The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

This volume features new Southern fiction, poetry, and essays by acclaimed veterans of the popular "Blue Moon Cafe" series, handpicked by editors Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin. Contributors: Matt Brock; Bev Marshall; Brock Clarke; Jack Pendarvis; Joe Formichella; Michelle Richmond; Juliana Gray; Donald Hays; Brad Vice; Bret Anthony Johnston; Daniel Wallace; Suzanne Kingsbury and David Wright.

In 1927, as rains swell the Mississippi, the river threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path, including the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, where federal agents Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson arrive to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents--and find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene.

Ingersoll finds a home for the infant with local woman Dixie Clay Holliver, unaware that she's the best bootlegger in the county and has many tender and consequential secrets of her own.

The Tilted World is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love.

Beth Ann Fennelly, writing to a newly pregnant friend, goes beyond the nuts and bolts or sentimentality of other parenting literature, in letters that range in tone from serious to sisterly, from lighthearted to downright funny. Some answer specific questions; others muse about the identity shift a woman encounters when she enters Mommyland. This book invites all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children.

Hailed as "a brilliant blueprint of the imagination" (David Baker), Open House established Beth Ann Fennelly as "an ambitious and spacious young talent" (Paul Zimmer) and introduced us to her "passion, compassion, inventiveness, and intelligence" (Alison Hawthorne Deming).

Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and yes jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated."Tender Hooks" is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities."

Insouciant, sexy, funny, and dead-on . . . a startlingly empathetic series of concise and slashing poems. Booklist

With elegant wordplay and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly explores the "unmentionable" not only what is considered too bold but also what can't be said because words are insufficient. In sections of short narratives, she questions our everyday human foibles. Three longer sequences display her admirable reach and fierce intelligence: One, "The Kudzu Chronicles," is a rollicking piece about the transplanted weed. Another, "Bertha Morisot: Retrospective," conjures up a complex life portrait of the French impressionist painter. The third presents fifteen dream songs that virtually out-Berryman Berryman."