Lee Smith
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“A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity.”—The New York Times Book Review
“This is Smith at her finest.”—Library Journal, starred review
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters,...
“This is Smith at her finest.”—Library Journal, starred review
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters,...
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Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader's dream" (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites from...
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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....
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It is 1936 when orphaned thirteen-year-old Evalina Toussaint is admitted to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, a mental institution known for its innovative treatments for nervous disorders and addictions. Taken under the wing of the hospital s most notable patient, Zelda Fitzgerald, Evalina witnesses the cascading events leading up to the tragic fire of 1948 that killed nine women in a locked ward, Zelda among them.
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In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.
Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:
Dear Friends,
Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year....
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A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It's through these treasured mementos that we meet Molly Petree.
Raised in those ruins and orphaned by the Civil War, Molly is a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. When a mysterious benefactor...
8) Silver alert
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"Herb's charmed life with his dear wife, Susan, in their Key West house is coming undone. Susan, in her seventies, now needs constant care, and Herb is in denial about his own ailing health. The one bright spot is the arrival of an endlessly optimistic manicurist calling herself Renee. She sings to Susan during manicures, gets her to paint, and brings her a much-needed sense of contentment. But then Herb and Susan's adult children arrive to stage...
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"Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the "deep state," targeting...
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"The events of January 6, 2021, are being exploited by the Democratic Party and the national news media to criminalize political protest and free speech in America. American's were shocked and outraged to the chaos unfold at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The melee shut down plans by some Republican lawmakers to object to Congress's official certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Democrats, the new media, and many leading Republicans...
11) Dimestore
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"Evenly divided between a book about Smith's process and her life, first as a Southern mountain child and, later, as the parent of a schizophrenic child, this book is interesting and compelling. Despite being surrounded by loving family and being blessed with an active imagination, Lee copes with a mentally ill mother. Later, her son's mental illness and early death brings her to the breaking point but she is saved by her writing. This is a read-alike...
12) Empire of light
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A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s.
13) Inception
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Dom Cobb is the best there is at extraction; stealing valuable secrets inside the subconscious during the mind's vulnerable dream state. His skill has made him a coveted player in industrial espionage, but also has made him a fugitive and cost him dearly. Now he may get a second chance if he can do the impossible; inception, planting an idea rather than stealing one. If they succeed, Cobb and his team could pull off the perfect crime.
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Preacher's son Moses Bailey believed that the fiddle was the voice of the Devil and denied his wife the pleasure of the music she dearly loved. She fiddled for her three children behind her husband's back. Thus begins a magnificent 150-year saga of a musical Southern family featuring barn dances, medicine shows, the Grand Ole Opry, and the evolution of country music from hymns to rockabilly. Generations of authentic, down-home mountain people spring...
16) Cakewalk
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Lee Smith, one of today's finest writers in the Southern literary tradition, has been compared to Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. This collection of nine stories, ranging from poignant ballads to delightfully inventive forms, showcases Smith's celebrated talent. The stories will make you chuckle and leave you with a satisfying sense that no matter how unruly or warped life may seem, equilibrium can be found after all. With each story you will...
17) 1917
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At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield and Blake are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers, Blake's own brother among them.
18) Dunkirk
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A World War II thriller about the evacuation of Allied troops from the French city of Dunkirk before Nazi forces can take hold. The evacuation was aided by civilians who traversed the English Channel in order to collect the soldiers stranded on the beach.
19) Oral history
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A curse laid on the inhabitants of Hoot Owl Holler follows each succeeding generation for a century, in a tale of love, murder, obsession, and betrayal set in Appalachia.
20) Saving Grace
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Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through some of life's most arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a snake-handling preacher who ignores the needs of his destitute family, Florida Grace doesn't think much of Jesus. He's the reason she's lived in squalor most of her life. He certainly doesn't keep her womanizing...