The twelve essays in this book, several published here for the first time, represent some of Tony Badger’s best work in his ongoing examination of how white liberal southern politicians who came to prominence in the New Deal and World War II handled the race issue when it became central to politics in the 1950s and 1960s.

Not Without Honor threads together the stories of three American POWs—Carano; his buddy Bill Blackmon, who was also at Stalag 17 b; and John C. Bitzer, who survived the brutal “Death March” from northern Germany to liberation in April 1945. At times the journal reads like a thriller as he records air battles and escape attempts. Yet in their most gripping accounts, these POWs ruminate on psychological survival. The sense of community they formed was instrumental to their endurance. This compelling book allows the reader to journey with these young men as they bore firsthand witness to the best and worst of human nature.

These raw and powerful poems have at their heart the charged, archetypal figure of the mother. Conflicted by the twin desires of self-destruction and self-preservation, this mother is both terrible and beautiful. This compassionate, nervy collection of poems shows a family in the aftermath of violence. James Allen Hall explores themes of loss, the intersection of grief and desire, and the ways in which history, art, and politics shape the self.

Since 9/11 there has been a cultural and political blossoming among those of the Afghan diaspora, especially in the United States, revealing a vibrant, active, and intellectual Afghan American community. And the success of Khaled Hosseni’s The Kite Runner, the first work of fiction written by an Afghan American to become a bestseller, has created interest in the works of other Afghan American writers. One Story, Thirty Stories (or “Afsanah, Seesaneh,” the Afghan equivalent of “once upon a time”) collects poetry, fiction, essays, and selections from two blogs from thirty-three men and women—poets, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers and video artists, photographers, community leaders and organizers, and diplomats. Some are veteran writers, such as Tamim Ansary and Donia Gobar, but others are novices and still learning how to craft their own “story,” their unique Afghan American voice. The fifty pieces in this rich anthology reveal journeys in a new land and culture. They show people trying to come to grips with a life in exile, or they trace the migration maps of parents. They navigate the jagged landscape of the Soviet invasion, the civil war of the 1990s and the rise of the Taliban, and the ongoing American occupation.

The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so-famous African American male and female athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how these changes mirrored the transformation of sports, American society, and civil rights legislation. Some of the athletes discussed include Marshall Taylor (bicycling), William Henry Lewis (football), Jack Johnson, Satchel Paige, Jesse Owens, Joe Lewis, Alice Coachman (track and field), Althea Gibson (tennis), Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus and Serena Williams.

Outlaw Style is a collection of narrative and lyric poems, many of them in the tradition of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. While gothic imagery, humor, and nineteenth-century diction and reference alternate and interweave, the four thematic currents that converge in the collection are music, race, spirituality, and the impact of monstrosity on somewhat innocent bystanders.

To celebrate ten years of Southern Music Issues, most of which are sold out or very hard to find, the fifty-five essays collected in this dynamic, wide-ranging, and vast anthology appeal to both music fans and fans of great writing. Here you’ll find writers like Peter Guralnick, Nick Tosches, Susan Straight, William Gay, Tom Piazza, Roy Blount Jr., R. Crumb, Rosanne Cash, Lucinda Williams, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Jerry Wexler, and Steve Martin probing the lives and legacies of southern musicians you may or may not yet be familiar with. In one creative, fresh way or another, these writers also uncover the essence of music—and why music has such power over us. From blues to rock ’n’ roll to jazz to country to bluegrass, from interviews, reviews, analysis, reflections, and biographical portraits, The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing has “something that will inform and excite you”—Nashville City Paper.

The scholars included in A Paler Shade of Red cover the 2008 presidential election with detailed, state-by-state analyses of how the presidential election, from the nomination struggle through the casting of votes in November, played out in the South. The book also includes examinations of important elections other than for president, and in addition to the single-state perspectives, there are three chapters that look at the region as a whole. Contributors are Scott E. Buchanan, John A. Clark, Patrick R. Cotter, Charles Bullock III, Rogert E. Hogan and Eunice H. McCarney, David A. Breaux and Stephen D. Shaffer, Cole Blease Graham, Jay Barth, Janine A. Parry and Todd G. Shields, Jonathan Knuckey, Charles Prysby, Ronald Keith Gaddie, Brian Arbour and Mark McKenzie, and John J. McGlennon, all collected here to provide powerful insight into southern politics today.

In Paradise, Stephen Gibson's fourth poetry collection, we are taken on a journey through history and myth, wars past and present, public discoveries and private loss. The search begins and ends with some of the great art and great ruins in cities that once composed part of the Grand Tour of another century. In the collection's final poem, "Ghosts," in which an ironical fashion shoot takes Rome's ruins as its backdrop -"this outcrop of ruin isn't just urinal, / but also restaurant"-the reader sees the implications and repercussions of such a journey. Meanwhile, in lines set closer to home, early-twentieth-century crime-scene photos from New York City inspire a horrifying sequence of poems where we become part of a perverse Grand Tour in reverse. These images recall the millions of immigrants who came to America's shores in search of paradise and whose voyages ended with strangulation in tenement basements and rooftop bludgeonings-crimes, the poems suggest, that were perpetrated both by strangers and by acquaintances, spouses, lovers, or friends. As the reader confronts past horrors and present truths as well as the speaker's personal ones (an abused mother, a shellshocked father), it becomes apparent that the paradise sought–not in the hereafter but in the here and now-lies just beyond reach. It all ends, suggest these verses, with the understanding that behind everything we find nothing more divine than the human.

The thirteenth volume in the ongoing Arkansas Edition of the works of Simms, The Partisan is the first in order of publication of Simms’s Revolutionary War romances. Although Simms took advantage of the novelist’s prerogative to invent characters and events for his saga, he did so with a historian’s eye, making extensive use of official histories; letters, diaries, and other documents; family traditions; and unpublished and published memoirs. Simms gives human interest to the novel’s historical framework with two love triangles, mixing romantic conventions with gritty realism that outlines the four classes of Simms’s ideal society. The Partisan is also remarkable among Simms’s work for its use of symbols, indicating, perhaps, a new intention for the novel. The result is a satisfying work of literary art enlivened with adventure and humor while remaining true to the history behind it.