Eighteen-year-old Sawyer accepts her estranged grandmother's bribe to live with her for a year, participate in the debutante season and ball, and possibly meet the father she has never known.

This profound portrait of family life takes listeners inside the hearts and minds of members of the Quick family, whose raw-edged emotions are stirred up by a visit home. An inexplicably violent death and painful confrontations leave every family member forever changed. Rich in insight and psychological entanglements, A Southern Family is a masterful tale of anger and pain, of love and hatred, and ultimately of healing, understanding, and wisdom.

Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty--the Forsters, founders of the world's first major soft-drink company--against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history. The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more--from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his...

"As a teenager, Greer Michaels fled his segregated Southern hometown after uncovering a devastating secret. Now it's 1977. He's returned to care for his dying mother and perhaps come to terms with his past. Bannen, Georgia, is a small town surrounded by pine forests and tobacco fields. A place that should be idyllic except for its unpaved roads and ramshackle houses, its racial tensions and class inequalities. A place where it's dangerous for a young...

"Stories about genderqueer characters in the American South"-- The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless...