It is three years after the events of ALL THAT's BEST OF DARK AND BRIGHT. The University of Monroe Metrics are again a mediocre club. This year, though, the Beast, the Northeast regional championship, is being held at Monroe. They face the embarrassment of being blown out of their own arena. What's more, a valuable artifact has been stolen! The Monroe AD hires Reporter Guy, narrator of the earlier book, to find the crown jewel. And as a cover, he makes Reporter Guy the Metrics' poetry coach! Will Poetry Man find the trophy? Will he discover unknown skills as a poetry coach to motivate the team? Boy howdy!

The sixth installment of the "All That's Best" novels about women's basketball finds Nick Johnson asked to take over a failing girls WBB team as his wife, Dee, prepares to take her Monroe Metrics to Spokane for the ACAA tournament. On Nick's team, the Liberty, you will meet his rebellious daughter Bit, Candy, who has to overcome her hardscrabble life to get on the path to a college athletic scholarship, Weather, whose mother W.A. Nick has also coached and Dream, a non-playing player. Dead last in the league, they manage to rise to seventh, a dreary record that is salvaged when the league decides all teams will play in the league tournament. Meanwhile Dee, back from Spokane, gets to work preparing for this year's Metrics Hall of Fame installation, which doesn't go exactly as planned. Get ready to laugh and cry as you read this final installment of the ALL THAT'S BEST series!

The Napkin Manuscripts is a collection of twenty-two engaging prose pieces written over the past several decades by Michael McFee – poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. Taken together, they constitute a wide-ranging exploration of what working writers do, how they do it, and what it means. The book is divided into four parts: Section one is composed of personal essays, and is rooted in the landscape and culture of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where the author grew up and where he often returns for inspiration. Section two gathers essays about the literary life and writing, among them pieces on editing, on teaching, on memorizing poetry, on rejection slips, on typewriters, and on becoming and being a writer. Section three collects seven essays about individual Appalachian writers, among them Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Robert Morgan. Section four consists of a public interview conducted at the Michael McFee Literary Festival at Emory & Henry College a few years ago, and recapitulates many of the book’s topics in lively conversational form. The Napkin Manuscripts will appeal to anyone with a connection to Appalachia and the South; to readers interested in contemporary poetry and literature; and to teachers, writers, and students of poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction.