, arguing that what we would today call “fine dining” flourished throughout the region as its towns and cities grew. Moss describes the economic forces and technological advances that revolutionized public dining, reshaped commercial pantries, and gave southerners who loved to eat a wealth of restaurants, hotel dining rooms, oyster houses, confectionery stores, and saloons. Most important, Moss tells the forgotten stories of the people who drove this culinary revolution. These men and women fully embodied the title “chef,” as they were the chiefs of their kitchens, directing large staffs, staging elaborate events for hundreds of guests, and establishing supply chains for the very best ingredients from across the expanding nation. Many were African Americans or recent immigrants from Europe, and they achieved culinary success despite great barriers and social challenges. These chefs and entrepreneurs became embroiled in the pitched political battles of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and then their names were all but erased from history.

The stories collected here in Volume One are among the earliest in Blaise's forty-year publishing career. The experience of Florida -- particularly the underdeveloped north-central areas close to modern Disneyfied Orlando -- profoundly affected a `Yankee' child with Canadian parents. The Florida Blaise describes is little-changed since the Civil War. The stories in this volume trace a young writer's journey towards his life's work. By the close of his Florida experience, he has discovered a way of integrating his Canadian, and especially his French-Canadian, background into a sub-tropical foreground. Included are two very early stories, `A Fish Like a Buzzard' and `Giant Turtle, Gliding in the Dark', which have not previously been published in book form. Southern Stories assembles the best of Clark Blaise's early work in one collection. His powerful writing is as relevant to our times now as it was when these stories first appeared. Included here are stories from A North American Education, Tribal Justice, Man and His World and Resident Alien.