From Banks’s brewery’s yeasty stink to groaty pudding to spicy curry, Sebastian Groes and R. M. Francis have assembled a new literary history of the smells and (childhood) memories that belong to the Black Country. This often overlooked region of the United Kingdom at the frontlines of post-industrial upheaval is a veritable treasure trove for studying the relationship between olfaction and place-specific memory. Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between smell and memory in which the contributions consider both personal and communal memory. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, memory studies, literary studies and philosophy, the critical essays reconsider psychogeography through cutting-edge sensory and philosophical engagements with physical space, smell, language and human behaviour. The creative contributions from writers including Liz Berry, Narinder Dhami, Anthony Cartwright, and Kerry Hadley-Pryce meditate on the senses, place, and identity. Not only does this book illustrate the rich cultural heritage of the Black Country, it will also appeal to those interested in place writing. The book is prefaced by Will Self.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). This songbook includes all 15 songs from the 2006 release, Jackson's first ever gospel album. Songs: Blessed Assurance * How Great Thou Art * I'll Fly Away * In the Garden * The Old Rugged Cross * Softly and Tenderly * What a Friend We Have in Jesus * and more.

In Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, Carol Bodensteiner tells the stories of a happy childhood growing up on a family-owned dairy farm in the middle of America in the 1950s, a time when a family could make a good living on 180 acres.

A telling memoir by an exciting new voice, Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl explores journalist Kitty Oliver's coming of age as she makes the crossing from an all-black to a predominantly white world. Born and raised in an all-black area of Jacksonville, Florida, Oliver was one of the first African American freshmen to enter the University of Florida. Though she chronicles the strains of her transition from Jim Crow to desegregation, this book is much more than a memoir of the turbulent sixties. It is an upbeat journal of self-discovery in the aftermath of that decade, a look at one woman's coming to terms with living an integrated life in America. With humor, poignancy, and lyrical language (reminiscent at times of another Florida writer, Zora Neale Hurston), Oliver shares her passage from the "old world" to the new—an immigrant's journey indicative of the American experience. Blending past and present, she searches for roots from the Gullah or "Geechee" culture of South Carolina to the urban streets of northern Florida to the multicultural mix of South Florida's diverse ethnic cultures, serving up family stories with large helpings of southern "folktalk," food, and music along the way.

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a “lively, engaging, and often wise” (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity. What emerges in My Black Country is a celebration of the most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture. As country music goes through a fresh renaissance today, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is the perfect gift for longtime country fans and a vibrant introduction to a new generation of listeners who previously were not invited to give the genre a chance.

WINNER OF THE 2018 READ RUSSIA PRIZE AND THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BEST BOOK IN TRANSLATION IN 2017 Considered Teffi’s single greatest work, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia and Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her, many of which have now resurfaced. In 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Teffi, whose stories and journalism had made her a celebrity in Moscow, was invited to read from her work in Ukraine. She accepted the invitation eagerly, though she had every intention of returning home. As it happened, her trip ended four years later in Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life in exile. None of this was foreseeable when she arrived in German-occupied Kiev to discover a hotbed of artistic energy and experimentation. When Kiev fell several months later to Ukrainian nationalists, Teffi fled south to Odessa, then on to the port of Novorossiysk, from which she embarked at last for Constantinople. Danger and death threaten throughout Memories, even as the book displays the brilliant style, keen eye, comic gift, and deep feeling that have made Teffi one of the most beloved of twentieth-century Russian writers.