Madison Smartt Bell Books In Order

Haitian Revolutionary Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. All Souls’ Rising (1995)
  2. Master of the Crossroads (2000)
  3. The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
  2. Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
  3. Straight Cut (1986)
  4. The Year of Silence (1987)
  5. Soldier’s Joy (1989)
  6. Doctor Sleep (1991)
  7. Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
  8. Ten Indians (1996)
  9. Anything Goes (2002)
  10. Devil’s Dream (2009)
  11. The Color of Night (2011)
  12. Boy With a Coin (2011)
  13. Behind the Moon (2017)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Zero DB and Other Stories (1987)
  2. Barking Man and Other Stories (1990)
  3. Zig Zag Wanderer (2013)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Narrative Design (1997)
  2. Charm City (2007)
  3. Toussaint Louverture (2007)
  4. Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone (2020)

Great Discoveries Books In Publication Order

  1. Lavoisier in the Year One (2005)
  2. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (By:) (2005)

New Stories From The South Books In Publication Order

  1. New Stories from the South (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1988)
  2. New Stories from the South 1992 (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1992)
  3. New Stories from the South 1993 (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1993)
  4. New Stories from the South 1994 (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1994)
  5. New Stories from the South 1995 (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1995)
  6. New Stories from the South 1996 (By:Shannon Ravenel) (1996)
  7. New Stories from the South (By:Robert Olen Butler) (1997)
  8. New Stories from the South 1998 (By:) (1998)
  9. New Stories from the South 1999 (By:) (1999)
  10. New Stories from the South 2000 (By:) (2000)
  11. New Stories from the South 2001 (By:Lee Smith) (2001)
  12. New Stories from the South 2002 (By:) (2002)
  13. New Stories from the South 2003 (By:) (2003)
  14. New Stories from the South 2004 (By:) (2004)
  15. New Stories from the South, 2005 (By:) (2005)
  16. Best of the South (By:Shannon Ravenel) (2005)
  17. New Stories from the South (By:) (2007)
  18. New Stories from the South 2008 (By:) (2008)
  19. New Stories from the South 2009 (2009)
  20. New Stories from the South 2010 (By:) (2010)

Haitian Revolutionary Trilogy Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Great Discoveries Book Covers

New Stories From The South Book Covers

Madison Smartt Bell Books Overview

All Souls’ Rising

In this first installment of his epic Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism. The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world’s first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality.

Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved. Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul s Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution.

Master of the Crossroads

With the publication of All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell was immediately acclaimed as being ‘as remarkable a historical novelist as we have in this country’ Harold Bloom. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and was praised by writers as ‘a triumph of storytelling and inspired historical analysis’ Robert Stone and by reviewers as ‘one of the year’s most substantial literary accomplishments’ The New Yorker. Now, with Master of the Crossroads, Bell achieves an even greater accomplishment: he brings to life the rise to power of the great Haitian military general Toussaint Louverture and the story of the only successful slave revolution in history. Beginning in 1794, Toussaint led his troops to victory over English and Spanish invaders, over the French political establishment, and in a civil uprising for control of the infant island republic. He extended the ideological triumph of the French and American revolutions by offering universal liberty and human rights to all races. In chronicling Toussaint’s victory and its aftermath, Bell gives us a kaleidoscopic portrait of this extraordinary figure as seen through the eyes of the men and women whose paths he crossed. English, French, Spanish, and African the intersection of peoples who inhabited this war torn island creates a rich social canvas against which the astonishing story of Toussaint Louverture his beliefs, passions, and compulsions unfolds over the course of nine tumultuous years.

The Stone That the Builder Refused

Following the widely acclaimed All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell gives us the climactic final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history. In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island. The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint’s career and paints an astonish ingly detailed and riveting portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to preserve it.A masterly weave of the factual and the imagined, this grand culmination of Bell’s landmark Toussaint Louverture trilogy stands alone as a towering achievement of historical fiction.

The Year of Silence

Marian died by her own hand exactly one year ago. The author approaches Marian’s death from the viewpoints of the people that touched her life including her lover, her best friend, and even her enemies.

