Mercer University Press: 29 books

STORMY WEATHER & OTHER STORIES is probably as close as Lisa Alther will ever come to writing an autobiography. These stories, written over the course of her career, are set in the three places that have meant the most to her—the Southern mountains, Vermont, and New York City. Most of these stories were published in journals or anthologies, though three are previously unpublished.

“Maizee Hurd was an easy target for hard times,” according to Burdy Luttrell, the town healer. Burdy is a Melungeon woman with striking features and mysterious ways who owns the land the Hurds leased following their marriage on June 3, 1940. Maizee moved upriver at the age of ten after tragedy struck,...

A CHURCH FOR RACHEL is a collection of discourses written for, and among, those who mourn, grieve, struggle, and wonder. Sooner or later, almost everyone will weep Rachel’s tears, so, sooner or later, almost everyone will need a family of faith to help them go through what they could not go around, a church for Rachel.

Ilya is the uncouth, uneducated son of ardent Communist workers who becomes a war hero in the Red Army. After the war, however, he experiences a radical conversion to Christianity and becomes a priest, but also eventually a KGB general and Metropolitan of Leningrad. Captivated by the prophecy of Russia’s...

At the age of ten, Annie Todd finds not only is her mother quite mad but that Annie has inherited an unusual legacy. The ghost of a young girl visits Annie in her new home deep in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where Annie’s mother, Grace Jean, has hidden them away from the life they used...

Travel to Sequoyah, Georgia, to meet Early and Ivey Willingham. Early is a lifelong underachiever who occasionally smokes marijuana, drinks malt liquor, and watches the world go by. Ivey is a modern day prophet who sees dead relatives and angels in her sleep. Together they own Camp Redemption, a failing...

When Cooper Coghlan arrives in Ireland with the cremains of his grandfather, Finn Coghlan, he has one instruction: Let my ashes blow in the wind. You'll know the place when you come to it. I'll be there, telling you. He also has tender memories of his grandfather's exaggerated stories of Irish wonder...

Like his father and grandfather before him, Fergus Greybar the Fourth travels the countryside in a wagon of carnival mirrors, pulled by two magnificent white horses named Look and See. As the Mirror Man, he is welcomed everywhere by children who find delight in seeing themselves take on strange and funny...

When Asa Holbrook Staggs stepped into the cold-water spring that would later bear his name, he was drunk. The date was November 18, 1914. He pulled himself from the water, sober, cold, and converted to a new life in the Lord. Thus began the legend of Asa's Spring. THE GREATS OF CUTTERCANE tells the stories...

When he arrives on Neal's Island to begin ten days of intensive group therapy to treat his obsession for a woman he cannot forget, he brings with him the pseudonym of Bloodworth. What he discovers is an island of ghosts, an island of intense, but fragile, relationships founded on deceit, and, yet,...

After a death at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque...

MIRROR'S FATHOM is the story of Tycho Wilhelm Lund—anarchist, pirate, and thief of a legendary mirror. Tycho is also a great-nephew of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and is, when the novel begins, a mild-mannered antiques dealer who is asked to assess the value of some furniture at the home...

Martha M. Ezzard and her physician husband John are among the pioneers in the movement of professionals trading busy city careers for a return to the land. While this story about saving a family farm is distinctly Southern, it typifies the national locally grown movement which has begun to sweep the...

Rodney Earwood and Palmer Cray had been best friends for as long as either could remember. They were brothers in all but the genetic sense, each born late in the lives of good women who had given up on the dream of motherhood by the time their respective miracles occurred. They wandered the hills...