Showing results for "Lee Smith" in Literature & Fiction

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Devil's Dream is an animated, lyrical novel that is meant to be savored as spoken word. Consummate storyteller Lee Smith's creation will delight anyone who enjoys the sound of language and a good story.

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork.

A consummate storyteller in the Southern tradition, Lee Smith tugs at her listeners' heartstrings with this haunting narrative that reads like a country ballad. Touching, funny, and sad, its down-to-earth characters are somehow familiar and endearing as they do their best to meet the demands of daily life.

Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. With each chapter, Lee Smith, a master of regional voices, adds another branch to a family tree that sings with secrets and sadness, beauty and joy. Researching an assignment for an Oral History course, Jennifer drives to the Virginia hills where her mother and father grew up. Raised by a stepmother, the young college student wonders why her father never talks of her real mother or relatives.

The American West is no safe haven for women—least of all in the Gold Rush town of Coloma, California. Not for Clara Tice, the blacksmith’s strange and stubborn daughter. Not for Mei, the healer whose calm presence in the makeshift camp for Chinese immigrants contrasts sharply with her brother’s hard-eyed pursuit of riches. And certainly not for Haloke, a Nisenan shaman’s granddaughter whose native village has been devastated by smallpox, hunger, and the relentless greed of Outsiders.

Lee Smith, author of the acclaimed The Last Girls, delights with a tale of dry wit. Smith has won many prizes, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Academy Award in Literature.

Orphaned when her father dies in the Civil War, Molly Petree is taken in by Uncle Junius on his Agate Hill plantation. But the terminally ill Junius is manipulated into marriage by his housekeeper, Selena, who inherits Agate Hill upon his death. Neglected and abused under Selena's watch, Molly escapes to a better life with help from her father's closest battlefield companion. But as she grows into a refined, educated woman, Molly remains haunted by tragedy.

Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through life's arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a preacher who ignores his destitute family, Florida Grace doesn't think much of Jesus. He's the reason she's lived in squalor and He wasn't there for her through her failed marriage. But in one shining moment He calls out to her and she returns to her roots to heed His call.

Lee Smith is one of today's most critically acclaimed authors writing about contemporary life in the South. In Family Linen, with a remarkable economy of description and dialogue, Smith sketches eccentric, yet familiar characters moving through a family drama that resonates with both tension and humor.

Lee Smith, one of today's finest writers in the Southern literary tradition, has been compared to Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. This collection of nine stories, ranging from poignant ballads to delightfully inventive forms, showcases Smith's celebrated talent. The stories will make you chuckle and leave you with a satisfying sense that no matter how unruly or warped life may seem, equilibrium can be found after all.

This funny and endearing novel of family, secrets, and aging follows an elderly man who heads off on a joyride with a new young friend—who may have some secrets of her own. A driving force in literature, the one and only Lee Smith returns with a road trip novel, a story full of hope and humor...

Nine-year-old Susan has the whole glorious, carefree summer ahead of her. Sometimes she worries that her mother and father aren't happy together, but from her vantage point under the dogbushes, the world is safe and wonderful. Her life begins to change when her friends introduce her to the creepy new city kid, Eugene, who's come to spend the summer. Eugene holds a strange power over the group, a power that Susan feels most profoundly on the night she is forced to play "doctor".

When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is famous for its up-to-the-minute shock therapies and for Dr. Carroll's revolutionary theory of the benefits of non-introspection. Evalina finds herself in the midst of a kaleidoscope of characters, including the estranged wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A storyteller in the very best southern tradition, Lee Smith pens unexpected plots vibrant with luminous prose. Her powerful short stories in Me and My Baby View the Eclipse capture those extraordinary moments in everyday life when greatness and tragedy shimmer through the surface. This collection was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Lee Smith delivers the heartwarming tale of three generations of women who record their lives in Christmas letters to the family.

Mary Anna Custis Lee is a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and heiress to Virginia's storied Arlington house and General Washington's personal belongings. Born in bondage at Arlington, Selina Norris Gray learns to read and write in the schoolroom Mary and her mother keep for the slave children and eventually becomes Mary's housekeeper and confidante. As Mary's health declines, Selina becomes her personal maid, strengthening a bond that lasts until death parts them.

Three tourist ships have gone missing. An entire Russian research base has gone silent. A private facility has been swept with an unknown pathogen. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. After Siggy Smith is charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to liquidation, she’s given offered a choice: A public death, or five years on an elite squadron known as M.O.N.S.T.R. Choosing life, the shape-shifter and ex-marine is now tasked with tracking down and eliminating supernatural entities that threaten human life.

Going to Meet Lee is about a newspaper editor dissatisfied with his life in the Big Apple. He decides to head to Nebraska, where a family he barely remembers has offered to provide him with the ranch life, plus a daughter whose name he doesn't know, to perhaps become his mail order bride. There are two hearts to be healed in this western romance.