Newsouth Books: 150 books

One of the most compelling issues in public education involves what it means for schools to be public. Are they public in funding or public in oversight and control? Are they public in the values they convey or in the standards they set? Are they public in deciding curriculum or only in access to...

During the plague year of 1358, Heron, a French student, decides to walk to the sea and then to seek passage to England. His journey symbolizes freedom, as he turns his back on both the ruling oligarchy and the peasant armies forming all over Europe. He travels through a chaotic wasteland, where armies...

Raised in the Primitive Baptist Church, Beulah Buchanan at age 16 marries the much older deacon Ralph Rainey to escape from her oppressive parents, thus jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Over the next six years, Beulah works in her domineering husband’s cafe all day and cooks him dinner...

Sue Pickett was a coal miner’s daughter who became a coal miner’s wife and witnessed and lived through the turbulent years of the Great Depression and the sometimes violent struggles between labor unions and coal mine bosses throughout the Appalachian South—especially her native Alabama. The...

William Cobb's first novel in nine years is a brilliant, quirky, highly readable story as compelling as it is original. Its main characters journey on parallel quests: Lester Ray, a fourteen-year-old boy who was deserted by his mother when he was a baby and has now escaped his abusive alcoholic father,...

Donald Youngblood is a rich, bored ex-Wall Street whiz kid that returns to his East Tennessee hometown and on a whim gets a Private Investigator's license. Billy Two Feathers is a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, ex-convict and Don's best friend. Together they open Cherokee Investigations and for a few...

After nearly four decades of government denial, the deeds of four Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 have been made public and their names memorialized at the CIA’s Wall of Honor in Langley, Virginia. Their stories can now be told. The four guardsmen who died flew...

Slaves in chains, toiling on master’s plantation. Beatings, bloodied whips. This is what many of us envision when we think of 19th century African Americans; source materials penned by those who suffered in bondage validate this picture. Yet slavery was not the only identity of 19th century African...

Just when he thought it was safe to come back to New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina boils up a rich gumbo of trouble for lawyer Tubby Dubonnet. He rides out the storm okay, but then the levees break, the city floods, and he ends up with thousands of other refugees in the hellish Convention Center. In...

Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, moves back in with his widowed father in hopes of coasting through another year. But his father is dating again, and his sisters are trying to manipulate Waylon into asking their father for their inheritance before he gives it to a second wife. The sarcastic...

Publisher’s Weekly hailed the “wit and subtlety” in Gerald Duff’s fiction as “simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon,” and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetter said “Gerald Duff’s dialogue is among the best being written, and his sense of the absurd is Portis-like.”...

Discovering Alabama producer Roger Reid, author of acclaimed YA novels Longleaf and Space, continues the saga of teenage sleuth Jason Caldwell in his new mystery adventure, Time. Set at the Steven C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site in north Alabama -- the richest source of vertebrate trackways of...

”Discovering Alabama” producer Roger Reid, author of acclaimed novel Longleaf, continues the saga of teenage sleuth Jason Caldwell in his new mystery adventure Space. Set at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Space is a fast-moving story that incorporates factual information...

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served...