THE STORIES: A YOUNG LADY OF PROPERTY. Wilma, a lonely girl of fifteen, lives with her aunt. Her mother is dead, and her father, who is weak and not too reliable, goes out with a Mrs. Leighton, a woman of whom the town disapproves. In a wistful mom

This literary biography thoroughly investigates how Foote's life and worldview have shaped his works for stage, television, and film. Tracing the whole trajectory of Foote's career, Watson demonstrates that Foote has created a fully imagined mythical world from the materials supplied by his own and his family's and friends' lives. 8 photos.

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE • Set in 1828 on a Louisiana sugar plantation, this novel from the bestselling author of Mary Reilly presents a “fresh, unsentimental look at what slave-owning does to (and for) one's interior life.... The writing—so prised and clean limbed—is a marvel" (Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved). Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?