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When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father gives her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and moves the family out of its two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio, to his mother’s three-room house in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life in Knoxville, a city she could never love. Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends and was, above all, a good piano student. Her life becomes like that of a nomad, moving from house to house and from job to job. Her great love of life is expressed by dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. After divorcing her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with troubled married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a churchgoer. She raises three boys in poverty. A fourth son dies soon after birth. Oldest Dickie becomes a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls. Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and successful writer. Rather than a chronological narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables readers to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them. In sharply focused scenes, Madden evokes the colorful expressions of the articulate, witty woman he has spent all his life listening to—and this memoir will inspire readers to listen eagerly, too.
The first comprehensive guide to pre-1934 female popular vocal recordings sung in English—from around the world and including all styles—this discographical study includes solos, duets, trios, and quartets composed by the great songwriters of the early 1900s (from Irving Berlin to Victor Young). The majority of the listings includes material that has not been previously published, and a large number of entries profile such prolific artists as Helen Clark and Gladys Rice, who are not in previous discographies. A special feature includes data on sound-on-disc recording made for early talking-picture musical shorts (especially by Vitaphone) that is not documented elsewhere. A comprehensive title index includes composer credits for the majority of the titles listed. The first comprehensive guide to pre-1934 female popular vocal recordings sung in English—from around the world and including all styles—this discographical study includes solos, duets, trios, and quartets composed by the great songwriters of the early 1900s (from Irving Berlin to Victor Young). The majority of the listings includes material that has not been previously published, and a large number of entries profile such prolific artists as Helen Clark and Gladys Rice, who are not in previous discographies. A special feature includes data on sound-on-disc recording made for early talking-picture musical shorts (especially by Vitaphone) that is not documented elsewhere. A comprehensive title index includes composer credits for the majority of the titles listed. Many of the records documented in this volume are by the artists who introduced these songs at this time or who performed them in the original productions of the shows or movies for which they were written. The singing styles include those of cabaret performers, music-hall and vaudeville acts. Songs for the stage, screen, and radio are also included.
The Newbery-winning novel in Cynthia Voigt’s timeless Tillerman cycle. When Momma abandoned Dicey Tillerman and her three siblings in a mall parking lot and was later traced to an asylum where she lay unrecognizing, unknowing, she left her four children no choice but to get on by themselves. They set off alone on foot over hundreds of miles until they finally found someone to take them in. Gram’s rundown farm isn’t perfect, but they can stay together as a family—which is all Dicey really wanted. But after watching over the others for so long, it’s hard for Dicey to know what to do now. Her own identity has been so wrapped up in being the caretaker, navigator, penny counter, and decision maker that she’s not sure how to let go of some responsibilities while still keeping a sense of herself. But when the past comes back with devastating force, Dicey sees just how necessary—and painful—letting go can be.
Doomed to living in her mentor's shadow, Sonechka, a talented but mousy young pianist employed by a beautiful soprano and her devoted, bourgeois husband, secretly schemes to expose infidelities.
Praise for stories in FORT MOMMA: "Surprise and delight lurk in every paragraph of DEFROSTING HOWARD, a well-crafted story written in a clear, strong voice." -Vicki Hendricks fiction editor of QUIXOTE QUARTERLY, and author of five novels including MIAMI PURITY, IGUANA LOVE and SKY BLUES"REAL TIME is an humorous insight into the computer anxiety of the early eighties." -Dan Wakefield guest editor of PLOUGHSHARES and author of sixteen books including best selling novels STARTING OVER and GOING ALL THE WAY, and non-fiction books NEW YORK IN THE 1950'S and RETURNING.With deepest gratitude to the editors who published my stories: Dan Wakefield, PLOUGHSHARES, 1981 (REAL TIME) Michael Ishii, PAINTED HILLS REVIEW, 1993 (THE DEPRESSION) J.H.E. Paine, TENNESSEE QUARTERLY, 1993 (CURLEY'S PICTURE) Vicki Hendricks, QUIXOTE QUARTERLY, 1994 (DEFROSTING HOWARD) Reviews on Al Gowan's last novel ZAMORA'S TATTOO "Marks the debut of a new American novelist of insight, intelligence, style and sensitivity. Al Gowan is a writer with something to say that's fresh and provocative and he says it in a voice that is utterly, uniquely his own." -Gerald Gross, EDITORS ON EDITING"A dangerous and startling novel full of wit and grace. Al Gowan is a writer who takes delight in revealing the struggles of his people" -Melanie Rae Thon, SWEET HEARTS, IONA MOON, GIRLS IN THE GRASS, METEORS IN AUGUST and FIRST, BODY.
