The Permanent Press: 217 books

Satire at its gentlest and best and humor at its richest mark this story of a blustery retired military officer who mounts his final campaign against those self-appointed and elected guardians of the public good (and the taxpayer’s purse strings) who are guilty of the sort of petty graft and private enrichment endemic in the mythical, sleepy, southern town of Fredricksville, Georgia.

Originally published in 1938 by Harcourt, Brace, this tale of people who migrate to New York City in search of careers and fulfillment was the first work that brought Berry Fleming to national prominence as a novelist.

Back home in Wyoming, June used to be a star bronco rider and a honky-tonk queen. Now, at 21, having ridden too many barstools into oblivion, she finds herself at The Pines, an elegant New England mental hospital and rehab center for out-of-control celebrities, eccentric millionaires, and assorted troubled souls.

In A Sweet Magnolia Time makes a major contribution to American history and American literature, for it explores the life and times and legacy of Waties Waring, the South Carolina federal judge whose epic opinion in Briggs v. Elliot that “separate but equal is not equal,” predated by two years of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision that came to the same conclusion.

At times hilarious, at other times thoughtful, this book is more than an account of a family which goes to live on a farm. The events described here took the Sherry’s deep into a terra incognita of the spirit as well as the land. It is that quality: the sense of adventure and of patterns being broken which gives Maggie’s Farm a flavor all its own.

It’s hard enough to have your mate die suddenly, but even harder to discover that he had a second life, which included a mistress, and that their estate was largely depleted because of his gifts to his paramour.  Peg must put herself back together again and do it rapidly. With beautifully worded...

In The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories, William Browning Spencer demonstrates a wildly imaginative, non-stop narrative skill in the tradition of Roald Dahl and John Collier.

This subtle and powerful novel is the story of a haunted, wealthy family whose mysteries Jerry tries to solve with his precocious imagination. Why does his father miss so many trains home from his New York office? Why does his mother hide in the bedroom behind a locked door? There’s love somewhere...

In My Father’s Fighter, Vincent Rosen, a 35-year-old Manhattan English teacher, inherits the management of a prizefighter from his father. The fighter is Mickey Davis, a white light-heavyweight contender with a doomed air, a reputation for dirty fighting, and plenty of neuroses and sexual obsessions....

Hesper Dance, live-in caretaker of Peregrine’s Rest, a graveyard founded in 1848, is a manic-depressive, introverted ex-librarian who seeks refuge from life’s disappointments by communing with the dead. Her lifelong ambition is to see a ghost. Inadvertently aiding her in this quest is her new...

A rowdy book; Tom Jones with a lacing of Karl Marx, as its hero plunges through the 20th century—the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II—at a gallop.

It’s a hot summer night in a small town in North Carolina. A pretty girl named Anna Shockley has arrived in the emergency room after a drug overdose. And so, David Livingston—emergency room orderly, fledgling artist, and incorrigible romantic—meets the obsession of a lifetime. When David...

The Nihilesthete is a novel with great intensity that depicts the relations between artists and their enemies.

Following a serious automobile accident, seventeen-year-old Branda Raggan wakes up at the hospital a stranger in her own skin. Therapy for her injuries has little effect, so the doctors send her home with her mother, Margaret, a hard-drinking, tough-talking former country-and-western singer who runs the local tavern, The Bloody Mary, above which she and Branda make their home.