"This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants’ hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes, and cowards, Shiloh creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete to the haze of gunsmoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men.
Shiloh, which was hailed by The New York Times as “imaginative, powerful, filled with precise visual details . . . a brilliant book” fulfills the standard set by Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronical of the Civil War."
"This debut novel by Shelby Foote, a major Southern writer whose masterpiece is The Civil War: A Narrative, introduces Hugh Bart, a farmer confronting life's problems in the postbellum South. Hugh's story is told through a clever blend of rich language and flashbacks that bring to life Jordan County, Foote's fictional Mississippi Delta community. Many of the remarkable characters introduced here will become staples of Foote's future works.
Highly praised both here and abroad, Foote's novels have been on bestseller lists in France and Italy. Whether writing historical narrative or novels, Shelby Foote clearly belongs to the first rank of American writers of our century."
"A stark tale of a crime of passion, Follow Me Down tells the story of Luther Eustis, a respectably religious Mississippi farmer who runs off to a deserted island with a young girl and brutally kills her after a three-week idyll. Why did he do it? And what was there about Eustis that attracted the young girl in the first place? The explanation of Eustis' motives is tangled and far from obvious, and each narrator perceives and reveals only parts and facets of the truth. Bit by bit, the story emerges-with stunning dramatic impact."
"Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War he wrote this fictional chronicle—“a landscape in narrative”—of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.
The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a Black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siècle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory ,only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War.
In prose of almost biblical gravity and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives, Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
Stories in this collection are: “Rain Down Home,” “Ride Out,” “A Marriage Portion,” “Child by Fever,” “The Freedom Kick,” “Pillar of Fire,” and “The Sacred Mound.”"
"Shelby Foote's magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families-the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses-are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque, Foote's novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh-and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition."
