Solitary, graceful, and contemplative, cats have inspired poets from Charles Baudelaire to Margaret Atwood to serve as their chroniclers and celebrants. They have appeared, wrapped in their inscrutability, in verse both sensual and spiritual, weary and whimsical. With Familiars, Fred Chappell proves himself a worthy addition to the fellowship of poets who have sought to immortalize their beloved cats. Here are cats as personalities, cats as art objects and historical figures, cats as reflections of human temperament. Chappell salutes the literary cats of decades past -- George Herriman's happy-go-lucky Krazy Kat, Don Marquis's grande dame mehitabel -- and the imagined cats who claim as their companions the characters from Chappell's own past poems. The cats in Familiars are alert and affectionate, equal parts cherished friends and unknowable mysteries.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. This volume includes translations by Fred Chappell (Alcestis), Mark Rudman and Katharine Washburn (Daughters of Troy), Richard Elman (The Phoenician Women), Elaine Terranova (Iphigenia at Aulis), and George Economou (Rhesus).

In Fred Chappell’s introduction to The Kelly Cherry Reader, he writes, “Cherry is a flambeau example of the extremely conscious artist, a writer who mediates ceaselessly upon the problems and possibilities of the poem, the novel, the short story and the essay. She ponders what she has done and how she has done it; she thinks about the approaches and techniques she has employed, and she labors to extend and expand them. This kind of effort is not common to all writers, many of whom will write this year pretty much the same novel they wrote year before last, the same poem they wrote twenty years ago.” Cherry has long been a writer whose work has remained vital and, due to her diligence, fresh. Here, in the Reader, she collects a body of work, much of it no longer in print, and permits us to remap and re-explore where her writing has come from, where it has gone, and where it is bound yet to go; it reacquaints long-time fans and invites new readers to discover the importance of her work.

In this collection, Fred Chappell shows his mastery across a range of genres. Featuring folk fables in the Twain tradition, realistic stories of growing up in remote Appalachia, stories of family, kin, and community, and tales of the fantastic and spooky, this book will delight fans and surprise new readers.

Regularly cited in lists of the world's best horror novels, "Dagon" tells the story of Peter Leland whose ancestral secrets emerge to plunge him into a world of terror and degradation. Employing the Mythos developed by America's great fantasist, H. P. Lovecraft, this novel transforms traditional Gothic elements into an intense, scarifying, modern work.
An international bestseller, "Dagon" was awarded the Best Foreign Book prize by the French Academy and has ignited spirited debate about its revolutionary approach to its materials. Readers have been known to keep their house lights burning all night while reading this story.
"I am honestly convinced that Fred Chappell is one of the finest writers of this time, one of the rare and precious few who are truly 'major.'" - George Garrett, author of "Death Of The Fox" and "The Succession."
Author of thirty volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Fred Chappell has twice won World Fantasy Awards, has appeared in over fifty anthologies, and has gathered some dozen or so literary prizes including Poet Laureate of the state of North Carolina. Retired after forty years of university teaching, he lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and worships cats.

A Southeast Booksellers Association Best Book of the Year

Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to tend to his ailing mother, and clean out his deceased father's workroom. What he discovers there leads him—and the reader—on an unforgettable journey through the secret life of Jess's father, Joe Robert, which culminates in a moment of profound mystery and comedy.

Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You is rich with the music of the Southern mountains and the stories of their people. Jess Kirkman's grandmother is dying, and Jess remembers the tales she and his mother have passed down to him—a chorus of women's voices that sing and share and celebrate the common song of life.

This story of a day in the life of Joe Robert Kirkman, a North Carolina mountain schoolteacher, sly prankster, country philosopher, and family man, won the hearts of readers and reviewers across the country.

Winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry Together now, the four poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep counterpoint one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred to as "something like a verse novel," Fred Chappell has summoned up the rich veins of memory and brings this to bear on the contemporary sensibility. Through the remarkable range of his poetic talent-in turns lyrical, dramatic, elegiac, mythic, and humorous-Chappell brings us to the elemental: this encounter with earth, air, fire, and water. The dynamic of their interrelation contains multitudes but also holds a pattern. In his preface to the completed work, Chappell explains that "though he is called 'Fred, ' the 'I' of the poem is no more myself than any character in any novel I might choose to write. . . . He was constructed, as was Dante's persona, Dante, in order to be widely representative." Chappell's Fred has moved away from the land and the work of the hands to the city and the work of the intellect. In the memories he reviews at mid-life, he regains the values that he had thought were lost. In its mental reclamation, Midquest belongs in a long and vital southern tradition. In design, he tells us, its model was "that elder American art form, the sampler, each form standing for a different fancy stitch." Fred Chappell, author of four novels, is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Besides the four volumes of Midquest, he has published another collection of poems, The World Between the Eyes. Four times he has won the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and he has also received the Prix de Meilleur, Acadmie Franaise, the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize, and theNorth Carolina Award in Literature.

Jess's childhood is spent peacefully on a farm in the mountains of North Carolina with his parents and grandmother. Every so often his life is happily interrupted by visits from his eccentric relatives, such as his womanizing uncle Luden who sought fortune in California, his uncle Zeno and his endless stories, his volatile uncle Gurton and his impressive beard, the country singer Samantha Barefoot, and his uncle Runkin, who travels with his coffin in search of the perfect epitaph. But his life is also altered with the arrival of Johnson Gibbs, an orphaned teenager who the family hires as a farmhand, and who joins him in his mischief. "La infancia de Jess transcurre apaciblemente junto a sus padres y su abuela en una granja de las montanas de Carolina del Norte. De vez en cuando su vida se ve alegremente alterada con las visitas de excentricos parientes como su mujeriego tio Luden que busco fortuna en California, su tio Zeno y sus cuentos interminables, su volatil tio Gurton y su impresionante barba, la cantante de country Samantha Barefoot y su tio Runkin, quien viajaba con su ataud buscando la frase perfecta para su epitafio. Pero su vida tambien es alterada con la llegada de Johnson Gibbs, un adolescente huerfano que contratan como bracero, a quien secundara de inmediato en sus travesuras. "

Wonderfully funny and also deeply touching, I Am One of You Forever is the story of a young boy's coming of age. Set in the hills and hollows of western North Carolina in the years around World War II, it tells of ten-year-old Jess and his family -- father, mother, grandmother, foster brother, and an odd assortment of other relatives -- who usher Jess into the adult world, with all its attendant joys and sorrows, knowledge and mystery.

Jess's father is feisty, restless, and fun-loving. His mother is straitlaced and serious but accepts with grace and good humor the antics of the men of the family, a trait she learned from her own mother. Johnson Gibbs is the orphaned teenager who comes to live with them on their mountain farm. Life on the laurel-covered mountain is isolated and at times difficult, but for Jess it is made rich and remarkable through his relationship with his father and, especially, Johnson Gibbs.

Visiting the farm from time to time is a gallery of eccentric relatives who are surely among the most memorable creations in recent fiction. Uncle Luden is a womanizer who left the mountains years ago for a job in California that "paid actual cash money." Uncle Gurton has a spooky way of appearing and disappearing without ever seeming to enter or exit, but it is his flowing beard, which he has apparently never trimmed and which he keeps tucked inside his overalls, that is of most fascination to Jess.

Uncle Zeno is a storyteller. With the words "That puts me in mind of..." everyone around knows that he is about to launch into another of his endless tales. Uncle Runkin, who always brings his handmade coffin to sleep in whenever he visits, spends his time carving intricate designs into the coffin and trying to find just the right epitaph for his tombstone. Aunt Samantha Barefoot stops by for a brief spell, too. A country singer and cousin to Jess's grandmother, she is a woman of uncensored speech (Jess learns a lot from her) and honest emotions. Chappell tells the story of all of these characters in a series of chapters that range from fantasy and near farce to pathos. As notable for its lyrical descriptions of the rural settings as for its finely honed vernacular dialogue, I Am One of You Forever shows us a world full of wit and wisdom and the sadness at the heart of things. As one would expect from a poet like Fred Chappell, every line offers its own pleasures and satisfactions.