I am a country man, raised in the fields and woods of north-central Georgia. I do not care for cities, and so I live in the forest on a ridge over Wildcat Creek, a bold stream that flows, half a mile away, into the Oconee River....

Our house is halfway down the ridge, just before it plummets sharply to the creek. I have found archaic chert scrapers on our property, more recent potsherds with intricate decorations. I say that we own these seven acres, but we're really just passing through.

With his opening lines Philip Lee Williams defines the territory of this intricate and lyrical memoir: life with his young family on the ridge, his coming of age, and the legacy of his southern family. That legacy, which includes a love of literature, a passion for music, and an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, also includes a defective heart valve.

Crossing Wildcat Ridge combines the drama of Williams's open-heart surgery with contemplative essays on the natural world. The gentle counterpoint between the two elements illuminates both in remarkable and profound ways. Confronting his mortality, the author struggles to determine his place in the world. His sober consideration of things left undone is juxtaposed with the contemplation of a mound of fire ants: "There is no uncertainty in that world; each knows his job, doesn't know why, can't ask. None knows he will die". As the author slips into depression during his post-operative recovery, he studies the flora and fauna of the ridge, its lights and shadows, the dunes beneath the waters of the creek. With poetic imagery, he shares not only his crystalline observations of nature but also their healing effects -- how he learns to receivethe gift of a mockingbird's song, how the tracks of elusive woodland creatures bolster his faith in the existence of things we cannot see, how sensory memories reconnect him to the boy he was and the man he hopes to be.

All thinking, feeling adults search for the right path to self-discovery. Philip Lee Williams's luminous account of his journey is one satisfying and effective road map.

Retired professor Andrew Lachlan has returned to his family home on a lake in central Georgia to die. And yet he has never felt so alive, so ready to learn about the natural world around him. Having taught all his life, he is ready for solitude. But a young country boy, Willie Sullivan, disrupts Lachlan's search for order and rekindles memories he thought long dead.

Lachlan also finds Callie McKenzie, a woman he loved years earlier, and they soon begin to see in each other reflections of the lives they once led. Lachlan's journal of his year by the lake leads him to a deeper understanding of himself and the world.

Eden's Last Horizon is a work created from the pain and sorrow of what humans are doing to the Earth. Yet is also a poem of hope and joy for the varied and magnificent places on the planet and from inside the minds of people who love it. Both manifesto and a book of praise, the volume is darkly painful and yet filled with the light of the Earth's possible salvation. Philip Lee Williams has written about the natural world for decades, especially the science behind the Earth's most-striking objects and places.

Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams's poetry we hear "the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it."

Filled with colorful details and rich with photographs of the author's life, It Is Written is a beautifully written page-turner about how one person turns the raw materials of life into art. Over a thirty-year career as a published author of fiction, poetry, and essays, Philip Lee Williams has become one of the South's most-honored writers. From his first published novel in 1984 until now, he has been a steady presence in the literary world. In addition, he is an accomplished composer with more than eighteen full symphonies, an opera, and a requiem mass to his credit. Now, Williams tells the story of his creative life in an open, jaunty, and often hilarious autobiography. The book starts with the story of a notorious party in New York City in 1991 and then backtracks to Williams's early days living in the country outside Madison, Georgia, where his father was principal of Morgan County High School. While the book has plenty on Williams's youth in Madison, his days as a student at the University of Georgia, and his later years as a journalist, it focuses primarily on his career as a published writer, beginning with his first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest. Along the way, it dishes inside information on Hollywood and the publishing business itself, and is filled with high good humor, bizarre detours, and a quiet sense of accomplishment as a major writer in the South.

This is a new Civil War novel from the 2004 Michael Shaara Award winner. Philip Lee Williams' new Civil War novel, ""The Campfire Boys"", tells a story that's never really been told in fiction before - of Civil War camp entertainers. A book filled with high spirits and hilarity, it is also a book of extremely accurate history, telling the story of the Eastern Theater of the war and, in particular, a Georgia unit called Cobb's Legion Infantry. The novel is the story of the three Blackshear brothers - Jack, Michael, and Henry - and how they turned a boyhood love of performing in their Georgia hometown of Branton into a one of the most famous campfire acts of the Civil War. Much more, though, it's a book of war and its consequences and how we try to turn away from it with entertainment. In the end, the book is poignant and moving, hilarious and epic. It is the story of why the men who fought for both sides tried to keep their humanity alive in the midst of the most vile inhumanity imaginable.

In this collection, Philip Lee Williams shows again his well-known ability to combine the arresting image with the moment of sudden insight. Deeply intertwined with the natural world of his Georgia country home, Williams' poems are testaments both to time-tested forms and the free impulse of contemporary verse. While his poems are often clear and sharp as a winter stream, he also writes with a healthy respect for the dense, iconoclastic masters of twentieth-century poetry and from centuries before, examining order and disorder in the human and natural worlds with the kind of fascinated and passionate scrutiny he has shown in many earlier books.

A comic epic of a brazen and beautiful heroine set in vibrant Revolutionary War-era Charleston; Set in a city as lively and absorbing as the novel's writing, The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset is a comic historical epic with a memorable heroine. The novel, while parodying the style of eighteenth-century novelists such as Henry Fielding and William Thackeray, charts the growth of the beautiful Jenny Dorset as she matures from a headstrong child into a tenacious freedom fighter and leader of the Daughters of Liberty as the Revolutionary War approaches. Henry Hawthorne, an astute and witty family servant, narrates this adventure that follows the rise of and humorous feud between two eccentric low-country plantation families. The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset is an exciting and often hilarious novel that is entertaining reading for anyone who loves a good adventure and alluring characters.

Lucy McKay, a high school English teacher from Mississippi, is estranged from her divorced parents. Her father, Pratt McKay, is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her mother a professor of art history at Duke. Pratt, who is ill with multiple sclerosis, invites Lucy to spend her summer vacation with him at his second home, which is in an expensive gated community 250 miles west of Chapel Hill in the Great Smoky Mountains. What Lucy does not know is that her father has been withholding a series of family secrets from her, and he is determined to reveal them over the summer. The visit begins with difficulty for Lucy, who is 35, also divorced, and unhappy. She and her father have trouble talking about his progressing illness, and she still has mixed feelings about the Pulitzer Prize her father won. Within the gated community, Lucy begins to make friends with some older residents, but her life changes when she meets a landscape contractor named Sean Crayton, who is working on properties in the neighborhood. Lucy is desperate for her father's love, but shortly after she arrives, he reveals a shocking fact about his own years in college. As the days pass and Lucy begins to date Sean, she realizes how unstable her life has been and how desperately she needs the anchor of lasting love to understand what has happened to her. She must unravel the collapse of her own marriage and the failed ambitions of her ex-husband back in Oxford. She must also try to find a point of balance while dealing with her father. Told in a double-journal form by Lucy and her father, Far Beyond the Gates is a story of love's cost and necessity and the achingly hard job of making love work in a woman's life.