On its initial publication in 1962, Eudora Welty said of "A Long and Happy Life, " "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."

From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of "Kate Vaiden, " his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didn't also mention in glowing terms the reviewer's fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the clothbound edition of this truly enduring work as a companion volume to his brilliant book of essays, "A Common Room, " published simultaneously.

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

"Song of Solomon" begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

In her foreword, Anne Tyler calls Reynolds Price "an exclamation point in a landscape of mostly declarative sentences." When Price died in 2011, he left behind a final manuscript--two hundred candid, heartrending, and marvelously written pages about a critical period in his young adulthood. Approaching thirty, Price writes, is to face the notion that "This is it. I'm now the person I'm likely to be." "Midstream "details the final youthful adventures of a man on the cusp of artistic acclaim. Here, Price chases a doomed love to England, only to meet heartbreak. Determined to pursue other pleasures, Price journeys to Rome with poet Stephen Spender, sharing an afternoon with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Price finds company in New York with a group of artists as he awaits the publication of his first novel, and, back in North Carolina, he begins his illustrious career at Duke, which would span a half century. "Midstream "is a fitting bookend for Price's remarkable career, and it reinforces his place in the pantheon of American literature.

Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, author of the bestseller "Kate Vaiden" and the recent "Roxanna Slade, " is one of the most accomplished writers ever to come out of the South. He is an author rooted in its old life and ways; and this is his vivid, powerful memoir of his first twenty-one years growing up in North Carolina. Spanning the years from 1933 to 1954, Price accurately captures the spirit of a community recovering from the Depression, living through World War II and then facing the economic and social changes of the 1950s. In closely linked chapters focusing on individuals, Price describes with compassion and honesty the white and black men and women who shaped his youth. The cast includes his young, devoted parents; a loving aunt; his younger brother Bill; childhood friends and enemies and the teachers who fostered and encouraged his love of writing. "Clear Pictures" is an autobiography set apart from others by the author's clarity of vision, the power of his characters and the richness of his writing.

Most readers know Truman Capote as the author of "Breakfast at Tiffany's and "In Cold Blood; or they remember his notorious social life and wild and witty public appearances. But he was also the author of superb short tales that were as elegant as they were heartfelt, as grotesque as they were compassionate. Now, on the occasion of what would have been his eightieth birthday, the Modern Library presents the first collection that includes all of Capote's short fiction-a volume that confirms his status as one of the masters of this form.
Among the selections are "A Tree of Night," in which an innocent student, sitting on a train beside a slatternly woman and her deaf-mute companion, enters a seductive nightmare that brings back the deepest fears of childhood . . . "House of Flowers," the inspiration for a celebrated Broadway musical, which tells of a superstitious prostitute who learns to love in a way no one else can ever understand . . . the holiday perennial "A Christmas Memory," famously adapted into a superb made-for-TV movie . . . and "The Bargain," Capote's melancholy, never-before-published 1950 story about a suburban housewife's shifting fortunes.
From the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote's oeuvre are captured in this first-ever compendium. "The Collected Stories of Truman Capote should restore its author to a place above mere celebrity, to the highest levels of American letters.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Flying home to New York after a much needed getaway abroad, private art conservator Mabry Kincaid learns that his downtown loft has been devastated by the World Trade Center attacks. Unable to resume his normal life, he flies south to North Carolina to visit his aged father, a widowed Episcopal priest who is cared for by live-in nurse Audrey Thornton and her grown son, Marcus. During his stay -- with help from his cantankerous father, Audrey, Marcus, and an alluring old flame named Gwyn -- Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and a world he fondly remembers but has long since abandoned. Back in New York a week later, Mabry faces his old life, which lies in ruins before his eyes. There, he must once again confront change and uncertainty -- and a daunting disease that may prove fatal.

In an elegantly crafted and profoundly moving novel, Reynolds Price follows one man's wrenching journey to come to terms with two familiar worlds that have been radically altered.

