A collection of stories ranging in time from the 1940’s to present and taking place in locales such as Memphis, Tennessee; Sheffield, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and various other rural locations in the South. The stories chronicle the lives, life events, and conflicts of southern characters including the poor and rural; high school and college students; the elderly; children; the educated and uneducated; businesspeople; teachers and the working class. A rich thread of southern heritage, culture, and the human condition runs throughout the collection and brings to life the character’s motivations, mannerisms, eccentricities, persistence and resilience. Characters such as Uncle Lum; Uncle Caleb and Aunt Martha; Mitchell Murphy and Marsha Butler; Pack Jordan and Granville Graves; Nancy and Jack; Walter and Edna; and Paul and Davey evoke the intimate expanse of history, legend, truth, desperation, and textures of place: Southern places, Southern people, Southern conflicts and Southern relationships.

High quality reprint of Snake Doctor, and Other Stories by Irvin S. Cobb.

“Kerouac’s best book.”—TIME Dr. Sax is a haunting novel of deeply felt adolescence, Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in Kerouac’s own birthplace, the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. There, Dr. Sax, with his flowing cape, slouched hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack’s fantasy world. Deftly mingling memory and dream, Kerouac captures the accents and textures of his boyhood in Lowell in this novel of a cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom that he once described as “the greatest book I ever wrote, or that I will write.”

Jiangnan, that part of east-central China watered by the Yangzi River, is the ironically Edenic setting for these six powerful tales of devotion, betrayal, and defilement. Zhu Lin, a uniquely angry female voice on China’s literary scene, takes a particular interest in the plight of young women whose exceptional qualities condemn them to exploitation by men. No other contemporary Chinese writer renders the hostility of rural society toward women in such stark and ultimately tragic terms. Serpents tyrannize the innocent in this fictional Jiangnan garden. The title story refers to a fragrant, blood-red flower known as the snake’s pillow, which symbolizes an innocent girl betrayed and violated by a male figure of authority. Immersed in the heady and sensual imagery of the natural world, Zhu Lin’s female protagonists invite comparisons not only with Eve but also with Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Zhu Lin has said of her fiction that its purpose is to “summon the souls” of readers who have lost themselves in the turbulence of a society in the transition to modernity—and then to restore these lost souls to the bodies they have left. An evocation of both flesh and spirit, these Jiangnan stories give voice to the complex and disturbing experience of women in a changing society.