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"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So the young narrator begins her life story, in the process painting an extraordinary self-portrait. Ellen's first eleven years are a long fight for survival. Her invalid, abused mother commits suicide, leaving Ellen to the mercies of her daddy, a drunken brute, and after his death to the mercies of her grandmother, a bitter and vengeful woman. Against all odds, Ellen never gives up her belief that there is a place for her in the world which will satisfy her longing for love, acceptance, and order. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heartwrenching novel . . . [Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character -- and a good deal more endearing."
"Filled with lively humor, compassion and integrity. . . Ellen Foster may be the most trustworthy character in recent fiction."
--Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
"The story of a redoubtable girl who oversomes adversity with humor, spunk, and
determination, Kaye Gibbons's first novel is a work of considerable subtlety and intellectual sophistication, A terrific book."
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
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When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life. A Virtuous Woman is a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.
"So true and so vital I would swear that there were moments when A Virtuous Woman actually vibrated in my hands."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Complex, compact . . . The architecture of this novel is remarkable."
--New York Times Book Review
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Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina in 1960. She graduated from Rocky Mount High School and continued her education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at Chapel Hill, she wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster, which reviewers and fans praised as an extraordinary debut. Eudora Welty said that "the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word mark the work of this talented writer." The book has been widely translated and has gained wide course adoption. Gibbons lives in North Carolina with her family.
Charms for the Easy Life (1993) -- A New York Times bestseller
Sights Unseen -- Also a national bestseller. In 1996, Kaye Gibbons was the youngest writer ever to receive the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a French knighthood recognizing her contribution to French literature.
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon -- coming summer, 1998.
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"A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living"
-- San Francisco Chronicle
From the author of "A Gathering of Old Men" and "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.
"A Lesson Before Dying" is a novel whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South -- and, by extension, in America as a whole. "A Lesson Before Dying" is about the ways in which people insist on declaring the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. As such, Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it.
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"A nearly perfect summer book. . . . 'Songs in Ordinary Time' is real life cruising small-town USA with the top down and the volume up. In her graphic, stiletto chapters, Mary McGarry Morris is a cross between Elizabeth Gaskell and David Lynch."
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A powerfully absorbing novel from the acclaimed author of "A Dangerous Woman" and "Vanished." Set in the summer of 1960--the last of quiet times and America's innocence--this story centers on Marie Fermoyle, a strong but vulnerable Irishwoman, whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for a dangerous con-man.
A dark secret lies at the heart of Mary McGarry Morris's extraordinary novel, "Songs in Ordinary Time." Rooted in the delicate web of emotions, lies, and truths that bind people together, the story takes place in the primarily Catholic town of Atkinson, Vermont, during the summer of 1960. Here Marie Fermoyle struggles to raise her three children: Alice, seventeen - involved with a young priest; Norm, sixteen - hothead and idealistic; and Benjy, twelve - isolated and misunderstood, and desperate for his mother's happiness. Marie already has two strikes against her: she married above her station and now is divorced from the children's alcoholic father, Sam. That he is the town drunk and a laughingstock only further marks the Fermoyles.
Enter Omar Duvall, a confidence man. He comes to the door asking for bread and sees an opportunity. Soon he has insinuated himself into the Fermoyle family, promising Marie companionship, love, a willing pair of shoulders to share her burden. Twelve-year-old Benjy knows something terrible about Duvall, but, desperate for anything that will make his mother happy, he hides the truth. This silence gives Duvall time to bring Marie to the brink of financial disaster and lead her sons into mortal danger.
"Songs in Ordinary Time" includes a chorus of other Atkinson inhabitants: town cop Sonny Stoner and his dying wife; insurance salesman Bob Haddad, so enthralled with his beautiful wife that he's willing to steal for her; and Father Gannon, the young priest with whom Marie's daughter Alice becomes involved; and the Klubock family, who live an orderly life in the house next door. "Songs in Ordinary Time" is a masterful epic of the everyday, illuminating the kaleidoscope of lives that tell the compelling story of this unforgettable family.
"'Songs in Ordinary Time' is deep and thick as a long, hot summer, a fully realized world . . . wrought with fearless detail . . . the narrative of a town reminiscent of the collective ache of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter."
The Boston Globe
***"Songs in Ordinary Time" is Oprah's summer book and will be discussed in the fall.
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MAYA ANGELOU has written five volumes of autobiography, including the bestselling "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and many collections of poetry, as well as "On the Pulse of Morning," the poem she read at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton in 1993. She is currently Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
Wouldn't Take Nothing for my Journey Now
POETRY
And Still I Rise
I Shall Not Be Moved
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
On the Pulse of Morning
Phenomenal Woman
Brave and Startling Truth
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
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Ninah Huff is the granddaughter of the founder of the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind, an isolated southern religious community ruled by its patriarch. Ninah is fourteen and full of contradictory feelings. She sees the outside world only at school, where her long dresses and uncut hair mark her as odd and keep her apart from the other girls. Sheloves her family but is never sure that she is truly "holy" enough. In particular, she worries about the sanctity of her feelings for James, her prayer partner, as they spend an hour a day together in prayer and meditation, "being Jesus to each other."
When Ninah is discovered to be pregnant, the community is outraged. But in the midst of her tragedy and loneliness, Ninah continues to maintain that she is not guily of the sin of fornication; she says that a holy child grows inside her. No amount of punishment can make her recant.
And in the end there is a miracle, though like most miracles it takes an unpredictable form. Ninah must face with sudden clarity the things she must do for the sake of her own life, and her child's. She will come to understand at last that to embrace the life of the normal world can be a holy act.
Sheri Reynolds lives in Richmond and teaches part-time at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has also taught at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and she is now at work on a new novel.
"She's Come Undone" by Wally Lamb
Washington Square Press
"The Deep End of the Ocean" by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Viking Press
"Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
New American Library Trade (reissue edition)
"The Book of Ruth" by Jane Hamilton
Anchor Books
Oprah's Book Club
P O Box 617640
Chicago, IL 60661.
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