Including a previously-unpublished story 'The Bargain', Truman Capote's The Complete Stories is the first ever complete collection stories from one of the masters of American literature, and the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Reynolds Price. Passionate, perceptive and eloquent, the short stories of Truman Capote are amon the greatest works of twentieth-century American fiction. This new collection gathers them all together for the first time: from early, eerie Southern Gothic tales such as 'Miriam' and 'The Headless Hawk', to the brilliantly evocative 'Children On Their Birth-days' and the tenderly autobiographical 'A Christmas Memory' - an affectionate portrayal of Capote's own Alabama upbringing. Whether describing the Deep South of his childhood, or considering city life with the penetrating gaze of an outsider - as in 'Among the Paths to Eden' and the hitherto unpublished 'The Bargain' - these stories rank among Capote's finest work: acutely observed tales from a unique and brilliant mind. Truman Capote (1924-84) was born in New Orleans. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for The New Yorker, which provided his first - and last - regular job. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction - short stories, novels and novellas, travel writing, profiles, reportage, memoirs, plays and films; his other works include In Cold Blood (1965), Music for Chameleons (1980) and Answered Prayers (1986), all of which are published in Penguin Modern Classics. If you enjoyed The Complete Stories, you might like Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the century's greatest storytellers' Independent on Sunday

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price ("The New York Times") described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story--part shocking reality, part feverish dream --of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen--and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

0ne of the most feisty, spellbinding and engaging heroines in modern fiction captures the essence of her own life in this contemporary American odyssey born of red-clay land and small-town people. We meet Kate at a crucial moment in middle age when she begins to yearn to see the son she abandoned when she was seventeen. But if she decides to seek him, will he understand her? Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kate Vaiden is a penetrating psychological portrait of an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, a story as joyous, tragic, comic and compelling as life itself.

The eye is sovereign in every art but music. Reading, writing and painting are all but soundless deeds of sight."" These are the words of Reynolds Price (1933-2011), one America's greatest writers. In his novels, short stories, poems and plays - forty-one books in all - Price renders with keenness, clarity and profound eloquence the experience of life, both the visible and invisible, the outward and the interior. What is not well known is that Price was also a visionary collector. In his modest North Carolina house, nestled among southern pines and hardwoods, Price - confined to a wheelchair for the last three decades of his life - curated and arranged his books, photographs, paintings, sculptures, masks, religious icons, and objects he collected, purchased, or was given over the years, creating a visual environment that directly reflected his life, his experiences, his passions and preoccupations. After his death in 2011, Price's family invited acclaimed photographer, Alex Harris to photograph the house. In this remarkably intimate and revealing book, Harris and his wife, writer Margaret Sartor, pair sixty of Harris's color photographs with excerpts from Price's fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews. As longtime neighbors and friends who spent time in his house over many years, they show the ways in which the art and memorabilia Price collected inspired his writing and illuminates connections between the visible world he constructed and the creations of his mind. As we turn the pages of this book, it is as if Reynolds Price himself takes us on a guided tour of his home. And as we walk through his rooms, he reveals his private world, recounts significant episodes in his life, and speaks with wisdom and humor about the people, ideas, and beliefs most important to him. As readers we follow, we listen, and we see. Reynolds Price's connection to his house - where he lived and worked for over four decades - offers insight into our own lives and loves, teaches us about the importance of place, shows how to be fully engaged in the world, how to strive to live a meaningful life.

After two earlier autobiographical works--"Clear Pictures "and "A Whole New Life"--acclaimed writer Reynolds Price offers a full account of his life from the mid-1950s to the publication of his first novel in 1962.
Oxford University and Britain--which had scarcely recovered from the severe demands of World War II--were places of enormous vitality for Price, both academic and personal. From spotting J. R. R. Tolkien on the street in Oxford to intimate dinners with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, young Price was welcomed into the company of the most respected intellectual and artistic circles. Fully entrenched in the culture of his era, Price unfailingly makes clear the connections between his experience and the great tradition of world literature.
In lucid and frequently witty prose, Price offers full access to six years in the early adulthood of a rich life--"a gallery of portraits and sexual discovery" ("The Weekly Standard ") and part of the great train of human accomplishment in which Price so ardently believed.

