On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity....

The protagonists of these nine short stories learn to accept the harsh loneliness of life.

"The native gardening classic--now with more than fifty new plant profiles. In today's South, where fine gardening is a tradition, many homeowners and professional gardeners are discovering a vast "new" palette of plant materials--native plants. They are realizing that these native wildflowers, trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines, and grasses are far better suited, and therefore easier to grow and maintain, than most of the imported plants that populate...

Ella leaves her family and takes a road trip back to the places where key chapters of her life unfolded, hoping to face her ghosts and determine which of the secrets she carries must be shared, and which are better left untold.

Weaving together heart-wrenching stories with immersive reporting and dramatic storytelling, a gripping account of a weather event in April 2011 that saw a record 358 tornadoes rip through 21 states in three days shows how things that tear our world apart also reveal what holds us together.

"Michael Lee West writes like the Morman Tabernacle Choir sings-a thousand voices, all different, all together." - Diana Gabaldon

Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena collects a bevy of wise, witty, often hilarious essays by the inimitably charming, staunchly Southern Julia Reed. In classic Dixie storytelling fashion, Reed wends her way through the South from politics, religion, and women to weather, pestilence, guns, and what she calls drinking and other Southern pursuits with a rare blend of literary elegance and plainspoken humor. To hear Reed tell it, the...