The title of this book is a translation from the German of Das Narrenschiff, a moral allegory by Sebastian Brant. The author read it in Basel in the summer of 1932 when she had still vividly in mind the impressions of her fist voyage to Europe. She took for her own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity.

“A miraculously brilliant book” — New York Times

Set in an exotic American milieu, these vividly rendered adventure tales resonate with the rush Elliott felt as he stood face to face with two bears that he later killed with a single shot, as he fought a powerful drum fish and eventually landed it in his craft, as he harpooned a devil-fish and then held the line while the mammoth ray pulled his boat more than twenty five miles. He delighted in contrasting these robust activities with the tamer pursuits of trout-fishing and fox-hunting practiced in the North and in England. Elliott’s captivating sketches preserve a bounty of natural history and local wisdom, and just as important, they provide insight into the Southern way of life that would soon end in civil war.

A judge fines himself for being late to his own court session. A woman, unwilling to disclose the secret location of her dead mother’s quilts, invokes the “Fifth Commandment” during testimony. A lawyer asks the jury to have mercy on a “poor orphan” accused of killing his parents. Tales from Kentucky Lawyers is a bounty of such stories, told in the voices of the lawyers and judges who witnessed them —or at least heard about them.

Love in a Dry Season by Shelby Foote is a magnificently orchestrated novel which 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. The story creates a bit of a 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 be his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Foote combines a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque.

The Grass Harp by Truman Capote is set on the outskirts of a small Southern town and tells the story of three endearing misfits — an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies — who one day take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, “that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

“Remarkable…infused with a tender laughter, charming human warmth, [and] a feeling for the positive quality of life.” — New York Herald Tribune

The Half-Mammals of Dixie by George Singleton, according to Entertainment Weekly, is “Relentlessly offbeat…A disturbingly askew—at times, downright surreal — vision of the South.”

In a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston is a town so tiny it missed the map: Forty-Five, South Carolina. Here a boy’s reputation is ruined forever when he stars in an educational documentary about head lice; a former pharmaceuticals salesman waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint; a single dad woos a teacher with the show-and-tell objects he sends to school with his son; and motivational speakers, aquarium salesmen, flea-market shoppers, and palm readers mingle with hilarious results.

Overlooked, underappreciated, and funnier than a potbellied pig on a leash, the residents of Forty-Five are utterly impossible to forget.

Band of Angels puts on a ready display of Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts.
Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father’s death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods in American history as seen through the eyes of this star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist.

First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor is the Pulitzer Prize winning novel that introduces the Carver family, natives of Nashville, residents, with the exception of Phillip, of Memphis, Tennessee.

During the twilight of a Sunday afternoon in March, New York book editor Phillip Carver receives an urgent phone call from each of his older, unmarried sisters. They plead with Phillip to help avert their widower father’s impending remarriage to a younger woman. Hesitant to get embroiled in a family drama, he reluctantly agrees to go back south, only to discover the true motivation behind his sisters’ concern. While there, Phillip is forced to confront his domineering siblings, a controlling patriarch, and a flood of memories from his troubled past.

“A Summons to Memphis is like a leisurely port wine sipped slowly and with pleasure beneath a blackjack oak.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel Motes founds The Church of God Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with “wise blood,” who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel’s existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry is a story about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky, Hannah Coulter sorts through her memories. Twice widowed, alone, and in her late seventies, Hannah recalls childhood, young love and loss, raising children, and the changing of seasons. She offers her steady voice as she contemplates the deterioration of community, with wise and often fiery opinions about the way things were, are, and might have been.

“Berry is one the great American voices. If you have not yet discovered the deep pleasure of his writing, Hannah Coulter is a fine place to start.”
— Grand Rapids Press

Set This House on Fire by William Styron is a story of three Americans who converge in an Italian village shortly after World War II. One is a naïve Southern lawyer. One is a rough-edged artist with a fatal penchant for alcohol. And one is a charming and priapic aristocrat who may be the closest thing possible to pure wickedness in an age that has banished the devil along with God. Out of their collective alchemy William Styron has crafted an electrifying and deeply unsettling novel of rape, murder, and suicide — a work with Dostoevskian insight into the dreadful persuasiveness of evil.

“Immediately impressive…” — New York Times Book Review

This book is suffused with Robertson’s deep affection for his native Upcountry South Carolina. An internationally known and respected journalist, Robertson had a knack for finding the interesting and exotic in seemingly humble or ordinary folk and a keen eye for human interest stories.

“This is an eloquent hymn to one Southern way of life.” — Time

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCuller’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town’s gathering place.

“McCuller’s writes with genuine insight and proved emotion.” — Chicago Tribune

“[This book] has a permanent if modest historical value. Jesse has a rattrap memory for turns of speech, and he has given a sociohistorical record of daily life in his remote world—now so much less remote and more changed. But if that were all, the value would be infinitely less than it actually is…I am happy to say that now Head o’ W-Hollow has renewed recollections, and that, though I have reread the book several times over the years, this reading has given me more pleasure and admiration than any before.”

— Robert Penn Warren (from the Foreward to Head o’ W-Hollow)

Last Gentleman by Walker Percy

Will Barrett is the Last Gentleman, a twenty-five-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City with no plans for future and detached from his past. The purchase of a telescope one summer day changes his life—for while searching for an elusive peregrine falcon in Central Park, Will accidentally spots a beautiful young woman and falls in love with her. And so begins his quest for home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.

“Breaks your heart in the midst of laughter.” — Philadelphia Inquirer