A Burning in Homeland is ...a wonderfully written, crazily romantic story of intense love and devastating betrayal ...a stunning debut of a remarkably gifted young novelist ...a Southern novel that captures the beauty, madness and mystery of both place and time. In what can only be described as a tour-de-force of passionate atmospheric storytelling, first-time novelist Richard Yancey had created a finely nuanced narrative that resounds with raw, emotional truths -- a story about the ominous return to a small town in central Florida of a man once sentenced to prison for defending the honor of the woman he loved, about the woman and her husband who both betrayed him, and about a guileless young boy who gets caught up in their web of love, lies, and deceit. The story of the love between Halley Martin and Mavis Howell is seldom talked about in the tiny town of Homeland, Florida, but in the twenty years since Halley was sent to prison for murdering a rival suitor -- the only murder ever in this small, pious town -- the story has become legend. To seven-year-old Shiny Parker it has become a mystery, something his parents whisper about. He knows that somehow the pretty wife of the local minister is involved, but it is all too confusing for him to sort out. When the church's parsonage burns, almost killing the minister, only days before the legendary Halley Martin is due to be released from prison, Shiny senses a connection between the events -- as do most residents of the town. But if Haley was still in prison when the house burned, who set the fire...and why? Passionate love, the betrayal of friendship, hidden letters, a suspicious fire, mystery and revenge -- all are elements of this complex and deeply involving Southern gothic tale. Alternating among a trio of first person narrators -- Shiny, Mavis, and Halley -- Richard Yancey has created a lush, epic Southern landscape bursting with larger than life characters and rich atmospherics. A Burning in Homeland is both starkly haunting and exquisitely romantic and a masterpiece of dazzling storytelling you will not soon forget.
"Life was good, and promising to get ever better for the recently married Dreifuss couple and their young daughter, Alice, living in rural southwest Germany. Then HItler came to power, and their world turned upside down. This vivid biography deals with one of the transforming events of the twentieth century. As happened throughout Germany during the eight years that served as a prelude to the Holocaust, the Nazis turned the Dreifuss family members from valued friends and colleagues of their fellow villagers into an isolated, demonized minority. Even as a small child, Alice felt the impact of Nazi anti-semitism. More importantly, this story shows how strength of spirit and faith enabled the family to remain optimistic and resilient during their struggle to leave Germany and to make new lives for themselves in America"--Page 4 of cover
The bygone eras of our past gave rise to a generation with stories worth holding on to, taking place in a world that has since vanished from America, for better or for worse. Yet triumph and delight grow from unexpected sources. Once Below a Time is author Glynn Baugher’s account of growing up poor in rural Virginia in the middle of the twentieth century, and it is a memoir of a vanished world. Full of social details and vignettes of the colorful characters in Glynn’s early life, it portrays a world rich in specifics, deriving the universal from family particulars. Glynn carefully traces the contours of a fading way of life and fills his stories with vibrant personal narratives of his bucolic youthful days with family. Glynn’s story is that of the unexpected—of surprise, triumph, and delight. Join him on his illuminating retrospective, where out of poverty and a primitive early education spring comedy, success, and erudition.
Lambda Award winner Madelyn Arnold combines history, class, sex, and family inA Year of Full Moons, a tour-de-force about the coming of age and coming into power of a young girl in a hardscrabble southern town during the early 1960s. Brilliant, tomboyish Josephine Margaret Butler--better known as Jos--is the second oldest child in a large, poor family living in provincial Summit, Kentucky, in 1963. After her mother has a miscarriage and retreats into herself, Jos and her sister Ellie have to run the household and take care of their five younger siblings and their decidedly eccentric, sometimes brilliant, and always difficult father. In the coming year, the nation's mounting tensions over civil rights and the Vietnam War finally begin to infiltrate Summit at the same time that Jos begins to act upon her secret passion for women. Trapped in a damaging family dynamic and in a town that is violently resisting the sweeping social changes of the outside world, Jos realizes that only one thing--her intellect--can provide a means of escape.