This is the story of Virginia Turner Ballard, know to her North Carolina relatives as Ginny Sue. It's also the story of her mother, her grandmother, her great aunts, her closest cousin--three generations of women who gather around Virginia to help her at the end of a hard pregnancy, to tend to her, to help her prepare for the fourth generation. This kind of family attendance, this kind of tending to, is Southern to the core, offering, as it does, the occasion for reviving and trading entwined family stories. Tending to Virginia is a novel of one family's most important stories--how they happened, how they were perceived, how they were remembered, how their truth is revealed. In the end, an eruption of family confessions becomes revelation--revelation as legacy, passed down among a family's women; revelation as a family's gift in celebration of growing up, a process Jill McCorkle knows lasts into old age. In her characterizations of these vivid women playing out their generational roles in the contemporary South, McCorkle presents us with a powerful insight--that the strongest family bonds are, for better or worse, as often created by what is held back as by what is spoken.

Tending to Virginia: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

McCorkle, Jill

United States

A Shannon Ravenel Book

In his eighth deliciously funny novel, Clyde Edgerton introduces us to the irrepressible Lil Olive, who's recently arrived at the Rosehaven Convalescence Center to recuperate from a bad fall. Lil longs to be back in her own apartment, and since her driver's license doesn't expire until her ninety-seventh birthday, she also longs to get back behind the wheel of her sporty '89 Olds. To pass the time until independence, Lil strikes up some new friendships. Mrs. Maudie Lowe and Mrs. Beatrice Satterwhite, who are laying bets on whether Clara Cochran's glass eye comes out at night. And L. Ray Flowers, the freelance evangelical preacher with fancy white hair who sings his sermons, strums a mean guitar, and aspires to an even higher calling. Keeping a watchful eye on them all is Carl, Lil's middle-aged bachelor nephew with a heart of gold and the patience of a saint. But soon Rosehaven is turned upside down and the outcome is anyone's guess. Lil and the girls steal a car and hit the highway. L. Ray's vision of a national movement to unite churches and nursing homes (Nurches of America) is embraced by the residents. And then there's Darla Avery's dirty little secret, which could spell the end for the visionary preacher. Edgerton looks at the challenges of aging with sympathy, sensitivity, and his trademark sense of humor. Like the bestseller Walking Across Egypt, this is vintage Edgerton: wise, wistful, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Lunch at the Piccadilly (Edgerton, Clyde)

Edgerton, Clyde

Humor & Satire

For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers. Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding. Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country. This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.

John Gardner: Literary Outlaw

Biographies & Memoirs

Silesky, Barry

Arts & Literature

Award-winning author Jill McCorkle takes us on a splendid journey through time and memory in this, her tenth work of fiction. Life After Life is filled with a sense of wonder at our capacity for self-discovery at any age. And the residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life’s most profound discoveries and are some of the most true-to-life characters that you are ever likely to meet in fiction. Delivered with her trademark wit, Jill McCorkle’s constantly surprising novel illuminates the possibilities of second chances, hope, and rediscovering life right up to the very end. She has conjured an entire community that reminds us that grace and magic can―and do―appear when we least expect it.

Life After Life: A Novel

Jill McCorkle's new collection of twelve short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us-flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also animaled with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile-also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids. The insight with which McCorkle tells their stories crackles with wit, but also with a deeper-and more forgiving-wisdom than ever before. In Billy Goats, Fulton's herd of seventh graders cruises the summer nights, peeking into parked cars, maddening the town madman. In Monkeys, a widow holds her husband's beloved spider monkey close along with his deepest secrets. In Dogs, a single mother who works for a veterinarian compares him-unfavorably-with his patients. In Snakes, a seasoned wife sees what might have been a snake in the grass and decides to step over it. And, in the exquisite final story, Fish, a grieving daughter remembers her father's empathy for the ugliest of all fishes. The success behind Jill McCorkle's short stories-and her novels-is, as one reviewer noted, her skill as an archaeologist of the absurd, an expert at excavating and examining the comedy of daily life (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Yes, and also the tragedy.

Creatures of Habit

Contemporary

A New York Times Bestseller &amp; Oprah's Book Club Pick Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better. But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to fear most―the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

Gap Creek : The Story of a Marriage

Robert Morgan

Carrie Brown's three novels-Rose's Garden, Lamb in Love, and The Hatbox Baby-have established her as a writer who works from curiosity, skillful research, and a vivid imagination. Her reviewers have praised her "rich characterizations" (The Dallas Morning News) and her "profound, gentle insights."(The Orlando Sentinel) This first book of stories confirms those attributes seven times over.
 The generosity of Brown's storytelling style has never been more in evidence. Each of these seven stories presents a different authentic world-a divorcTe's spacious rent-controlled NYC apartment, a widow's Maryland neighborhood, horseback-riding camp for girls in England, a residential seaside resort in Rhode Island, a remote mountain village in Spain, a tidewater Virginia inn that flourished in the post-Civil War era, and, in the wonderful title story, a most unusual mortuary in Maine. Each one is so vividly created and populated that the experiences for the reader are remarkably novelistic. We've been taken inside seven very private places by a guide whose gentle insights are indeed profound.
 THE HOUSE ON BELLE ISLE will cement Carrie Brown's growing reputation as a fiction writer of deep resources and unlimited powers of imagination.

The House on Belle Isle (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Brown, Carrie

There are certain special―and rare― books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place―rural Virginia of the late 1940s. Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven. But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"―as old Professor James puts it―are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more―they love him. Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity.

Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Ashcom, Robert

The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier. As Thanksgiving Day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic, suspenseful climax.

Berne, Suzanne

This is about Parker, from Memphis, who is trying to become a man. He's twelve going on thirteen when we first meet him and suffering through an inning of Little League baseball. He's playing right field, in position and praying a ball won't come his way. It's a scene that sets the theme of his young life-he's ready, but he's terrified.
Parker's progress through middle-class life-high school, college, graduate school (he drops out), paying job in the real world (Atlanta at the millennium)-leads him to a lot of alarmingly seductive women who, more often than not, chew him up and spit him out. He hardly wants to admit it, but he has trouble with girls.
Then there's the one who doesn't spit him out-Rachel. In fact, Rachel's the only one he tries to dump. Sort of. He suggests seeing her only on an informal, between things basis, keeping-as far as sex goes-the options open.
Marshall Boswell's wry, beguiling first book is a canny portrait of a prototypical twenty-first century thirty-something American guy who's trying to balance sensitivity with good old-fashioned sensuality while he's on the make. Like a guy's guide to . . . well, hoping and flailing more than hunting and fishing. By the last story, Parker does catch that high hard one, but also comes to understand that it's Rachel, the prototypical twenty-first century thirty-something woman, who gets credit for the score.

Trouble with Girls (Shannon Ravenel Books)

Boswell, Marshall

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