Soldier’s Joy

A man returns home from Vietnam to his now abandoned family homestead outside of Nashville, suffering from a serious psychological wound incurred in combat. He meets up with a childhood friend who is black, and together they battle against a platoon of Klansmen for the literal salvation of a local preacher.

Doctor Sleep

Madison Smartt Bell is one of the most versatile and gifted authors of his generation, a literary stylist with few peers. Doctor Sleep, one of his best novels, is a taut and satisfying psychological thriller planned to be released as a major motion picture under the title Hypnotic. Adrian Strother is a hypnotherapist who, paradoxically, can’t get to sleep. He plies his trade in a depressed section of London, doing the occasional job for Scotland Yard, which brings him into contact with an unsavory drug trafficker. As little girls become the target of a serial killer, Adrian treads the line between tortured wakefulness and surreal sleep, and the gifts of his insomnia are called upon to unlock the secrets of a man who believes he has discovered the key to immortality. Part spiritual pilgrimage, part thriller, Doctor Sleep is witty, menacing, and deeply satisfying, a bravura performance by one of today’s finest writers.

Save Me, Joe Louis

Making their living by forcing strangers to withdraw money for them from automatic cash machines, Macrae and Charlie hook up with a black ex con called Porter, who teaches them the perils of an unexamined life.

Anything Goes

The only taste of life Jesse has known in his twenty years is bitter: his mother disappeared before he could talk, his father never got over being left, and Jesse’s presence seems only to kindle his father s anger. Jesse s talent is for music, which has given him a livelihood and a home as a bass player in a bar band called Anything Goes. Band life offers the opportunity for the dregs of experience hangovers, mildewed hotel rooms, and the antics of his band mates all of them older than he is; some of them wiser, some not offer more schooling in hard knocks. Anything Goes tells Jesse s story over the course of a year, during which he finds his life slowly being tempered by the unexpected: by a dad who wants to make up and be part of Jesse s life; by a female lead singer who suddenly makes the band sound a lot better than they have any right to be; and by the confidence Jesse begins to feel in his own musical talent.A complete departure from the sweeping historical vision of Madison Smartt Bell s Haitian novels and the gritty cynicism of his intense urban dramas, Anything Goes confirms Bell as one of the most versatile, most gifted, most surprising novelists of his generation.

Devil’s Dream

From the author of All Souls Rising which The Washington Post called A serious historical novel that reads like a dream, comes a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled, celebrated, and legendary, of Civil War generals. With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his previous works, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view this complicated American figure. Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small scale operations. In Devil’s Dream, Bell brings to life an energetic, plainspoken man who does not tolerate weakness in himself or in those around him. We see Forrest on and off the battlefield, in less familiar but no less revealing moments of his life: courting the woman who would become his wife; battling a compulsion to gamble; overcoming his abhorrence of the army bureaucracy to rise to its highest ranks. We see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement, and in battle we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina. As Devil’s Dream moves back and forth in time, providing prismatic glimpses of Forrest, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a rough, fierce man with a life fill of contradictions. From the Hardcover edition.

The Color of Night

A stunning novel that burns to the touch. Mae, a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, spends her free time wandering the desert with a rifle, or sitting in her trailer obsessively watching replays of an old lover escaping the wreckage of 9/11. What she sees in those images is different from what the rest of us see. She revels in the pure anarchy, thrills at the destruction. These images recall memories of a childhood marked by unthinkable abuse, of her drift into a cult that committed the most shocking crime of the ’60s, of her life since then as a feral and wary outsider, caught in a swirl of events at once personal, political, mythic.

Barking Man and Other Stories

In ten sharply drawn tales, Madison Smartt Bell expands his masterly, inventive, and deftly textured fictional landscape to portray a collection of America’s dispossessed characters. ‘Barking Man is a humane and mature book, the work of an important and talented writer.’ The New York Times Book Review.

