These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home-thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

Mary Hood is a lifetime resident in the rolling hills of Central Texas.She has always had a great love of animals of all kinds.Being the wife of farmer and rancher, Charles Hood, she has had the opportunity to care for all kinds of livestock. On their ranch they keep a running herd of 250 to 300 Dorper-cross sheep that Mary plays a fulltime part in feeding, doc- toring, and caring for. Every spring and fall lamb- ing season she usually ends up with a small group of "bottle" babies to feed. Naturally, they become very special to her. In all the daily feedings and handling of the sheep, certain happenings and events give Mary ideas that would make an interesting picture. Having a little spare time while traveling with her husband, Mary began sketching little scenes that she had observed while watching the sheep. In making the sketches, she tried to convey some of the thoughts that might be in the mind of a sheep instead of our human view. These sketches have been formed into this book in the hope that other people who love sheep can enjoy some of the funny, heart warming, and daily events that happen in the life of a sheep.

Seasonal roads are defined as one-lane dirt roads not maintained during the winter. They function as connectors linking farmers to their fields, neighbors to neighbors, or two more well-traveled roads to each other. Some access hunting lands and recreational areas. Some pass by cemeteries, allowing people to visit and honor their dead. They can be abandoned as people move and towns fade. In every incarnation, the seasonal road touches the land in a gentler way than do other roads. Having traveled nearly every seasonal road in Steuben County, New York, Hood finds they provide the ideal vantage to contemplate the meaning of place, offering intimate contact with plant and wildlife and the beauty of a rural landscape. Each road reveals how our land is used, how our land is protected, and how environmental factors have impacted the land. As a literary naturalist, Hood reflects on endangered species and invasive species, as well as on issues of conservation and sustainability. From state forests to potato fields, from development along Keuka Lake to vineyards, from old family cemeteries to logging sites, Walking Seasonal Roads is a celebration and an honoring of the rural and the regionalism of place, illustrating the ways we connect to our home and to each other.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Mary Hood's lyrical, humorous, and down-to-earth novel lays bare marriage with all its intangible dreams and mysteries and reveals the subtle web of personalities and events that characterize a small town. When a brutal accident leaves Faye Parry with permanent amnesia, her new husband, Vic Rios--a sea captain and reformed rake--reverts to his old ways, resulting in an estrangement that seems irreparable.

Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on childhood-and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.

Pam Durban's new collection of stories explores the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters - science, religion, family, self - the powerful act of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all. The title story in Soon - chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology - follows two generations of a family whose lives are driven by the "patient and brutal need that people called hope, which . . . formed from your present life a future where you would be healed or loved." In "The Jap Room," winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her husband, a World War II veteran, finally come home. "Rowing to Darien" introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband's rice plantation. In "Hush" a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky's iconic Mammoth Cave. An adopted child waits for his mother to come back for him in "Birth Mother," and, in "Forward, Elsewhere, Out," a mother must come to terms with her adolescent son's sexuality. The stories in this collection deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and the redemptive power of storytelling. Durban's writing has been praised for its depth and mastery of characterization, its ability to persuade readers that the lives of the people in her stories are true, that their troubles and pleasures are real enough to matter. The nuanced and artfully rendered cast in this collection wrestles with the big questions that face us all - Why are we here? How are we to live? What matters most? The thirteen stories in Soon have appeared in earlier forms in Atlanta Magazine, Indiana Review, Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, Idaho Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, High Five: An Anthology of Fiction from 10 Years of Five Points, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. The collection includes a foreword from novelist and short story writer Mary Hood, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize, Townsend Prize, and Lillian Smith Award.

A Clear View of the Southern Sky reveals women in the twenty-first century doing what women have always done in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. In each of the ten tales from southern storyteller Mary Hood, women have come by circumstances and choice to the very edge of their known worlds. Some find courage to winnow and move on; others seek the patience to risk and to stay. Along the way hearts, bonds, speed limits, fingernails, and the Ten Commandments get broken. Dust settles, but these women do not. In the title story, a satellite dish company promises that happiness--or at least access to its programming--requires just a TV and A Clear View of the Southern Sky. The short story itself reveals the journey of a Hispanic woman whose mission is to assassinate a mass murderer, an agenda triggered by post-traumatic stress wrought by seeing the murderer's cynical grin on a news program. We follow her into the shadow of an enormous satellite dish on a roof across the street from the courthouse and ultimately into a women's prison English-as-Second-Language class where she must confront her life. She has slept but never dreamed, and now she wakes. In other stories Hood introduces us to a kindergarten teacher, stunned by a student's blurted-out question, as she discovers her deepest vocation and the mystery of its source. We meet a widow who befriends a young neighbour, only to realize they must keep secrets from each other and hold fast to their hope. A woman trucker discovers the depth of her love as she imagines her cell phone calls and her sweetheart's own messages winging their way, tower to tower, along her interstate route. Two stories deal with one man and two of his wives and how they learn the lessons only love can teach about the reach and limitations of ownership and forever. The collection concludes with the novella ""Seambusters,"" in which a diverse cast of women workers in a rural Georgia mill sew camouflage for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The women are part of a larger purpose, and they know it. When the shadow of death passes over the factory, each woman and the entire community find out what it really means to have American Pride. New York Times best-selling writer and Story River Books editor at large Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.

Inspired with the essence of Mary Hood's native South and spiced with intrigue and the dark side of human nature, this collection of stories offers the drama, humor, and heartache of everyday life and unexpected tragedy - with more than a few twists. The stories cover the terrain of transition between old and new, history and the present, holding on and letting go. In Finding the Chain, Cliffie struggles to overcome her ties to the past and forge a beginning with her newly formed family. Moths shows how one man's fortitude, friends, and love of nature help him see his life of poverty in a new light. In the title novella, Delia struggles to overcome her fears of separation and abandonment in the face of her father's suicide. With characters, situations, and settings that capture the turmoil of lives - and of a region - caught in transition between the past and present, the stories of And Venus Is Blue portray both the uncompromising harshness of life and the power of human tenacity.

As Mary Hood writes in her foreword, "The Sacrilege of Alan Kent is unique. Comparisons are not odious, they are impossible. There is nothing like it in any of Caldwell's published works, nor can we find its example in all of American literature."

Alan Kent is a wanderer, a seeker. Driven by, or fleeing from, unnamed forces, he struggles against the hardening effects of a brutal and indifferent world. In a series of episodes, Erskine Caldwell tells the semiautobiographical story of Kent's childhood, roving early manhood, and transformation into an artist.

The episodes, which range from brief, graphic sketches to one-sentence impressions, are filled with elemental images of light and darkness, blood and water, earth and sky. Although an early work, "The Sacrilege of Alan Kent" shows readers the poetic economy, stark naturalism, and concern for the South's poorest people that became the hallmarks of Caldwell's later work.

Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger, longing--sometimes worse--lie just below the surface of a pleasant summer afternoon or a Sunday church service.

In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby" and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide." But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that made him worth the trouble he caused."

The title story in the collection begins with a visit to clean the graves in a country cemetery and ends with the terrifying pursuit of a young girl and her grandmother by two bikers, one of whom "had the invading sort of eyes the woman had spent her lifetime bolting doors against."

In the story "Inexorable Process" we see the relentless desperation of Angelina, "who hated many things, but Sundays most of all," and in "Solomon's Seal" the ancient anger of the mountain woman who has crowded her husband out of her life and her heart, until the plants she has tended in her rage fill the half-acre. "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."