Katy sat on the old stone bench, scrubbed of its mold, and wished she could warn all those eager faces waiting to return to the old town, the old farm, the old ways that nostalgia is an extravagance to be enjoyed frugally. "When you return home," she would explain," stand close enough to enjoy the glow of the hearth fire but not so close as to be scarred and maimed for life. When you leave a place where all your yesterdays are buried deep, visit briefly, leave fast, and never turn back." A Country Mile is the story of Katy, who has yearned for many years to return to her family home in Tennessee, to an historic plantation that served as a military hospital duringr the Civil War. The story, at times tender, at times violent, is set against a background of local color. The romance is vivid and the message reiiterates Thomas Wolfe's lament that one can never go home.

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In country music, the men might dominate the radio waves. But it’s women—like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves—who are making history. This is the full and unbridled story of the past twenty years of country music seen through the lens of these trailblazers’ careers—their paths to stardom and their battles against a deeply embedded boys’ club, as well as their efforts to transform the genre into a more inclusive place—as told by award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss. For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different universe—a brief blip in time, when women like Shania Twain and the Chicks topped every chart and made country music a woman’s world. But the industry, which prefers its stars to be neutral, be obedient, and never rock the boat, had other plans. It wanted its women to “shut up and sing”—or else. In 2021, women are played on country radio as little as 10 percent of the time, but they’re still selling out arenas, as Kacey Musgraves does, and becoming infinitely bigger live draws than most of their male counterparts, creating massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris’s “The Middle,” pushing the industry to confront its racial biases with Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me,” and winning heaps of Grammy nominations. Her Country is the story of how in the past two decades, country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down and created entirely new pathways to success. It’s the behind-the-scenes story of how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, Miranda Lambert, Rissi Palmer, Brandi Carlile, and many more have reinvented their place in an industry stacked against them. When the rules stopped working for these women, they threw them out, made their own, and took control—changing the genre forever, and for the better.

YOU KIN DO IT, CHILE, (You Can Do It, Child) tells of an unusual and poignant relationship between a black, horse trainer in his eighties and a young blond girl growing up on a farm in Tennessee. At a period in history, still affected by resentments and injustices of the Civil War, Maxie and Uncle Sandy cement a bond of friendship that transcends all opinions and established mores of the time. Uncle Sandy, born a slave, rose above his status by educating himself, becoming a world acclaimed Arabian horse trainer and passing on a wisdom and honor to the small child who loved and admired him, which enabled her to succeed in subsequent traumas of adult life. Maxwell's observations and first hand experiences among both aristocrats and farmers, gleaned from ancestors who predated the Civil War, gives credence and color to this touching novel of homecoming. The stories of a southern farm before and during World War II continue to that "far off land," California, where Uncle Sandy accompanies sixty Arabian hosses under his care. Although never having left Tennessee, he joins the family in the monumental move, not wanting his "horses" to go without him. The emotions of him and Maxie are similar and terrifying, facing a lonely ranch life, far from Tennessee. Their deep love for each other reaches an emotional climax when she flies with him on his last trip home.

"Do you want to sleep with her first or shall I?" So begins this hilarious story of a Swedish girl who travels the world looking for adventures and romance. She works in England, France and Spain to learn those languages. In California she teaches Swedish to American Army soldiers and meets a Russian, marries him and lives with him and their two children in Japan and in Rome. After ten years, they move to Santa Barbara, California and fifteen years later Kerstin divorces her husband and continuous to travel alone to, among many other countries, China, where she risks being arrested for smuggling. This book is fun and makes you laugh.