Narrative Design

With clarity, verve, and the sure instincts of a good teacher, Madison Smartt Bell offers a roll up your sleeves approach to writing in this much needed book. Focusing on the big picture as well as the crucial details, Bell examines twelve stories by both established writers including Peter Taylor, Mary Gaitskill, and Carolyn Chute and his own former students. A story’s use of time, plot, character, and other elements of fiction are analyzed, and readers are challenged to see each story’s flaws and strengths. Careful endnotes bring attention to the ways in which various writers use language. Bell urges writers to develop the habit of thinking about form and finding the form that best suits their subject matter and style. His direct and practical advice allows writers to find their own voice and imagination.

Charm City

With a writer’s keen eye, a longtime resident s familiarity, and his own sly wit, acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell leads us on a walk through his adopted hometown of Baltimore, a city where crab cakes, Edgar Allan Poe, hair extensions, and John Waters movies somehow coexist. From its founding before the Revolutionary War to its place in popular culture thanks to seminal films like Barry Levinson s Diner, the television show Homicide, and bestselling books by George Pelecanos and Laura Lippman Baltimore is America, and in Charm City, Bell brings its story to vivid life. First revealing how Baltimore received some of its nicknames including Charm City Bell sets off from his neighborhood of Cedarcroft and finds his way across the city s crossroads, joined periodically by a host of fellow Baltimoreans. Exploring Baltimore s prominent role in history it was here that Washington planned the battle of Yorktown and Francis Scott Key witnessed the bombs bursting in air , Bell takes us to such notable spots as the Inner Harbor and Federal Hill, as well as many of the undiscovered corners that give Baltimore its distinctive character. All the while, Charm City sheds deserved light onto a sometimes overlooked, occasionally eccentric, but always charming place.

Toussaint Louverture

In 1791, Saint Domingue was both the richest and cruelest colony in the Western Hemisphere; more than a third of African slaves died within a few years of their arrival there. Thirteen years later, Haitian rebels declared independence from France after the first and only successful slave revolution in history. Much of the success of this uprising can be credited to one man, Toussaint Louverture a figure about whom surprisingly little is known.

In this fascinating biography, the first about Toussaint to appear in English in more than fifty years, Madison Smartt Bell combines a novelist’s passion for his subject with a deep knowledge of the historical milieu that produced the man. Toussaint has been known either as a martyr of the revolution or as the instigator of one of history’s most savagely violent events. Bell shatters this binary perception, producing a clear eyed picture of a complicated figure.

Toussaint, born a slave, became a slaveholder himself, with associates among the white planter class. Bell demonstrates how his privileged position served as both an asset and a liability, enabling him to gain the love of blacks and mulattoes as ‘Papa Toussaint’ but also sowing mistrust in their minds.

Another of Bell’s brilliant achievements is demonstrating how Toussaint s often surprising actions, such as his support for the king of France even as the French Revolution promised an end to slavery and his betrayal of a planned slave revolt in Jamaica, can be explained by his desire to achieve liberation for the blacks of Saint Domingue.

This masterly biography is a revelation of one of the most fascinating and important figures in New World history.

Lavoisier in the Year One

ANTOINE LAVOISIER who lived at the zenith of the Enlightenment and died at the hands of the Revolution was himself a revolutionary. Closely followed by the burgeoning international scientific community, he competed with the best minds of his time of be the first to explain how chemical processes really work. Aided by a large fortune and his accomplished wife, he employed the most ingenious and expensive technology of his time in a series of innovative experiments that forever buried medieval alchemy and established a chemical language still in use today. Yet his personal triumph was short lived, and the glory his achievement brought France could not protect him from the ravages of the Terror. Madison Smartt Bell, building on his celebrated trilogy about the eighteenth century Haitian uprisings, dramatically re creates this turbulent era of reason and revolution, and the works of a man who so thoroughly exemplified its spirit.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (By:)

