Theron Estes, upon returning home from a 90-day stint in jail, is dismayed to find his two young daughters home alone and a cryptic note from his wife: "I had enuff its your turn." Thus begins the title story of Helen Norris' new collection, a funny yet pathos-filled tale of Theron's bizarre attempt to secure Christmas dinner for his girls. Norris is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction. Over a lifetime, she has developed a distinctive style and mastered the short-story form. With an impressive range, she invents and inhabits the worlds of a memorable set of characters both young and old, with authority, sharp insight, and great wit. Her wonderful older women, having found that everyone else's reality has nothing to offer them, claim the right to create their own. Troubled young couples mean well but find themselves heading down bewildering paths. Norris' stories are complex, at turns wry and poignant, playful and amusing, haunting and mythical. A few of these stories are traditionally southern in setting and theme, but Norris works well beyond the boundaries of regionalism, writing stories rooted in contemporary concerns and set in imagined places both rural and urban.

The narrator, a victim of childhood incest, looks back on her relationships with men, her brother, and the male psychiatrists who have treated her

A timely new novel evocative of the Biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist by a major American writer. Hugh Helton, a prosperous attorney in a progressive town, has married his brother's ex-wife, Nora. As Hugh negotiates his relationships with his new spouse, her daughter, Jean, and parish priest Father John Riley, Nora’s growing hate for the church into which they were all born and from which they have all lapsed drives her to desperate acts of deceit and manipulation. Father Riley himself wrestles with his own sense of purpose and mission. But when Nora attempts to discredit him as an authority figure in the minds of both her husband and their community, she uses her devoted daughter as the springboard for a series of accusations against the priest that has catastrophic results for all involved. Grappling with issues of faith, trust, family loyalty, child molestation, and scandal in the Catholic Church, Herod’s Wife is a timely exploration of subjects from today's headlines. It illuminates the isolation and search for meaning of characters young and old, innocent and experienced, in a rapidly changing and bewildering southern landscape. Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Soul's Rising, writes, “The main plot revolves around a mother pressuring a child to express her will in a more concrete way than she would or could herself—so that the child ultimately commits acts which are both criminal and morally horrifying... \[Herod’s Wife\] is a morality play set in contemporary conditions, with its eye on eternal verities.” Madison Jones is the author of 10 previous novels, including An Exile and A Cry of Absence. He has won the T. S. Eliot Award from the Ingersoll Foundation, the Michael Shaara Award from the United States Civil War Center, and the Harper Lee Award.

This highly praised first novel by fiction writer Julia Oliver is the story of one young woman's struggle with fidelity and identity in depression-era rural Alabama. A beautifully narrated novel of time and place, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky re-creates a southern summer when the depression and the boll weevil turned hopes to dust. With the extraordinary talent to make the reader see the Ball canning jars on the kitchen table, hear the clicks on the party line, and feel the bittersweet moments of 20-year-old Callie Tatum's first experiences with adult desire, Oliver portrays a young wife’s increasingly dangerous infidelity with cinematic precision and palpable suspense. Soon, with only her housekeeper as a confidant, Callie breaks society’s rules about race and class as well as her marriage vows. The result is a chain of events that will lead to tragedy and a woman’s stunning decision about love, passion, and the future of her life. Originally published in cloth in 1994, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky received considerable attention nationally and became a featured selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. Its inclusion in the Deep South Books series from The University of Alabama Press will extend the book’s reach and its life, while offering new readers access to the enthralling story. The richly drawn, fully developed characters of Buttermilk Sky live on in the reader’s mind long after the book has been finished. Against the emotional and physical isolation of rural Alabama in 1938, the threads of family ties, whispered gossip, old secrets, and unfulfilled dreams weave a powerful, evocative story that captivates its reader until the very last word.

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver. As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.

Newspapers, the Civil War, love, barbecue . . . Nothing escapes Hodges' twisted sense of southern culture in his outrageous novel B-Four. Beauregard Forrest has been a faithful son to his wealthy and quirky father, joining him in Civil War reenactments and morning coffee, and an uncomplaining second fiddle to his brother Jackson, an ex-Crimson Tide football player. To please his father, Beauregard works as a cub reporter at the Birmingham Standard-Dispatch, a job his father hopes will raise Beauregard's college entrance test scores and gain him admittance to prestigious and gentrified Washington and Lee University. Far from honing his skills and sharpening his wit, however, Beauregard's assignments at the Standard-Dispatch—Pet of the Week and obituaries—promise to bury him in Section B, Page 4, hence his nickname. Beauregard's road to Page 1 is filled with more potholes than an Alabama back road. Assigned to cover a speech by a British cleric, the young reporter believes he may have escaped journalistic limbo, only to discover the entire sermon delivered in Latin. When he files his story partly in Latin, he finds himself once again covering breaking news at the Humane Society. Hoping to woo his love interest, Lorena, and wow his fellow reporters with a sizzling front-page scoop, B-Four investigates an anti-Atlanta campaign organized by the Birmingham Boosters. The hilarity that ensues launches him on the road to self-discovery.