When renowned novelist and poet Reynolds Price, one of Christianity's most eloquent outlaws, was invited to deliver the annual Peabody Lecture at Harvard University Memorial Church in 2001, he chose to explore a subject of fierce debate and timeless relevance: the ethics of Jesus.
In two succeeding lectures at the National Cathedral and at Auburn Seminary, Price continued to explore the apparently contradictory ethics that Jesus articulates in the Gospels; and in a controversial act of artistic license, Price reimagined the historical Jesus. In "A Serious Way of Wondering," Price expands these lectures to present Jesus with three problems of burning moral concern -- suicide, homosexuality, and the plight of women in male-dominated cultures and faiths. A sweeping view of the inescapable implications of Jesus' merciful life and all-embracing thought -- and of the benefits of enlarging our notions of humanity, community, and equality -- "A Serious Way of Wondering" is a significant contribution to Price's penetrating works of religious inquiry.

Having given voice in previous novels to the extraordinary Kate Vaiden, Blue Calhoun, and Roxanna Slade, Reynolds Price -- one of America's most respected men of letters -- adds Noble Norfleet to his gallery of compelling portraits.

A few days before Noble Norfleet's eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship women's bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty he's long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful.

Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters. In A Whole New Life he presents his most intimate story yet -- a memoir as compelling as any work of the imagination.

In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in Price's spinal cord. Here, he recounts his battle to withstand and recover from this devastating affliction. He charts the first puzzling symptoms, three surgeries, the radiation that paralyzes his lower body, the occasionally comic trials of rehab, the steady rise of pain and reliance on drugs, and his discovery of biofeedback and hypnosis. Beyond the particulars, Price illuminates larger concerns, such as the gratitude he feels toward family and friends and (some) doctors, the abundant return of his powers as a writer, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." More than the portrait of one person in crisis, A Whole New Life offers honest insight, realistic encouragement, and authentic inspiration -- and stands as one of Price's crowning achievements.

Does God Exist and Does He Care?

In April 1997 Reynolds Price received an eloquent letter from a reader of his cancer memoir, A Whole New Life. The correspondent, a young medical student diagnosed with cancer himself and facing his own mortality, asked these difficultQuestions. The two began a long-distance correspondence, culminating in Price's thoughtful response, originally delivered as the Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary, and now expanded onto the printed page as Letter to a Man in the Fire.

Harvesting a variety of sources -- diverse religious traditions, classical and modern texts, and a lifetime of personal experiences, interactions, and spiritual encounters -- Price meditates on God's participation in our fate. With candor and sympathy, he offers the reader such a rich variety of tools to explore these questions as to place this work in the company of other great tetsaments of faith from St. Augustine to C. S. Lewis.

Letter to a Man in the Fire moves as much as it educates. It is a rare combination of deep erudition, vivid prose, and profound humanity.

The definitive anthology of Reynolds Price's accomplishments in poetry over four decades, The Collected Poems opens with a preface that discusses his beginnings, guides, and methods; it then includes his first three collections in their entirety -- Vital Provisions, The Laws of Ice, and The Use of Fire -- and adds a new volume, The Unaccountable Worth of the World, eighty-five more recent poems that offer striking departures as they continue to embody Price's close attention to the exterior and the interior worlds of a lengthening and unexpectedly complex life.

The Collected Poems reveals, throughout, the accumulated variety of Reynolds Price's years as a poet -- the thematic breadth, formal steadiness, narrative vitality, and intense lyricism that have marked his work from the start. It is a landmark in a creative life that now includes more than thirty books -- poems, novels, plays, essays, translations -- and in the span of contemporary American verse.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE ENTIRE MUSTIAN CYCLE IN ONE VOLUME, WITH A PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Rosacoke Mustian initially "stood up, live from her first paragraph" in one of Reynolds Price's earliest short stories, "A Chain of Love," and Price made the beginning of her life with Wesley Beavers the subject of his dazzling first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Eventually, Price spent two more novels, A Generous Man and Good Hearts, with this single family, telling a story of devotion and endurance that is now the hallmark of one of the most illustrious careers in American letters.

Reynolds Price pays tribute to his literary love of translation in this adaptation of the Gospels of Mark and John, in addition to a gospel written by the esteemed novelist himself. Esteemed novelist, dramatist, scholar, essayist, and poet, Reynolds Price turns his attention back to a literary love he had discovered earlier in his career: translation. But for Reynolds that didn't mean abandoning his passion for writing original work; powerful and imaginative, Three Gospels offers eloquent translations of the Gospels of Mark and John as well as a gospel never before seen-an original one written by Price himself. These stunning triumphs of imagination tell and retell some of the most iconic ancient stories in Price's unparalleled literary voice.

