"How do you write about third generation Snopeses who have moved to Memphis and joined an encounter group?" asked Walter Percy in his book Signposts in a Strange Land. A New Life answers this question, combining the stories of eleven of the best new writers of southern fiction with contemporary work from extraordinary southern photographers. These short stories and surprising images portray the South not as we might imagine or remember it, but as it is lived--in condos and malls, on golf courses and interstates, in family rooms and bedrooms, and in the hearts and minds of southern people. This volume brings together recent southern stories by Richard Barusch, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, and Mary Ward Brown, among others, coupled with photographic essays. These revealing pictures and stories cover a broad geographical and emotional territory and give us a revealing portrait of the new look and feel of the contemporary South.