"A family is a remarkable thing, isn't it? You belong. And then you don't. It passes you by. Unless you start a family of your own." The last two plays of Horton Foote's Orphans' Home Cycle both expand and contract the circle of a family that unifies all nine of the plays. In Cousins, an operation on Horace Robedaux's mother reunites, in person and in memory, the many Robedaux relatives (one of whom speaks the lines quoted above), and in the almost comic proliferation of cousins that results, the orphaned Horace is joined across time and space to a family that seems never to end. The Death of Papa returns the cycle to its origins, with the death of Horace's father-in-law. Far from ending the story, however, Papa's death regenerates the complexity of families and their survival, as his son bravely but foolishly tries to assume control of the land that supports his family's life.

Since the early 1970s southern fiction has been increasingly attentive to social issues, including the continuing struggles for racial justice and gender equality, the loss of a sense of social community, and the decline of a coherent regional identity. The essays in The World Is Our Home focus on writers who have explicitly addressed social and cultural issues in their fiction and drama, including Dorothy Allison, Horton Foote, Ernest J. Gaines, Jill McCorkle, Walker Percy, Lee Smith, William Styron, Alice Walker, and many others. The contributors provide valuable insights into the transformation of southern culture over the past thirty years and probe the social and cultural divisions that persist. The collection makes an important case for the centrality of social critique in contemporary southern fiction.

Listening for the Voice of Love After a serious van accident leaves Amish schoolteacher Jolene Yoder profoundly deaf, she leaves home to learn how to read lips and communicate with sign language. But two years later, a family with children who have been deaf since birth moves to Jolene’s hometown, and she is asked to return as their teacher. Lonnie Hershberger has lost faith in God and in women ever since his girlfriend broke up with him when he lost his hearing during an explosion. When he starts falling in love with Jolene, love-shy Lonnie sees no future in becoming emotionally tied to Jolene. For how could he hope to protect her, if he can’t even hear? Besides, Jake Beechy seems to be taking up most of her free time. Meanwhile, Ella Miller is worried Jake will end up breaking her cousin Jolene’s heart. Little does Ella know that Jake is interested in her—not Jolene. What drastic measures will God use to bring these couples together? Indiana Cousins Series: Book #1: A Cousin's Promise Book #2: A Cousin's Prayer

A short description about this book would be that it is a book about the life and death of three people.One of them is a seven years old girl abandoned by her father.Another is a young boy betrayed by his girlfriend.And the last one is a cold blooded cultist who seeks his father's death.There's a lesson to be learnt from the life of each person in the book. From the first person we learn about the role of responsibility that comes with our actions.From the second we learn about the danger that comes with bad relationships.And from the third we learn about the evil that comes with harboring pain and grudge.

From the bestselling author of The Edge of Town comes a novel about the Prohibition era and a young girl who must choose between a bootlegging father and the lawman on his trail. Anabel Lee and her father have made a middle-of-the-night move from their former home to a remote hilltop house in Missouri. Anabel is glad that she was able to finish high school before the move, but has resigned herself to the fact that her father's bootlegging business has made them nomads and left her with a life of loneliness. So when a young boy named Jack Jones comes to the door, hungry and looking for work, Anabel eagerly invites him in. And Anabel's father quickly recruits him for his operation. Meanwhile, Jack's older sister is looking for her runaway brother and begs law officer Corbin Appleby to find him. Corbin does so easily, but he also stumbles across the rumrunners-and Anabel, who attracts him immediately. What's an honest lawman to do?

A Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright, an Emmy-winning television writer, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter of such notable films as To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and A Trip to Bountiful, the amazingly versatile Horton Foote has been a force on the American cultural scene for more than fifty years. By critical consensus, Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle -- a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays that traces the transformation over twenty-six years of a small-town southern orphan, Horace Robedaux, into a husband, father, and patriarch. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Foote, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama. Set in and near Harrison, Texas, the fictitious counterpart to Foote's native Wharton, and based partly on his father's childhood and his parents' courtship and marriage, the plays introduce two extended families -- those of Horace and his wife, Eliazbeth -- across three generations, as well as numerous townspeople whose lives intertwine with theirs. The result is a wide-ranging, intricate work of interconnected stories reminiscent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga. Porter shows how the small-town southern culture speaks through Horace while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation. She explains that Foote's signature style -- which replaces stage directions, poetic language, and suspense-driven narratives with sparse, restrained dialogue and seemingly actionless plots -- creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. Similarly, Foote uses recurring character types and motifs, interrelated images and symbols, and parallel and inverted events that reverberate within and among the plays, employing language and structure in innovative ways. In comparing the cycle with the works of William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of southern literature and American drama. Foote's emphasis, Porter concludes, is not so much on returning home as on leaving it and building a new family, contending that for Foote home is not a place but a geography of the heart. Her definitive Orphans' Home shines much-needed light on an understudied talent and proves Foote's to be a vital American voice.