A consummate storyteller in the Southern tradition, Lee Smith tugs at her listeners' heart strings with this haunting narrative that reads like a country ballad. Touching, funny, and sad, its down-to-earth characters are somehow familiar and endearing as they do their best to meet the demands of daily life. Her mother's pride and joy, young Crystal Spangler has a keen intellect, the body of a beauty queen, and the heart of a poet. When she leaves Appalachia to attend college and follow her dreams, she faces a dazzling future. But something lurking in the shadow of Black Mountain is calling her back, something that will change her life forever. With passion, warmth, and insight, narrator Linda Stephens gradually reveals the rich irony inherent in this compelling novel. Her expressive, lyrical voice ensures the listener a delightfully vivid listening experience.
Lee Smith, one of today's finest writers in the Southern literary tradition, has been compared to Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. This collection of nine stories, ranging from poignant ballads to delightfully inventive forms, showcases Smith's celebrated talent. The stories will make you chuckle and leave you with a satisfying sense that no matter how unruly or warped life may seem, equilibrium can be found after all. With each story you will meet wonderful, vivid characters from towns throughout the South. Smith's knack for mannerisms and voices makes you feel these are real people whom you have known for years. And as their sometimes bizarre behavior becomes understandable, you will learn the secrets of their hearts. Narrators Linda Stephens and Tom Stechschulte add to the Southern ambiance by providing just the right voices for Smith's menagerie of colorful characters. Their skilled performances let you fully enjoy the gentle humor and pathos that season these stories.
In her first work of nonfiction, Lee Smith deploys the wit, wisdom, and graceful prose for which she is beloved to conjure her early days in the small coal town of Grundy, Virginia-and beyond. For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the rugged Appalachian Mountains, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, mountain music, and her daddy's dimestore. It was in that dimestore--listening to customers and inventing life histories for the store's dolls--that she began to learn the craft of storytelling. Even though she adored Grundy, Smith's formal education and travels took her far from Virginia, though her Appalachian upbringing never left her. Dimestore's fifteen essays are crushingly honest, always wise, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving, personal portrait and a broader meditation on embracing one's heritage. Hers is an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished. 'You know how in Lee Smith's fiction there's always something so fresh, crazy, and loving? In Dimestore is the essence of Lee.' -Roy Blount Jr., author of Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text
Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork. Through births and deaths, marriages and funerals, the decades of Ivy's life are captured in a rich dialect that carries the sounds and sights of the Appalachians in each syllable.
Lee Smith is one of today's most critically acclaimed authors writing about contemporary life in the South. In Family Linen, with a remarkable economy of description and dialogue, Smith sketches eccentric, yet familiar characters moving through a family drama that resonates with both tension and humor. Sybil Hess, a polished, Southern apartment manager has visited a hypnotist in a desperate attempt to discover the source of her blinding headaches. But in one session, a mysterious, Gothic childhood memory plays before her eyes. Now Sybil is racing against time to find an answer to one urgent question. Is her quiet, genteel mother a murderer? Stretching between Sybil and the truth is a loony tangle of sibling rivalry, family lore, and jealousy. Lee Smith's darkly comic, richly textured novel will enchant you. It is a tale told by many voices: Southern dowagers and whiskey-tippling uncles, polyester-clad housewives, and MTV-eyed teenagers. Narrator Linda Stephens' performance draws you into the company of this truly unforgettable family.
Lee Smith, author of the acclaimed The Last Girls, delights with a tale of dry wit. Smith has won many prizes, such as the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Academy Award in Literature. Speed, Alabama is celebrating 150 years of proud existence-and its whimsical inhabitants will definitely not let the event pass without a party.
When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is famous for its up-to-the-minute shock therapies and for Dr. Carroll's revolutionary theory of the benefits of nonintrospection.
Evalina finds herself in the midst of a kaleidoscope of characters, including the estranged wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her role as accompanist for all theatricals and programs at the hospital gives her privileged insight into the events that transpire over the twelve years leading up to a tragic 1948 fire-its mystery unsolved to this day-that killed nine women in a locked ward on the top floor, including Zelda.
In Evalina Toussaint, Lee Smith has a created a narrator whose story is one of unstoppable and defiant introspection. At the risk of Dr. Carroll's ire and at all costs, Evalina listens, observes, delves, pursues, accompanies, remembers-and tells us everything. This is her wildly prescient story about a time and a place where creativity and passion, theory and medicine, fact and fiction are luminously intertwined.
A storyteller in the very best southern tradition, Lee Smith pens unexpected plots vibrant with luminous prose. Her powerful short stories in Me and My Baby View the Eclipse capture those extraordinary moments in everyday life when greatness and tragedy shimmer through the surface. This collection was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Richly satisfying, each tale portrays ordinary people meeting trouble head on with courage and compassion: a teenaged girl coping with her father's nervous breakdown, a housewife filling her humdrum days with an eccentric lover, and a single mother struggling to hang onto her wayward son. With narrators Linda Stephens' and Tom Stechschulte's brilliant performances, these lyrical stories-made to be read aloud-will linger long in your memory. The collection includes: Bob, a Dog; Mom; Life on the Moon; Tongues of Fire; Dreamers; The Interpretation of Dreams; Desire on Domino Island; Intensive Care; and Me and My Baby View the Eclipse.
Virginia native Lee Smith has won two O. Henry Awards, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for her engaging works. A collection of 14 tales-both new stories and previously published favorites-Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger is sure to delight listeners with its warm humor and unforgettable characters.
A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It's through these treasured mementos that we meet Molly Petree. Raised in those ruins and orphaned by the Civil War, Molly is a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. When a mysterious benefactor appears out her father's past to rescue her, she never looks back. Spanning half a century, On Agate Hill follows Molly's passionate, picaresque journey through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial-and back home to Agate Hill under circumstances she never could have imagined.
Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. With each chapter, Lee Smith, a master of regional voices, adds another branch to a family tree that sings with secrets and sadness, beauty and joy. Researching an assignment for an Oral History course, Jennifer drives to the Virginia hills where her mother and father grew up. Raised by a stepmother, the young college student wonders why her father never talks of her real mother or relatives. So from the moment she steps out of the car, Jennifer is intrigued by the mystery of her heritage. One by one, the Cantrells tell of lives filled with vitality, colored by the land and family history. Through the voices of a full cast of narrators, Lee Smith's remarkable novel becomes a truly extraordinary listening experience.
Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through some of life's most arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a snake-handling preacher who ignores the needs of his destitute family, Florida Grace doesn't think much of Jesus. He's the reason she's lived in squalor most of her life. He certainly doesn't keep her womanizing zealot of a father on the straight and narrow. In fact, Jesus hasn't been there for her through her failed marriage, or the death of her son. But in one shining moment everything changes when He calls out to her, and she returns to her roots to heed His call. Narrator Christina Moore gives perfect voice to the vulnerability and wisdom of a young woman on a turbulent spiritual journey. The endearing heroine and the poetic language present a quandary: you want to savor this book a chapter at a time, but you can't put it down.
