Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip... (read more)