Bøger udgivet af Blair

Legends of Virginia Dare, Theodosia Burr, Blackbeard, and the witch of Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Sixteen years have passed since Steven Sherrill first introduced us to "M," the selfsame Minotaur from Greek mythology, transplanted to the modern American South, in the critically acclaimed The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. M has moved north now, from a life of kitchens and trailer parks, to that of Civil War re-enactor at a run-down living history park in the dying blue-collar rustbelt of central Pennsylvania. Though he dies now, in uniform, on a regular basis, M's world, his daily struggles, remain unchanged. Isolation. Loneliness. Other-ness. Shepherded, cared for, by the Guptas, the immigrant family who runs the motel where he lives, outsiders in their own right, and tolerated by his neighbors, by most of his coworkers at Old Scald Village, but tormented by a few, M wants only to find love and understanding. The serendipitous arrival of Holly and her damaged brother, halted on their own journey of loss, stirs hope in the Minotaur's life. As their paths overlap we find ourselves rooting for the old bull as he stumbles toward a real live human relationship.

Bob Garner's previous books are combined, updated, and expanded into one volume, creating the ultimate reference to North Carolina barbecue.

Straight from the roux bayou, a culinary memoir about how a centuries old Cajun and Creole secret―gumbo―has become one of the world’s most beloved dishes.The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans―all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many, in America and around the world? A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers. His obsession goes back to his childhood in the Cajun bastion of Bayou Black, where his French-speaking mother’s gumbo often got started with a chicken chased down in the yard. In Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou, Wells shares his lifelong quest to explore gumbo’s roots and mysteries. He spends time with octogenarian chefs to make a gourmet gumbo; joins a team at a highly competitive gumbo contest; visits a factory that churns out gumbo by the ton; and observes the gumbo-making rituals of an iconic New Orleans restaurant where high-end Creole cooking and Cajun cuisine first merged.Gumbo Life, rendered in Wells’ affable prose, makes clear that gumbo is more than a dish: it’s an attitude, a way of seeing the world. This is a tasty culinary memoir―to be enjoyed like a simmering pot of gumbo.This edition includes recipe additions as well as a story about the author’s quest for authentic Cajun Dark Roux, which involved a hunt for (thankfully scarce) bear lard.

"Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose. It's 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural village where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend. Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel's personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room-each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?"--

An Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction FinalistA woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

Steven Leyva’s second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man’s lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come.” For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an afro-latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film. This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask “What is the opposite of cruelty?” The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man’s hand touching another man’s face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, "not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left / when the world’s terrors retreat.”

A young girl grows up in a family uprooted by the terror of an Islamic Revolution, where her culture, her gender, and her education are in peril.For the curious and imaginative Moji, there is no better place to grow up than the lush garden of her grandparents in Tehran. However, as she sits with her sister underneath the grapevines, listening to their grandfather recount the enchanting stories of One Thousand and One Nights, revolution is brewing in her homeland. Soon, the last monarch of Iran will leave the country, and her home and her family will never be the same.From Moji’s house on Sun Street, readers experience the 1979 Iranian revolution through the eyes of a young girl and her family members during a time of concussive political and social change. Moji must endure the harrowing first days of the violent revolution, a fraught passage to the US where there is only hostility from her classmates during the Iranian hostage crisis, her father’s detainment by the Islamic Revolutionary Army, and finally, the massive change in the status of women in post-revolution Iran. Along with these seismic shifts, for Moji, there are also the universal perils of love, sexuality, and adolescence. However, since Moji’s school is centered on political indoctrination, even a young girl’s innocent crush can mean catastrophe. Is Moji able to pull through? Will her family come to her rescue? And just like Scheherazade, will the power of stories help her prevail?

Winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize, Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

River Road is a collection of narrative poems in the voice of Susan McFalls, writing from her new home in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee, returns to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains to continue the story of Susan McFalls, who is left on Mount Pisgah after the death of her dear friend and neighbor Posey Green. These poems follow Susan as she moves to and renovates an old house on River Road, vividly bringing to life the wild and beautiful land and culture of the Blue Ridge and the cherished memories and new friends that continue to anchor her to this special place.River Road is a companion to Caldwell’s first poetry collection, Woodsmoke, and while the two can stand alone, together they paint a fuller picture of friendship, loss, and the ways in which lives are shaped by the North Carolina mountains.

Bridges sports and cultural commentary: This book has been an improbable favorite among southern sports nuts and cultural critics alike.Targets general readers: Fight Songs is not a scholarly book, but it’s beautifully argued, full of relevant historical detail, and it is funny.Well-known regional author: Ed Southern, as the director of the largest writers’ organization in the South, is a well-known person in the book business, as is his wife—director of Bookmarks and this year’s SIBA president.Promotion on sports talk radio: Since the book’s hardcover publication, Ed has been a frequent guest on sports talk shows and this will continue with the paperback coming out at the beginning of the college football season.

WINNER of the LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE ¿This sun-and-salt-kissed coming-of-age story reads like a wry, honest chat with a close friend.¿ ¿Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness Evie Austin, native of Hatteras Island, North Carolina and baddest girl on the planet, has not lived her life in a straight line. There have been several detours¿career snafus, bad romantic choices, a loved but unplanned child¿not to mention her ill-advised lifelong obsession with boxer Mike Tyson. Evie is not plucky, but when life¿s changes smash over her like the rough surf of the local shoreline, she muddles through¿until that moment of loss and longing when muddling will no longer suffice. This is the story of what the baddest girl on the planet must find in herself when a bag of pastries, a new lover, or quick trip to Vegas won¿t fix anything, and when something more than casual haplessness is required. The Baddest Girl on the Planet is inventive, sharp, witty, and poignant. Readers will want to jump in and advise this baddest girl on the planet¿or at least just give her a shake or a hug¿at every fascinating turn.

Fourth book published in the Carolina Wren Press Chapbook Poetry series.

Part of a chapbook sequence, In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI-XL is the fifth chapbook to be published by Carolina Wren Press.

"Like Emily Dickinson, or more recently Paul Celan, Sandra Becker is a poet of ultimate moments rendered with spare, exacting strokes. These poems bring to difficult matters a spiritually attuned music that finds, in the ironies of illness, a luminous compassion." -Joseph Donahue, Judge, 2003 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Chapbook Contest

Number two in the Carolina Wren Press poetry Chapbook series is Succory by Durham resident Andrea Selch. Politics gets personal in Selch's debut, a volume spanning decades of memory and continents of care. Selch's lifestyle is subtly explored in ten lyric poems and two longer sequences, humor and pain are doled out in equal heaping doses.

"Core the questions, comma the nouns." The poems of Piece Logic buzz with a familiar terror as they expose the seams and piece the goods. As with Hunt's earlier books, Piece Logic eavesdrops with an unfailing ear on the sentences and corridors of power, but with a renewed sense of urgency: "The shoemaker's children have no shoes."Piece Logic was designed by Dave Wofford of Horse & Buggy Press. The covers, recycled entirely from post-consumer waster content, were letterpress printed by hand from metal type, and the book was hand-sewn with linen thread.

"The poems of Suddenly, Fruit are indeed ripe--ripe with sensuality, with language that is palpable. As if an old rift had been healed, dream, myth, flesh, spirit, history and consciousness are reunited and shown to be inseparable. Whether it's cooking dinner to NPR or watching a child's Christmas pageant, Linda Pennisi has a remarkable ability to see the mythic structures underpinning ordinary experience. And just as remarkably she hears how the ancient myths continue to speak. Her Persephone in modern dress reveals the dark currents tugging at our lives and shows us how experience, the dark and light of it, can-indeed, must-be embraced. These poems are womanly, wise, elegant, and profoundly generous in their affirmation of life, 'as if you had all along been praying for just this.'" --Betsy Sholl, Advance Reader