Reynolds Price's long and distinguished career has been remarkable both for his virtuosity and for the variety of forms he has embraced -- novels, stories, poems, essays, translations and plays. Now one of America's most respected and accomplished men of letters brings his formidable talents to bear on the long story, a form of novelistic scope and poetic intensity.

In the three stories that comprise "The Foreseeable Future," we encounter some of Price's most arresting and moving characters, set against large vistas, namely the future, its banquet of promises and terrifying consequences. For Kayes Paschal in "The Fare to the Moon" this means leaving the black woman he loves -- and for whom he has already left his wife and son -- as he is called off to World War II ("Forget about Hitler and the wide Pacific, I could die this minute in full possession of all I hoped to find in life, whoever I hurt"). In the title story, for Whit Wade -- returning severely wounded from that same war and "dead" a long year afterwards -- it will mean unearthing his life again, and all its possibilities, among his family and the people he loves. And for Dean Walker -- loyal father and son, football coach and troubled young husband, the protagonist of "Back Before Day" -- the most important hours of his life till now will occur one hectic night before dawn breaks on a day that will be unlike any other in the knowledge and promise it brings.

Generous, wise, rich with the details of very human lives, "The Foreseeable Future" is proof again of Reynolds Price's mastery and vision.

For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short story.
These fifty stories include two early collections -- "The Names and Faces of Heroes" and "Permanent Errors" -- as well as more than two dozen stories that are gathered only in "The Collected Stories." In his introduction, the author explains how, at one point, he wrote no stories for almost twenty years. "But," he writes, "once I needed -- for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life -- to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance." Indeed, chances abound here in stories that will astonish even Price's most devoted readers as they travel through not only the author's native North Carolina but also Jerusalem, the American Southwest, Europe, and Asia.

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try."

Set in a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the deceptively tranquil 1950s, The Tongues of Angels is a story of the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher, a superbly gifted boy, and their advance toward a startling fate. As the now-older man looks back at on that summer, he reflects on the meanings he thought he had learned on the threshold of manhood from the perspective of full maturity.

Not since Reynolds Price's award-winning, bestselling novel Kate Vaiden has he told a woman's story in her own voice. Roxanna Slade is this woman.

Roxanna begins her story on her twentieth birthday -- a day that introduces her to the harsh realities of adulthood and changes the course of her life forever. From this day on, Roxanna is quick to share with the reader the intimate details of ninety years of life in North Carolina. Her beguiling tale is one that boldly reflects the high and low moments in the development of the modern South and the nation as well as the inner strength of a woman possessed of a piercingly clear vision, forthright hungers and immense vitality.

"This starts with the happiest I ever was, though it brought down suffering on everybody near me. Short as it lasted and long ago, I've never laid it all out yet, not start to finish. But if I try and half succeed, you may wind up understanding things, choosing a better road for yourself and maybe not blaming the dead past but living for the here and now, each day a clean page."

April 28, 1956, was the day Blue Calhoun met a sixteen-year-old girl named Luna. And for the next three decades, their love has borne consequences of the most shattering -- and ultimately, perhaps healing -- kind for everyone they know. As Blue recounts the years and their events for us -- fervently, tenderly, knowing full well his own deep responsibility -- we are made witnesses to a story of classic dimensions, a story of love and suffering, family and friendship, death and redemption.

In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man's return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival -- and his death -- has on his family.

Wade Mayfield's parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.

Here is the second volume of A Great Circle, the highly acclaimed Mayfield family trilogy, from one of America's literary treasures.

Though a novel independent from The Surface of Earth, The Source of Light continues the saga of the Mayfield family, here focusing on Hutchins Mayfield, whose desire for self-knowledge removes him from his secure existence as a prep school teacher and takes him on a journey to Oxford and Italy to study and write. Hutchins comes back home for a family crisis but ultimately returns to England, where he achieves a maturity that enables him to cope with commitments, abandonments, and the creation of an honest personal agenda.

In The Source of Light, Reynolds Price combines gravity and buoyancy, a mythic sense of the past with the mysteries of place, to forge an encompassing portrait of the strange and various world one travels through in the quest for self-fulfillment.