The Southern Woman - Selected Fiction

Zusatztext “A national treasure . . . [Elizabeth Spencer] is indispensable witness to the difficulties of having a home and then leaving it, to the struggles of smart, sexually alive young women trying to find their way in the world.” — The Paris Review   “There seems to be nothing this extraordinary writer can’t do.” — The New York Times   “One of the foremost chroniclers of the American South.” — The Washington Post “A retrospective collection of twenty-seven stories, written over a period of more than half a century, by a Southern writer whose best fiction merits comparison with the work of Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Spencer is a spellbinding storyteller. Her stories . . . are dense and rich as novels, as light as air; they hover in the mind like hummingbirds.” —Lee Smith “What [Spencer’s] stories do wonderfully, for me, is explore the ties that bind–in families, friendships, communities, marriages–how mysterious, twisted, chafing, inescapable, and life-supporting such ties are.” —Alice Munro “A writer one puts on the ‘permanent’ shelf. These stories will be read and reread.” —James Dickey Informationen zum Autor Elizabeth Spencer (1921–2019) was the author of nine novels and novellas and three other short-story collections. She was raised in Mississippi, where tales of the Civil War lingered and segregation seemed permanent, during the Great Depression. Spencer’s wanderings took her to Italy in 1953, to Montreal in 1958, and back to the South in 1986. Klappentext A stunning collection from one of the South's masters of short fiction. Elizabeth Spencer has been writing masterly short stories and novellas about Southerners for more than fifty years. Her short fiction, infused with the sense of place and the elegant precision of an original voice, has earned her a reputation as one of our most accomplished writers of the form. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer's shorter fiction. The book displays Spencer's range of place-the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt. In "The Little Brown Girl," young Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In "First Dark," a young man returns home to tiny Richton, Mississippi, a "land of mourning and shadows and memory." In the elegiac story, "The Cousins," a group of Southerners roams through Italy, tangling with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included here is "The Light in the Piazza," the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that first brought Spencer widespread acclaim, selling more than two million copies worldwide and inspiring the popular award-winning Broadway musical. In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the long heritage of the Southern short story. Leseprobe the little brown girl Maybeth’s father had a business in the town, which was about a mile from where they lived, but he had about forty acres of land below the house that he planted in cotton and corn. The land was down the hill from the house and it was on two levels of ground: twenty acres, then a bluff covered with oak sprouts and vines, then a lower level, which stretched to the property line at the small creek. You could see it all from the house—the two fields and the creek, and other fields beyond the creek—but from the upper field you could just see as far as the willows along the creek bank. For nine months of the year, Maybeth’s father hired a Negro named Jim Williams to make the crop. Jim would work uptown in the mornings and come in the afternoons around two o’clock—a black, strapping Negro in blue overalls, stepping light and free and powerful on the road from town. He wou...

Product details

• Authors: Afia Atakora, Elizabeth Spencer
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.04.2021
• EAN: 9780593241189
• ISBN: 978-0-593-24118-9
• No. of pages: 528
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 26 mm
• Series: Modern Library Torchbearers
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature