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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.
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!
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.
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Soon - Stories (Hardcover)
Pam Durban; Foreword by Mary Hood
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R757
R638
Discovery Miles 6 380
Save R119 (16%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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Sacriledge of Alan Kent (Hardcover)
Erskine Caldwell; Illustrated by Ralph Frizzell; Foreword by Mary Hood
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R772
R694
Discovery Miles 6 940
Save R78 (10%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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."
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