An omnibus of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama written by Mississippi authors

Fiction recounting the experience of growing up in the Deep South

This anthology of Mississippi crime fiction “has produced a unique, delicious flavor of noir” with stories by Ace Atkins, Megan Abott and more (New York Daily News). From poverty to state corruption, Mississippi has a well-deserved reputation for trouble. Could there be a connection between its many misfortunes and its rich literary legacy? Mississippians from Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty to Richard Ford and John Grisham certainly know how to tell a good story. Now Mississippi Noir offers “a devilishly wrought introduction” to a new generation of “writers with a feel for Mississippi who are pursuing lonely, haunting paths of the imagination” (Associated Press). Mississippi Noir includes brand-new stories by Ace Atkins, William Boyle, Megan Abbott, Jack Pendarvis, Dominiqua Dickey, Michael Kardos, Jamie Paige, Jimmy Cajoleas, Chris Offutt, Michael Farris Smith, Andrew Paul, Lee Durkee, Robert Busby, John M. Floyd, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, and Mary Miller.

Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella, Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. Contributors such as Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including “Becoming a Writer;” “Becoming a Southern Writer;” “Place, Politics, People;” “Writing about Race;” “The Craft of Writing;” and “A Little Help from My Friends.”

"Norma Watkins, a rare, brave, and entrancing human being, has written a uniquely Mississippi story about coming to terms with family, state, and tumultuous times---and discovering herself in the process. It is a great read, pure and simple."---Hodding Carter III "The Last Resort reminded me of why I started reading in the first place---to be enchanted, to be carried away from my world and dropped into a world more vivid and incandescent. Norma Watkins casts her spell with exquisite sentences and unerring, evocative details. She is a writer of inordinate compassion and formidable intelligence. This unsparing and unsentimental memoir documents a woman's struggle for independence over the course of her lifetime and took great moral courage and ferocious honesty to write. And let me add that this book is so much more than personal memoir. It is an eye on history. Norma Watkins puts us there at the white hot center of the struggle for racial equality in Jackson, Mississippi, in the turbulent fifties and sixties."---John Dufresne "What a book! What a woman! And what a life she has led ... touching upon all the major issues of our time. I was riveted from start to finish. Brave, honest, and open, Norma Watkins is a born writer through and through. The Last Resort is an absolute must---read for all southern women---and men, too---as she shines a light into some of the darkest, most secret and sacred areas of our culture. This is one of the best memoirs I have ever read."---Lee Smith "Norma Watkins takes her readers through one woman's journey toward understanding herself and the Mississippi in which she grew up. It is a soul-searching work, one with which many women will identify."--Kay Mills The Last Resort Taking the Mississippi Cure Raised Under The Racial Segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady. The Last Resort, her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett, His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

This volume packages together 17 of the peculiar Yuletide experiences of great writers like Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Elizabeth Spencer, with illustrations by Waters.