Set in 1933 Mississippi, this thought-provoking story about a young boy who lives in an environment of racial hatred will challenge young readers to question their own assumptions and confront personal decisions. Full color.

You need only one best friend, Daniel Musgrove figures, to make it through high school alive. After his family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, Daniel finds fellow outsider Tim Cousins. The two become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and Arnita Beecham, the most bewitching girl at Minor High. But soon things go terribly wrong. The friends commit a small crime that grows larger and larger, and threatens to engulf the whole town. Arnita, the first black prom queen in the history of the school, is injured and wakes up a different person. And Daniel, Tim, and their families are swept up in a shocking chain of events. "There is nothing small about Childress's fine novel. It's big in all the ways that matter -- big in daring, big in insight, and big-hearted. Really, really big-hearted." -New Orleans Times-Picayune

Creators and Context. Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented group of comics creators changed the American comic industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetics into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Millers Batman The Dark Knight Returns 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbonss Watchmen 1987 in particular revolutionized the genre. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention, as best represented by Art Spiegelmans Maus. The Rise of the American Comics Artist is an insightful volume surveying the

"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.

The Mississippi Cookbook was prepared in an attempt to collect, make available, and thus preserve the favorite recipes of fine cooks throughout Mississippi. Over 7,000 recipes were collected from all areas of the state. From this total, the home economists of the state Cooperative Extension Service had the painfully difficult task of screening the amount down to the 1,200 best recipes. The names of the individuals who submitted follow each recipe and, in some cases, historical data about the dish is included. A special section includes favorite recipes of the wives of former governors. The appendices feature tables and charts that provide such valuable technical information as substitutions and equivalents, measuring ingredients, time and temperature guides, definitions, and servings. This comprehensive collection of Mississippi's most popular recipes records the state's culinary heritage and its mastery of home cooking.

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.

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.