Dimestore: A Writer's Life - Softcover

Smith, Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616206462 ISBN 13: 9781616206468

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2017

Synopsis

“A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity.”—The New York Times Book Review“This is Smith at her finest.”—Library Journal, starred review Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. When she was sent off to college to gain some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she would ever know was the one she was leaving. Lee Smith’s fiction has always lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Together, they create an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2016: “What is it about Appalachia that so captures the mind, echoes in the ear, and lodges in the heart?” Lee Smith’s memoir metes out the answer to that question, touching on the elusive substance of Southern culture which so fascinates those of us outside of it and has inspired an entire subgenre of writing. Some of her essays ring with the raucous sounds of bluegrass, others with the sweet smells of home cooking passed down through generations--but Smith also bucks small town propriety by exposing the mental illness that plagued her family and by describing her sometimes fraught journey to becoming a beloved novelist. Dimestore is a love letter to the people and places that made a writer out of a small town Southern girl, and to the love, heartbreak, and power of creating her own stories that came after. --Seira Wilson

About the Author

Born in the small coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia, Lee Smith began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece. Since then, she has written seventeen works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and, most recently, Guests on Earth. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with her husband, the writer Hal Crowther. Visit her at www.leesmith.com.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1616206462
• ISBN 13: 9781616206468
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224