A masterly introduction to the life and thought of the man who transformed our conception of math forever. Kurt G del is considered the greatest logician since Aristotle. His monumental theorem of incompleteness demonstrated that in every formal system of arithmetic there are true statements that nevertheless cannot be proved. The result was an upheaval that spread far beyond mathematics, challenging conceptions of the nature of the mind. Rebecca Goldstein, a MacArthur winning novelist and philosopher, explains the philosophical vision that inspired G del’s mathematics, and reveals the ironic twist that led to radical misinterpretations of his theorems by the trendier intellectual fashions of the day, from positivism to postmodernism. Ironically, both he and his close friend Einstein felt themselves intellectual exiles, even as their work was cited as among the most important in twentieth century thought. For G del , the sense of isolation would have tragic consequences. This lucid and accessible study makes G del’s theorem and its mindbending implications comprehensible to the general reader, while bringing this eccentric, tortured genius and his world to life. About the series:Great Discoveries brings together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.

New Stories from the South 1992 (By:Shannon Ravenel)

The seventh edition of a respected annual collection of short stories from Southern writers features diverse writers and varied subject matter, accompanied by concise author profiles and photographs.

New Stories from the South 1993 (By:Shannon Ravenel)

An annual compendium of the year’s finest stories by Southern writers features tales by Jill McCorkle, Wendell Berry, Richard Bausch, Robert Olen Butler, Elizabeth Hunnewell, Tony Earley, David Huddle, Barbara Hudson, and others.

New Stories from the South 1994 (By:Shannon Ravenel)

A new anthology of short fiction, representing the best in Southern literature, features the work of Frederick Barthelme, Richard Bausch, Ethan Canin, Reynolds Price, Nancy Krusoe, Nanci Kincaid, Barry Hannah, John Sayles, and other notable writers.

New Stories from the South 1995 (By:Shannon Ravenel)

The annual collection of Southern stories has a Louisiana flavor this year, with five of the seventeen stories set along its levees and bayous, including James Lee Burke’s ‘Water People’ and ‘The Bug Man’ by Tim Gautreaux.

New Stories from the South 1996 (By:Shannon Ravenel)

The eleventh edition in a series of collections of Southern literature includes the work of such authors as William Faulkner, Robert Olen Butler, Ellen Douglas, David Gilbert, Annette Sanford, Jill McCorkle, and other notables.

New Stories from the South (By:Robert Olen Butler)

The twelfth in the annual series presents nineteen stories by established and up and coming Southern writers, along with the authors’ notes on the genesis of their stories and a list of magazines consulted by the editor.’

New Stories from the South 1998 (By:)

THE ONLY ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY SHOWCASING THE BEST SHORT FICTION WRITTEN IN AND ABOUT THE SOUTH. With a preface by Padgett Powell. The thirteenth edition of NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH proves that literature from and about the South continues to evolve. Whether it’s a surreal meditation by a man on night watch in contact with everything from space aliens to a charming Southern belle, or how life looks to two stock boys in a grocery store, or the stories hidden within the covert language of an art book, or the intricate jealousies that both cement and divide two couples, this newest collection of nineteen stories is proof positive that the literature of the South refuses to be pigeonholed. This year’s contributors include well established writers such as Mark Richard, Stephen Dixon, and Tim Gautreaux, in addition to original new voices carving out their own niches in ways that bode well for the future of Southern literature. Padgett Powell’s preface answers, on its own terms, the question ‘What Southern Literature Is.’ And each selection includes the story behind the story, giving readers a window into the mind of the writer. We continue to include an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor, along with a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the inception of the series in 1986. The 1998 edition features the following standout writers: Josh Russell, Wendy Brenner, John Holman, Tim Gautreaux, Mark Richard, Enid Shomer, Sara Powers, Molly Best Tinsley, Frederick Barthelme, Tony Earley, Padgett Powell, Nancy Richard, Michael Gills, George Singleton, Annette Sanford, Stephen Marion, Jennifer Moses, Scott Ely, Stephen Dixon. ‘Ravenel has shown a canny ability to spot emerging talent…
and time and again has included stories by writers before their novels widened their fame.’ The Anniston Star; ‘For readers who love short stories, finding one really good one is a pleasure. NEW STORIES is full of them.’ St. Petersburg Times.

