"Tell Me A Story is breathtakingly tender, heartbreakingly true...The best memoir I've read." -- Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of The Beach House Reunion Bestselling author Cassandra King Conroy considers her life and the man she shared it with, paying tribute to her husband, Pat Conroy, the legendary figure of modern Southern literature. Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, divorced "Sunday wife" of a preacher, and debut novelist when she met Pat Conroy. Their friendship bloomed into a tentative, long-distance relationship. Pat and Cassandra ultimately married, ending Pat's long commutes from coastal South Carolina to her native Alabama. It was a union that would last eighteen years, until the beloved literary icon's death from pancreatic cancer in 2016. In this poignant, intimate memoir, the woman he called King Ray looks back at her love affair with a natural-born storyteller whose lust for life was fueled by a passion for literature, food, and the Carolina Lowcountry that was his home. As she reflects on their relationship and the eighteen years they spent together, cut short by Pat's passing at seventy, Cassandra reveals how the marshlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry ultimately cast their spell on her, too, and how she came to understand the convivial, generous, funny, and wounded flesh-and-blood man beneath the legend--her husband, the original Prince of Tides.

New York Times best-selling writer Pat Conroy (1945-2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans numbering in the millions, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year writing life. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary life in and well beyond the American South. Conroy's was a messy fellowship of people from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he'd left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Pulitzer Prize winners Rick Bragg and Kathleen Parker; Grammy winners Barbra Streisand and Janis Ian; Lillian Smith Award winners Anthony Grooms and Mary Hood; National Book Award winner Nikky Finney; James Beard Foundation Award winners Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart; a corps of New York Times best-selling authors, including Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; longtime Conroy friends Bernie Schein, Cliff Graubart, John Warley, and Walter Edgar; Pat's students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a vibrant, multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on the writer and the man. Loosely following Conroy's own chronology, the essays in Our Prince of Scribes wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched and loved along the way.

The first novel by the author of acclaimed national bestseller The Sunday Wife, now reissued in paperback. In a small Alabama town in Zion County, life is finally looking up for 20-year-old Donnette Sullivan. Having just inherited her aunt's old house and beauty shop, she's taken over the business. Her husband, Tim, recently crippled in an accident, is beginning to cope not only with his disability but also with the loss of his dreams. Once a promising artist who gave up art for sports, Tim paints a sign for Donnette's new shop, Making Waves, that causes ripples throughout the small southern community. In a sequence of events--sometimes funny, sometimes tragic--the lives of Donnette, Tim, and others in their small circle of family and friends are unavoidably affected. Once the waves of change surge through Zion County, the lives of its people are forever altered.

Join a circle of friends that will never be broken -- Cassandra King's celebrated national bestseller, The Same Sweet Girls, is now in paperback None of the Same Sweet Girls are really girls anymore, and none of them have actually ever been that sweet. But the story of this spirited group of six southern women, who have been holding biannual reunions ever since they were together in college, is nothing short of compelling. On an island every summer and in the mountains every fall, the Same Sweet Girls come together to share their stories. When one of the group faces the most difficult challenge of her life, the novel builds to an almost unbearably powerful conclusion, one of the most memorable in current fiction. Without a touch of sentimentality, Cassandra King writes of the way close friends can help each other through even the most cataclysmic life events. Both heartbreaking and hilarious, The Same Sweet Girls will touch, move, and inspire readers to cherish their own lifelong friendships. Perfect for reading groups, The Same Sweet Girls is a story of friendship that readers will want to share with their special girlfriends.

A heartfelt collection of personal stories that connect a common past and offer hope for a promising future. For many, South Carolina is a sunny vacation destination. For those who have been lucky enough to call it home, it is a source of rich memories and cultural heritage. In this final volume of State of the Heart, thirtyeight nationally and regionally known writers share their personal stories about places in South Carolina that hold special meaning for them. While this is a book about place, it is ultimately about people's connections to one another, to a complex, common past, and to ongoing efforts to build a future of promise and possibility in the Palmetto State. Editor Aida Rogers groups the essays thematically, with poetry, vintage photographs, and even recipes introducing each section. She unites pieces by New York Times best-selling novelists Patti Callahan Henry, CJ Lyons, and John Jakes; USA Today best-selling mystery writer Susan Boyer; historians Walter Edgar, Orville Vernon Burton, and Bernard Powers; artist and author Mary Whyte; and cookbook authors Sallie Ann Robinson and the Lee Brothers-just to name a few. Nikky Finney, a South Carolina native and winner of the 2011 National Book Award for poetry, provides the foreword. The afterword is written by Cassandra King, author of six novels, including the New York Times best seller The Sunday Wife.

A heartfelt collection of personal stories that connect a common past and offer hope for a promising future. For many, South Carolina is a sunny vacation destination. For those who have been lucky enough to call it home, it is a source of rich memories and cultural heritage. In this final volume of State of the Heart, thirtyeight nationally and regionally known writers share their personal stories about places in South Carolina that hold special meaning for them. While this is a book about place, it is ultimately about people's connections to one another, to a complex, common past, and to ongoing efforts to build a future of promise and possibility in the Palmetto State. Editor Aida Rogers groups the essays thematically, with poetry, vintage photographs, and even recipes introducing each section. She unites pieces by New York Times best-selling novelists Patti Callahan Henry, CJ Lyons, and John Jakes; USA Today best-selling mystery writer Susan Boyer; historians Walter Edgar, Orville Vernon Burton, and Bernard Powers; artist and author Mary Whyte; and cookbook authors Sallie Ann Robinson and the Lee Brothers-just to name a few. Nikky Finney, a South Carolina native and winner of the 2011 National Book Award for poetry, provides the foreword. The afterword is written by Cassandra King, author of six novels, including the New York Times best seller The Sunday Wife.

Bringing the New Orleans of the late 1800s and early 1900s vividly to life, Nicole Seitz's latest novel unfolds as a series of letters, journal entries, and newspaper articles discovered in the secret compartment of an enormous and exquisitely detailed birdcage that Trish, a twenty-first-century blogger, has inherited from a heretofore unknown relative. As she peruses the documents, Trish finds herself irresistibly drawn into the history of her family-a tale that is, as one letter puts it, "part love story and part horror and madness." In 1906 Dr. Rene Le Monnier is ready to retire after a lengthy career as the New Orleans coroner and physician for the insane asylum. Still mourning his wife's death, the Civil War veteran wants nothing more than finally to write his account of the Battle of Shiloh. But when a sixteen-year-old girl, Carmelite Kurucar, enlists his aid in saving her brother from a death sentence, the good doctor has to reckon with old ghosts and dusty, long-forgotten files-in particular the case of a patient to whom he may not have given sufficient treatment and consideration. Le Monnier's efforts to help Carmelite lead him to Bertrand Saloy, one of the richest men in all New Orleans; to the Le Monnier mansion, which still haunts him; and down a dark family lineage "cursed" by a succession of wealth. Amid the mysteries and suspenseful intrigue, a French birdcage maker's obsessive love for Madame Saloy emerges at the heart of the story. Based in part on real people and events and featuring illustrations by the author, this engrossing epistolary novel offers fresh twists on the Southern Gothic genre. It reveals much about criminal justice, about early-twentieth-century notions of care for the mentally ill, and, most important, about the many ways in which the weight of history hangs over the present from one generation to the next.