Death of the Fox

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Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

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Ernest J. Gaines

"This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The Fury." Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has 'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek. "Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that excludes quite the same refreshing mix of wit and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female character in Southern fiction since Lena of Faulkner's Light In August than Miss Jane Pittman." -- Josh Greenfeld, Life

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Janet Peery

Set in the Texas/Mexico border country, a desert made lush through human will, The River Beyond the World spans nearly half a century in the lives of two very different women and their families. Luisa Cantu is chosen by the shaman in her Sierra Madre village to join him in an ancient fertility ritual more powerful to some of the villagers than Christianity. At first honored by her role, she begins to understand its burdens, and she flees the village and the confusing demands of her eccentric aunt and walks through the Mexican desert toward the Rio Grande. She finds work in the Texas border town of Rio Paradiso as a housemaid for Eddie Hatch, a woman of strong opinions and a narrow world-view. The two women begin an intimate battle of wills as Eddie asserts her place of privilege while Luisa, subtly but stubbornly, risking the loss of the spiritual power she knew as a girl, tries to assert her own will. By turns mystical and mannered, comical and deeply affecting, their story moves through decades of change, across sexual, social, moral, and spiritual divides, until the women's complex relationship reaches a painful moment in which they must decide what matters and what doesn't.

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Julian Barnes

Metroland is a celebrated work by Julian Barnes (Booker Prize Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.