New Stories from the South 1999 (By:)

It was an anthology that began simply enough: as a way to gather together the best kinds of writing going on in the South. It was also a way, back then, for editor Shannon Ravenel to keep tabs on who was writing what. Some of those voices that she heard first are now well known: Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Olen Butler, Marly Swick, Rick Bass, Abraham Verghese, James Lee Burke, Larry Brown.

Our goal is still the same to find the most original and affecting stories. And this year, in our newest tradition, we’re pleased to include a preface by Tony Earley, which calls into question the message of one of the most anthologized Southern stories of our time.

The 1999 edition gathers stories by: Michael Knight, Pinckney Benedict, Richard Schmitt, Clyde Edgerton, Andrew Alexander, Mary Clyde, Richard Bausch, Tony Earley, Michael Erard, Rick DeMarinis, Heather Sellers, Kurt Rheinheimer, Ingrid Hill, William Gay, Janice Daugharty, Mary Gordon, George Singleton, Tom Franklin Laura Payne Butler, and Wendy Brenner. An indispensable resource for aspiring writers, students, and readers of Southern fiction, New Stories from the South also includes the story behind each story. We continue to offer an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor, along with a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series’ inception, in 1986.

New Stories from the South 2000 (By:)

Whether it’s the bodybuilder who picks up energy in the air, the rich girl who sees potential in the beer-drinking factory worker at her father’s cardboard plant, the girl who turns against her evangelist father to find the real Jesus, the aunt with a withered arm who may have influenced Flannery O’Connor, the feminist scholar trying to reason with a good old boy, or the young MFA student determined to write a good story, this year’s collection is about the connections these Southerners will to happen. Each story, as Ellen Douglas’s thoughtful preface says, testifies to our need to ‘feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience.’ This fifteenth edition is rich with unforgettable characters and full of great moments of comedy and tragedy.

Twenty writers tell their stories in this year’s NSFS: A. Manette Ansay, Wendy Brenner, D. Winston Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cathy Day, R.H.W. Dillard, Tony Earley, Clyde Edgerton, William Gay, Tim Gautreaux, Allan Gurganus, John Holman, Romulus Linney, Thomas H. McNeely, Christopher Miner, Chris Offutt, Margo Rabb, Karen Sagstetter, Mary Helen Stefaniak, Melanie Sumner

Each selection is accompanied by a look into the origin of the story. Readers will also find an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor for this edition and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series’ genesis in 1986.

New Stories from the South 2001 (By:Lee Smith)

It would be easy to describe the stories in this year’s collection as typically Southern, if we only knew what that was. As Lee Smith writes in her engaging and provocative preface, the South is both as it always was and profoundly different. Some things have stayed the same: ‘As a whole, we Southerners are still religious, and we are still violent. We’ll bring you a casserole, but we’ll kill you, too.’ And some things have changed: many a Southerner spends more time in the mall than the kitchen, and many a Southerner is really a displaced Northerner. Still, there’s something about life below the Mason Dixon line that leads to evocative, hilarious, moving, authentic, rip your heart out stories. Maybe it’s true, as Lee Smith says, that ‘narrative is as necessary to us as air.’ Maybe narrative is in the air. This year’s collection ranges from small vacant towns to thriving Southern cities, tracking the likes of a violent paperhanger, an ambitious fiddler, a failed adman, and a boy who kidnaps his schoolbus driver. Nineteen standout writers make appearances in this year’s volume: John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, Marshall Boswell, Carrie Brown, Stephen Coyne, Moira Crone, William Gay, Jim Grimsley, Ingrid Hill, Christie Hodgen, Nicola Mason, Edith Pearlman, Kurt Rheinheimer, Jane R. Shippen, George Singleton, Robert Love Taylor, James Ellis Thomas, Elizabeth Tippens, Linda Wendling. Each story is followed by an author’s note. Readers will also find an updated list of magazines consulted by Ravenel and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the inception of the series in 1986.

