The Southern Woman - Selected Fiction

Zusatztext “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, the acclaimed author of several novels and short-story collections, is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction. She was brought up in Mississippi during the Depression, at a time when tales of the Civil War lingered and segregation seemed permanent. Spencer's wanderings took her to Italy in 1953, to Montreal in 1958, and back home to the South in 1986. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Klappentext Born in rural Carrollton, Mississippi, Elizabeth Spencer has been writing masterly stories and novellas about Southerners for more than half a century. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer's shorter fiction and displays her range of place-the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and the contemporary Sun Belt. In "The Little Brown Girl,” Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In the elegiac "The Cousins,” a group of Southerners roams through Italy, brushing with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included is "The Light in the Piazza,” the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that brought Spencer widespread acclaim and was adapted for both the screen and the Broadway stage. In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the distinguished heritage of the Southern short story.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 would go around the house to the back to hitch up the black mule in spring, or file on the hoe blade in summer, or drag a great dirty-white cotton sack to the field in the fall. Spring, summer, and fall they saw him come, until he became as much a part of the household as Maybeth or Brother or Lester Junior or Snookums, the cook; then, after the last pound of cotton was weighed in the cold fall twilight, the Jim they knew would vanish. In winter, they sometimes spoke to a town Negro as Jim, and he would answer back, pleasant as you please, but it was no use pretending he was the same. The cotton stalks stood black and sodden in the field, and the cornstalks broke from the top, and there was nothing for a little girl to do in the afternoons but grow all hot and stuffy by the fire or pester Mother for things to eat or study schoolbooks sometimes. There wasn...

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Spencer
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.08.2009
• EAN: 9780812980769
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-8076-9
• No. of pages: 480
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 26 mm
• Series: Modern Library Classics; Modern Library Classics (Paper; Modern Library Classics
• Subject: Fiction > Mixed anthologies