The semiautobiographical story of an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.

"Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit." -The Washington Post Book World Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage, directed by David Gordon Green. Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won't slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of...

Fourteen-year-old Chris, a poor relation of the wealthy Winchesters, must chose whether to be on the side of management or labor when his classmates' parents go on strike at the Winchester mill in response to a wage cut

"Homesick and alone, a teen-aged girl arrives in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer"

"A novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, following the intersecting lives of the local families fighting to protect their homeland, the West Indian laborers recruited to dig the waterway, and the white Americans who gained profit and glory for themselves"-- It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring...

Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter...

After the death of her father, Emma Molinero moves in with her grandmother and struggles to find a place for herself in a rugged English village.

Ten-year-old message-runner Freddie Musgrove's silence is bought after he witnesses a scene of unremitting horror at The Towers, but years later, when the horror reoccurs, Freddie must fight to remain uninvolved.

At the Habitation, a large and decaying riverside house, the Crawfords were on the verge of bankruptcy - and when Martha Mary was obliged to take on the responsibility for her family, a series of dramatic events occurred that would test her indomitable fortitude.