New Stories from the South 2002 (By:)

As Larry Brown explains in this year’s preface, ‘This is all that I have, this land called North Mississippi, home of my father, and grand-fathers, and great-grandfathers, and luckily for me, it turns out to be always enough.’ It’s that land and everything around it-the intractable clay soil, the twisting rivers, the air heavy with humidity-that makes the South a character in its own right, and that permeates this year’s collection.

The stories in the seventeenth volume of New Stories from the South begin with the land or the water or the weather, but it’s their depth and richness that take us somewhere altogether new-the South, seen from a wholly new perspective, as if for the first time. From the mountains of Tennessee to the suburbs of New Orleans to a hollowed-out antebellum house to the center of Texas, this year’s New Stories from the South turns out to be ‘always enough.’

Nineteen writers make their mark in this year’s volume: Dwight Allen, Russell Banks, Brad Barkley, Doris Betts, William Gay, Aaron Gwyn, Ingrid Hill, David Koon, Andrea Lee, Romulus Linney, Corey Mesler, Lucia Nevai, Julie Orringer, Dulane Upshaw Ponder, Bill Roorbach, George Singleton, Kate Small, R. T. Smith, and Max Steele.

Each story is followed by the author’s notes about its origin. Readers will also find an updated list of the magazines consulted by Ravenel and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series’ inception in 1986.

New Stories from the South 2003 (By:)

Many famous writers later James Lee Burke, Barbara Kingsolver, Larry Brown, Tony Earley, William Gay, Ravenel still combs through over one hundred journals and magazines, regional and national, large and small, in search of the most talented authors coming out of the South. She still tracks down the newest voices before their breakouts, collecting the best renditions of the short story genre. New Stories from the South has become sine qua non in creative writing clas*ses, in Southern literature clas*ses, for any serious writer following the competition, and above all, for any lover of Southern literature. The stories in the eighteenth volume of NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH carry on that tradition. Among the eighteen writers making their mark in this year’s volume are Michael Knight, Donald Hays, John Dufresne, ZZ Packer, and Chris Offutt. This year’s preface is by the preeminent Southern humorist and NPR regular Roy Blount, Jr. Each story is followed by the author’s note about its origin. Readers will also find an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor, and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series’ inception.

New Stories from the South 2004 (By:)

As it approaches its twentieth year, Shannon Ravenel’s anthology has taken on a kind of cult status among readers, writers, teachers of short fiction, and trend watchers. It was here that some of the most well respected voices of the last two decades were first recognized, here that writers tell us they were discovered by agents, here that they landed their first book deals. And for readers looking for fresh, exciting short fiction, here is where they’ll find it. Ravenel has once again put together a stellar lineup of stories that makes this anthology not just a mark of distinction for writers, but a must have for short story aficionados and lovers of Southern fiction.

The stories in the nineteenth volume of New Stories from the South continue to spotlight the jewels of the South, both discovered and on the verge, featuring Edward P. Jones, George Singleton, Chris Offutt, Annette Sanford, Rick Bass, Silas House, Starkey Flythe, Michael Knight, and more. Each story is followed by the author’s note about its origin. With a preface by bestselling writer Tim Gautreaux, this volume promises to be another collector’s edition.

New Stories from the South, 2005 (By:)

Over the past two decades, New Stories from the Southhas been identified as one of the most significant and eagerly anticipated annual collections of American short stories Booklist. The quality of the selections and the skill of its editor have been lauded: Excitingly original stories from new and recently emergent writers make this now venerable annual a must for readers who mean to keep up with contemporary short fiction…
. Ravenel is one of the most resourceful and intelligent editors in the business Kirkus Reviews, starred. And NPR commentator Alex Chadwick sums it up best when he calls New Stories A good answer to the question, Why read fiction? NPR’s Morning Edition. It s in these pages that readers first encountered many of the writers whose work they ve now followed and enjoyed for years, and where they continue to find the freshest voices on the verge of stardom. In the 2005 volume, Ravenel treats us to works by Robert Olen Butler, Dennis Lehane, Moira Crone, Tom Franklin, Michael Parker, Rebecca Soppe, and Bret Anthony Johnston, among many others, and a preface by the inimitable Jill McCorkle. Whether it s a young woman taking her teacher to task for favoring his more beautiful students, or a couple on the edge of despair with their colicky baby, or a neighbor who takes too much interest in the girl next door, these selections illustrate the ways in which a good story can electrify a reader.

