Pamela King Cable has woven together the music, the language, the religions, and the traditions of the South. The result is Southern Fried Women, a collection of nine short stories about Southern women, and a few men, struggling to find answers to unanswerable questions, hoping for forgiveness, seeking righteousness, and questioning the existence of God in their lives. Cable writes Southern fiction in the true spirit of the rural South. She can ruffle the feathers of the most stoic, mess with the beliefs of the strictest fundamentalists, and reel you into her stories like a stubborn catfish meant for the fryer.
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Hannah Payne’s life has been devoted to church and family. But after she’s convicted of murder, she awakens in a new body to a nightmarish new life. She finds herself lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, with cameras broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new Chromes–criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime–is a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red for the crime of murder. The victim, says the State of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father,
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With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely
resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug
money ten years ago. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and
sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional
facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna
is now inmate #11187-424—one of the millions of women who disappear
“down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first
strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this
strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary
rules,
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John and Martha Beck had two Harvard degrees apiece when they conceived their second child. Further graduate studies, budding careers, and a growing family meant major stress—not that they’d have admitted it to anyone (or themselves). As the pregnancy progressed, Martha battled constant nausea and dehydration. And when she learned her unborn son had Down syndrome, she battled nearly everyone over her decision to continue the pregnancy. She still cannot explain many of the things that happened to her while she was expecting Adam, but by the time he was born, Martha, as she puts it, “had to unlearn virtually everything Harvard taught [her] about what is precious and what is garbage.”
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One of England’s finest and most loved writers explores the uncomfortable
and tragicomic gap between people’s public appearance and their private
desires in two tender and surprising stories.
In The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson, a
recently bereaved widow finds interesting ways to supplement her income
by performing as a patient for medical students, and renting out her
spare room. Quiet, middle-class, and middle-aged, Mrs. Donaldson will
soon discover that she rather enjoys role-play at the hospital, and the
irregular and startling entertainment provided by her tenants.
In The Shielding of Mrs.
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A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
Marylou Ahearn is going to kill Dr. Wilson Spriggs. In 1953, the good doctor gave her a radioactive cocktail without her consent, and Marylou has been plotting her revenge ever since. When she discovers his whereabouts in Florida, she hightails it to Tallahassee, moves in down the block from where he resides with his daughter, Caroline, and begins the tricky work of insinuating herself into his life. But she has no idea what a nest of yellow jackets she’s stumbled into. Spriggs is senile, his daughter’s on the verge of collapse,
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