This slender book, the last of twenty-nine written by Kathryn Tucker Windham over her long and productive life, will be an exquisitely bittersweet read for the many fans of the late storyteller and author from Selma, Alabama. In She, which Windham was putting the finishing touches on when she died in June 2011, the author describes how she woke up one day to find that she had an unwanted houseguest, an old woman who had suddenly moved into her home and was taking over her life. Windham referred to this interloper simply as She, and here the reader has been invited into the lively colloquy between the author-whose spirit has not changed-and her alter ego, who moves haltingly toward her earthly end. She will leave you laughing and crying, but also grateful and hopeful.

Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts is a deluxe, commemorative edition of a beloved collection of ghostly stories from famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham's home state of Alabama. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home in Selma, Alabama, Kathryn Tucker Windham traveled the South, visiting the sites of spectral legends in Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, among other places. In Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts, a sequel to her landmark Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham introduces readers to thirteen more of Jeffrey's ghostly acquaintances, each with the charm and universal appeal that has created hundreds of thousands of Jeffrey fans. Among the other hair-raising tales in this collection, Windham spotlights the apparitions of academia. From the three Yankee soldiers who haunt the University of Alabama's Civil War-era Little Round House to the Confederate soldier who resides in the University Chapel at Auburn University, Alabama's institutions of higher learning seem to have more than a few paranormal pupils. Photographs of the sites about which Windham writes are one of the best-loved features of her series of "Jeffrey the Ghost" books. Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen features the image of a beautiful child who, though not photographed in life, reappeared long enough to be photographed with his bereaved father's borrowed camera. Bewitched readers will find the startling photograph of the child in the next-to-last chapter, just pages before he book's photograph of Windham's own spectral muse, Jeffrey. This commemorative edition returns Windham's thrilling classic to its original 1982 keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author's children.

This is the first anthology of the author's own favorite ghost stories from the highly successful Jeffrey series of books that began in 1969 with 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. Hundreds of thousands of these books have been sold. The present volume includes 13 of the best of Mrs. Windham's stories, representing mysterious and supernatural doings from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Most of the stories are related to historical places and sometimes to historical people.

In her inimitable storytelling style, Mrs. Windham takes readers on a tour of the history, people, and places of the ""heart of Dixie."" First published in 1975 and long out of print, Alabama: One Big Front Porch is now reissued in a handsome new edition. Alabama, they say, is like one big front porch where folks gather on summer nights to tell tales and to talk family. Everybody, they say, is kin to everybody else-or knows somebody who is. It's a sprawling porch, stretching from the Tennessee River valley to the sandy Gulf beaches with its sides sometimes slipping over into Mississippi and Georgia. The tale-tellers don't all look alike and they don't all talk alike, but the stories they tell are all alike in their unmistakable Southern blend of exaggeration, humor, pathos, folklore, and romanticism. Family history is woven into the stories. And pride. And humor. Always humor.

Remembering the sting of male discrimination she repeatedly endured during her career as a newspaper-woman, Kathryn Tucker Windham with wistful amusement recalls here the hurt and the awful fact of being overlooked, snubbed, and ribbed by her male colleagues.

In this memoir, a child's recollections of her family and warm home life are lovingly preserved in a front-porch ambience. Windham, who frequently participates in oral storytelling sessions around the country, grew up in a small Alabama town in the early part of this century. She was surrounded by offbeat adults in those years, among them a doughty aunt, who was the town's formidable postmistress, and a circuit-riding Baptist-preacher grandfather. They were fodder for legends within the family, as well as story-creators themselves. As Windham weaves her memories there are digressions into tales that mark the castes of a bygone South, tales that move in slow cadence and bring to life a family that accommodated all members in their entertaining oddities. The word "serigamy" is, according to the author, a family coinage, used through the generations to indicate "a goodly number," and the word aptly applies as well to this charming retrospective.