Best of the South (By:Shannon Ravenel)

Since 1986, New Stories from the South has brought the best short fiction of the year to the attention of a national audience. The series has been called the collection others should use as a model the Charlotte Observer, and for twenty years it has held to that standard. When Anne Tyler helped us celebrate the first ten years of the series in Best of the South, 1986 1995, the reviews were ecstatic. A triumph of authentic voices and unforgettable characters, said Southern Living. An introduction to some of the best writers in the world today, raved the Northwest Arkansas Times. Now that the anthology has reached its twentieth birthday, Anne Tyler has done it again. From the 186 stories found in the ten volumes from 1996 to 2005, she has picked her favorites and introduced them with warmth, insight, and her own brand of quiet literary authority. Once again, her choices reflect her love of the kind of generous fiction she has called spendthrift. Here are twenty stories by both famous and first time writers, from Lee Smith and Max Steele to Gregory Sanders and Stephanie Soileau that hold nothing back.

New Stories from the South (By:)

This enduring celebration of the short story only gets better with age and this year enlists the talents of guest editor Edward P. Jones, ‘one of the most important writers of his own generation and of the present day’ the Washington Post Book World .

In 1993, for the first time in his career, Edward P. Jones had a short story selected for an anthology. The story was ‘Marie.’ The anthology was the eighth volume of New Stories from the South. Now, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer returns to guest edit and introduce the twenty second volume of this distinguished anthology.

Jones brings to the task his artistic vision for the short story and finds its best practitioners, and not just those with well established names James Lee Burke, Rick Bass, Tim Gautreaux, George Singleton but writers just beginning their careers Holly Goddard Jones, Joshua Ferris, Angela Threat, Philipp Meyer. Jones chooses eighteen stellar stories for the 2007 collection, stories that hold a special resonance for him. As he says in his introduction, ‘For something to claim me long after the last sentence, I need a sense that the world, for even one character, has shifted, whether to a large or a tiny degree…
. I have tried to do my best to pick stories that are not, to use some of William Faulkner’s words, about the glands, but about the human heart.’

New Stories from the South 2008 (By:)

This year, acclaimed short story writer ZZ Packer chooses twenty distinctive stories representing the great number of voices and narratives coming out of the South. Some of the youngest and freshest talents on the literary horizon Bret Anthony Johnston, Kevin Brockmeier, Holly Goddard Jones accompany well known Southern stalwarts, including Pinckney Benedict, Clyde Edgerton, and Ron Rash. Their stories tell of life as it is now, a life not seen in romanticized Southern fiction, one where existence both urban and rural is as raw and risky as it is alluring. The energy of this collection courses through every one of Packer’s edgy, funny, and gritty selections.

New Stories from the South 2009

In the twenty fourth volume of this distinguished anthology, Madison Smartt Bell chooses twenty one distinctive pieces of short fiction to tell the story of the South as it is now. This is a South that is still recognizable but no longer predictable. As he says, ‘to the traditional black and white recipe ever a tricky and volatile mixture have been added new shades and strains from Asia and Central and South America and just about everywhere else on the shrinking globe.’ Just as Katrina brought out into the open all the voices of New Orleans, so the South is now many things, both a distinctive region and a place of rootlessness. It’s these contradictions that Madison Smartt Bell has captured in this provocative and moving collection of stories.

Here you’ll find the well known Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Spencer, Jill McCorkle alongside those writers just making their debuts, in stories that show the South we always thought we knew, making itself over, and over.

New Stories from the South 2010 (By:)

In its 25th year, we’ve turned the venerable series over for the first time to a non Southerner, to see choices she’ll make about the shape of Southern short fiction.

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