FPPL Roadtrip Through Books: South

The acclaimed first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and...

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "A fine mix of compassion and precision . . . Verghese makes indelible narratives of his cases, and they read like wrenching short stories."-Pico Iyer, Time Abraham Verghese has garnered worldwide acclaim for his New York Times bestselling novel The Covenant of Water, selected as an Oprah's Book Club Pick and spanning the years 1900 to 1977 in Kerala, India. In his first book, My Own Country, Verghese...

From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed,...

"The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and...

A haunting exploration of faith, from a preacher convicted of attempted murder to a first-hand account of holiness serpent handling--"One of the best books on American religion from the last 25 years" (Chicago Tribune) For New York Times reporter Dennis Covington, what began as a journalistic assignment-covering the trial of an Alabama pastor convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes-would evolve into a headlong plunge into...

"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

"Hard-working humorist Roy Blount Jr. lives in the North but he's from the South, a delicious tension that has always informed and shaped his work. In this new collection, he directs his acerbic wit and finely-tuned insight toward the persistent and colorful differences between the two. His essays treat every conceivable topic on which North and South misunderstand each other, from music to sports, eating, education, politics, child-rearing, religion,...

The author follows the story-line of John Laroche, an orchid thief, through the swamps of south Florida. His plans for cloning rare orchids and selling them to collectors have brought him to the attention of the Federal Government, environmentalists, Native Americans, and "devoted orchid collectors."

Meg Langslow's summer is not going swimmingly. In her small Virginia hometown, she's the maid of honor at the nuptials of three loved ones—each of whom has dumped the planning in her hands. One bride is set on including a Native American herbal purification ceremony while another wants live peacocks on the lawn. Only help from the town's drop-dead gorgeous hunk keeps Meg afloat in a sea of relatives and outrageous neighbors. But when an offensive...