Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Woodrow McIlmore is leading the perfect life in Paris, Arkansas: married to his high school sweetheart, he has two wonderful children and a warm circle of family and friends. When Wood's daughter announces that she wants to marry a college classmate, Wood is stunned. But that's just the tip of the iceberg -- her intended is the son of the woman who left Wood twenty years earlier, the free-spirited Duff. And so... (more)

Fay: A Novel

by Larry Brown

She's had no education, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her "love." So at seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home, carrying a purse with half a pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay. There's a highway patrolman who gives her a... (more)

Oral History

by Lee Smith

"Delightful and entertaining." PEOPLE When Jennifer, a college student, returns to her childhood home of Hoot Owl Holler with a tape recorder, the tales of murder and suicide, incest and blood ties, bring to life a vibrant story of a doomed family that still refuses to give up.... "Deft and assured....<Lee Smith> is nothing less than masterly." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the Paperback... (more)

Family Linen

by Lee Smith

"Brilliant, haunting, dark, joyous, remarkably compelling...immensely difficult to put down...a master storyteller." THE VILLAGE VOICE A childhood memory re-experienced, a funeral that brings about a family reunion, and the excavation of a swimming pool on the site of an old well, uncover family secrets and air the dirty linen in this behind-the-scenes look at life and family, memory and forgetfulness, anger and... (more)

Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

A lush, epic novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina . When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for ten years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll world; her dreams of singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a... (more)

Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

by Michael Lee West

Laced with delicious secret recipes passed from generation to generation, Consuming Passions is Michael Lee West's delightfully quirky memoir of an adventurous food-obsessed life.By watching a multitude of relatives cook, squabble, and carry on tradition, West went from a noncooking sytudent to a full-on gourmet of food and words. Throughout, she lends her distinctive humor and often hilarious insights to... (more)

Mad Girls In Love

by Michael Lee West

Michael Lee West's indomitable G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised in the South) are back -- enduring rough times with all the grace and outrageous flair expected of true Southern heroines. Bitsy Wentworth -- fleeing yet another relationship nightmare in a “borrowed” red Corvette, with her baby daughter and a recently acquired “demon child” -- has an APB out on her for attempted murder (she broke her ex-husband's nose... (more)

Sarah Conley

by Ellen Gilchrist

A New York City magazine editor and novelist returns home to the South when her closest childhood friend falls ill--and finds herself forced to choose between pursuing her career and rekindling her relationship with the man she has long considered the love of her life. NPR sponsorship.

I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy: And Other Stories

I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy: And Other Stories

by Ellen Gilchrist

With all the poignancy, hilarity, and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her fiction, Ellen Gilchrist introduces a gallery of unforgettable characters-Southern women and men whose off-kilter lives are delicately revealed by the author's keen and forgiving gaze. This jubilantly acclaimed collection affirms anew why, as the Washington Post puts it, 'Ellen Gilchrist should be declared a national treasure.' - Since... (more)

Drunk with Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

This latest collection of thirteen masterful short stories by the author of Victory Over Japan brings more critical acclaim to the writer who has been called "a natural teller of tales."

Rhoda: A Life in Stories

by Ellen Gilchrist

A collection of all twenty-two previously published short stories featuring the author's most popular character, Rhoda Katherine Manning, a vivacious, wholly liberated writer, is complemented by two new tales. Reprint.

Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces

Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet: Selections from the People Pieces

by Jo Carson

In one of the most powerful poems in this 96-page collection, a mother asks her grown child to come home while she is still alive: "I could fill you up with stories, stories I ain't told nobody yet. . . . When I am dead, it will not matter / how hard you press your ear to the ground." Like the voices in the oral histories collected by Studs Terkel, these monologues and dialogues from east Tennessee and the... (more)

Crazy Ladies: A Novel

by Michael Lee West

From the author of She Flew the Coop and American Pie comes this lively multigenerational tale of six charming, unforgettable Southern women -- a novel of love and laughter, pain and redemption. Though she was born in Tennessee, Miss Gussie is no country fool. A woman who can handle any situation, she has her hands full with two headstrong daughters who happen to be complete opposites-dour Dorothy and sweet... (more)

The Last Girls (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Last Girls (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Lee Smith

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LEE SMITH Author of News of the Spirit THE LAST GIRLS A Novel “Wise and insightful . . . The Last Girls deserves to be shared, pondered, and treasured.” – The Dallas Morning News “<A> GENIAL, THOUGHTFUL, FUNNY NOVEL, WRITTEN WITH THE WIT AND ASSURANCE OF A BORN STORYTELLER.” – The Hartford Courant “RICH AND DELICIOUS . . . THE STORY OF FOUR WOMEN . . .Years... (more)

The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

PAT CONROY has created a huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low country as well as... (more)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.... (more)

One Mississippi: A Novel

by Mark Childress

An uproariously funny and deeply moving novel about growing up in the South by the acclaimed author of Crazy in Alabama. When Daniel Musgrove's family moves to a small Mississippi town at the beginning of his junior year, he faces all the pain and thrills of adolescence, with extra helpings of hormones and humiliation. But then he meets Tim, a fellow outsider, and the two become fast friends. You only need one... (more)

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man

by Fannie Flagg

In Fannie Flagg’s high-spirited first novel, we meet Daisy Fay Harper in the spring of 1952, where she’s “not doing much except sitting around waiting for the sixth grade.” When she leaves Shell Beach, Mississippi, in September 1959, she is packed up and ready for the Miss America Pageant, vowing “I won’t come back until I’m somebody.” But in our hearts she already is. Sassy and irreverent from the get-go, Daisy... (more)

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

When Siddalee Walker, oldest daughter of Vivi Abbott Walker, Ya-Ya extraordinaire, is interviewed in the New York Times about a hit play she's directed, her mother gets described as a "tap-dancing child abuser." Enraged, Vivi disowns Sidda. Devastated, Sidda begs forgiveness, and postpones her upcoming wedding. All looks bleak until the Ya-Yas step in and convince Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of their girlhood... (more)

The Mermaid Chair

by Sue Monk Kidd

A dazzling novel of passion and spirituality—the instant blockbuster bestseller from the author of The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd’s phenomenal debut, The Secret Life of Bees , became a runaway bestseller that is still on the New York Times bestseller list more than two years after its paperback publication. Now, in her luminous new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: southern favorites

by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

by Larry Brown

by Lee Smith

by Lee Smith

by Dorothy Allison

by Michael Lee West

by Michael Lee West

by Ellen Gilchrist

by Ellen Gilchrist

by Ellen Gilchrist

by Ellen Gilchrist

by Jo Carson

by Michael Lee West

by Lee Smith

by Pat Conroy

by John Berendt

by Mark Childress

by Fannie Flagg

by Rebecca Wells

by Sue Monk Kidd