Southern food is as delightful and as varied as the region from which it comes - shrimp gumbo simmered in kitchens along the gulf Coast, roast venison from Alabama's piney woods, wild ducks from Georgia's marshland, tall stacks of Tennessee in-fare cakes, charlotte piled high in crystal bowls, dewberry cobbler, scuppernong wine, tender turnip greens with wedges of hot cornbread, peas cooked with ham hocks, Brunswick stew made by an old family recipe, fresh fish with hush puppies, chess pie, squash souffle, spoon bread, smothered quail with baked grits, chicken fried to a crisp, thick slices of country ham with red-eye gravy. The list goes on and on, as good Deep South cooks and discriminating diners know.

Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts is a commemorative facsimile edition of the beloved and best-selling second book in famed national folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham's southern ghosts series. Jeffrey was the resident apparition in the Selma, Alabama, home of nationally-known folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and the inspiration for Windham's best-selling collection of macabre tales that reveal two hundred years of Alabama's ghostly secrets, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. One of the most popular books ever published in the state, generations of Alabama children and students have been thrilled and chilled by Windham's spectral legends. Following the overwhelming success of Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham and Jeffrey began to journey across the South assembling a second collection of ghastly tales that repeat Windham's winning combination of traditional folklore, Southern history and culture, and family-friendly story-telling. In Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts, Windham's disembodied friend roams the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida to recall thirteen more timeless, spine-tingling tales of baneful and melancholy spirits that spook the most stoic heart. Opening this volume is "The Girl Nobody Knew." One midsummer night in the genteel Kentucky mineral spring resort of Harrodsburg, a beautiful lady arrived at the town's grand hotel. The belle danced late into the night with the town's smitten gallants only to expire suddenly with the notes of the last quadrille. The spooked residents of Harrodsburg guard a grave you can see to this day. Readers then visit the world-famous Bell Witch of Robinson County, Tennessee. Jeffrey also makes his first trip to old New Orleans to reveal a revenant in residence on Royal Street before continuing his ghostly progress across Dixie. This new edition returns Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts to its original format in jacketed cloth full of original, black-and-white illustrations in a handsome keepsake edition perfect for gift-giving and for families, folklorists of all ages, and libraries.

Although the Marquis de Sade is often read only for his pornography, it is important to ask why his works have claimed such a persistent reception for the past two centuries, a reception that has grown increasingly more astute and analytical in the past two decades. Iwan Bloch (1872-1922), the founder of Sexualwissenschaft or sexology, taught the 20th century to examine Sade's works in terms of psychology and cultural anthropology in his study of 1899. In a magisterial two-volume biography, 1952-57, Gilbert Lely laid the foundation for every biography that has followed. Lely went on to assemble the first critical/historical edition of Sade, his Oeuvres completes, 16 vols., 1966-67. Alice Laborde extended Lely's work in her three volumes on Sade's relationships, imprisonment, and family history (1988-91). Laborde also edited Sade's letters, Correspondances du marquis de Sade et de ses proches enrichies de documents, notes et commentaries, 27 vols., 1991-98.The study of Sade's literary influence commenced with Mario Praz's account of "the Divine Marquis" (1930). Simone de Beauvoir, in "Faut-il bruler Sade?" (1953; "Must We Burn Sade?" 1955), paved the way for subsequent studies of Sade's relevance to gender issues and sexual behavior. Angela Carter, in The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979) and Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), demonstrate the continuing ramifications of Sade's understanding of the motives of desire. Thanks to the foundational work of Lely and Laborde, recent commentators have been able to attend in more detail to Sade's literary career. Neil Schaeffer, in The Marquis de Sade: A Life (1999) addresses the logic and rhetoric of Sade's prose, his suasory strategies to arouse, his paranoiac strategies to conceal, his philosophy of passion, and the reason in his madness.Responding to current trends and offering new directions, this book examines Sade's reactions to medical theory and practice, to crime and punishment; his attempt to craft a reciprocity of written discourse and sexual intercourse; his involvement in the theater, both as a playwright for the public stage, and as playwright and director for the private theater of the insane asylum.