In pleasant contrast to the recent flood of haunting childhood memoirs, A Girl's Life is about growing up in a functional family, about nurture, serenity, wonderment, and the stabilizing contributions an unencumbered heart makes in the life of an observant child. Marianne Gingher makes the events of a "normal" girlhood not only engaging but distinctly illuminating and explores rites of passage that are as persuasive in shaping an artist's sensibilities as are privations.

A meditation on the comforts of home place and family, A Girl's Life celebrates the last era in America, the 1950s and 1960s, when it was still possible to enjoy a cynicism-free girlhood -- when "it was still safe for children to take gifts from strangers and not yet unwise for them to leave the doors of their hearts unlocked". As Eudora Welty wrote in her autobiographical memoir One Writer's Beginnings, "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within". The seventeen personal narratives collected here corroborate Welty's conviction.

Arranged in a loose chronology, the tales document a southern white girl's middle-class initiation into the adult world. The first section, "Sanctuary", recalls Gingher's earliest impressions of family dynamics and shelter, a child's yearnings and resourcefulness. "Truths and Grit", the second section, deals with the tempering of bliss, a young girl's first encounters with corruption and mortality. In the final group of essays, "Metaphors and Pies", Gingher explores the contributions her recollections of childhood make in her ongoing trials as a parent and a writer. That her own childhood still informs and inspires her present life is perhapsits greatest legacy.

Did the way Marianne Gingher grew up compel her toward the writing life? Certainly the impact of that distant time, specific people and events, sensory-steeped moments, and the privilege of being allowed to dream as well as do enriched and fostered the writer's imagination. By turns funny, provocative, jubilant, and tender, A Girl's Life is perhaps most notable for both exalting and justifying the place of happiness in a writer's development.

This book includes luminous stories, each told in a flash. This extraordinary collection gathers short-short stories - none longer than 1,800 words - by some of North Carolina's best contemporary writers, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Sarah Dessen, Haven Kimmel, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace. The stories are compulsively readable. The spellbinding elements of brevity, variety, and surprise conspire to keep readers flipping pages. Comic, tragic, magical, fantastical, provocative, disturbing, luminous, the short-short form proves a reliably elastic and dazzling medium for every writer featured. In one flash of literary artistry after another, these sixty-five established and emerging writers remind us why we read fiction: to laugh, to learn, to feel, to be discomfited and challenged, to be transported, and to make enlightening and enduring connections with the world outside our own skins. ""Long Story Short"" will appeal to legions of fans who already delight in reading many of the North Carolina authors included here and will introduce them to extraordinary writers they have not yet discovered.

'Reading makes me want to write,' says Marianne Gingher, 'in the same way a whiff of chocolate makes me salivate'. And write she does, as sure as Hershey makes kisses. How that writing came about is the subject of this hilarious and insightful book.""Adventures in Pen Land"" presents the call to the writing life as one of joy and opportunity rather than angst and longing. Gingher traces the circuitous and potholed road to the publication of a first novel, Bobby Rex's Greatest Hit - a slice of teenage Americana acclaimed as 'a rich and evocative portrait of an era' (""Library Journal"") - as she follows the trajectory of her writing life from its earliest inklings.Gingher's unabashed account is chock-full of side-splitting observations of her literary education, from a Freudian analysis of her juvenile rabbit story to descriptions of a school principal more concerned about the proper use of Venetian blinds than pedagogy or discipline. She invites us along on a raucous tour of soul-sucking jobs, marriage, and a teaching career, with accompanying disquisitions on blasphemous reading preferences, '60s pop culture, writing workshops, and other amusing detours and distractions on the way to publication. She also shares her keen insights into the role of a southern writer in American literary culture, the experience of writing as a mother, and the process of novel-writing as compared to a lengthy family car-trip.Featuring guest appearances by other writers such as Fred Chappell, Max Steele, and Annie Dillard plus cameos by the likes of Patty Hearst, Richard Nixon, and Bon Jovi, ""Adventures in Pen Land"" celebrates writing as a form of play that Gingher has never outgrown. The lighthearted illustrations by novelist Daniel Wallace (author of ""Big Fish"") serve to reinforce this refreshing message as they depict one writer and her imagination growing up together.""Adventures in Pen Land"" conveys a writer's sheer doggedness, with a few bones of advice tossed in along the way. Candid and irreverent, but always humane, this memoir is must reading for fans of southern literature, students of creative writing, and anyone who can't resist the treat of reading about a writer's resilience and dedication to her craft.

Some of us understand place in terms of family and community, landscape, or even the weather. For others, the idea of place becomes more distinct and particular: the sound of someone humming while washing dishes, the musical cadence of a mountain accent, the smell of a tobacco field under the hot Piedmont sun. Some of North Carolina's finest writers ruminate on the meaning of place in this collection of twenty-one original essays, untangling North Carolina's influence on their work, exploring how the idea of place resonates with North Carolinians, and illuminating why the state itself plays such a significant role in its own literature. Authors from every region of North Carolina are represented, from the Appalachians and the Piedmont to the Outer Banks and places in between. Amazing Place showcases a mix of familiar favorites and newer voices, expressing in their own words how North Carolina shapes the literature of its people.