A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (The Lyndhurst Series on the South) - Hardcover

9780393040302: A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (The Lyndhurst Series on the South)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393040305 ISBN 13: 9780393040302

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Our notion of the South, shaped by the likes of Faulkner, Welty, and O'Connor, is turned on its head in this new and startling collection of stories and photographs.

"How do you write about third generation Snopeses who have moved to Memphis and joined an encounter group?" asked Walter Percy in his book Signposts in a Strange Land. A New Life answers this question, combining the stories of eleven of the best new writers of southern fiction with contemporary work from extraordinary southern photographers.

These short stories and surprising images portray the South not as we might imagine or remember it, but as it is lived--in condos and malls, on golf courses and interstates, in family rooms and bedrooms, and in the hearts and minds of southern people.

This volume brings together recent southern stories by Richard Barusch, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, and Mary Ward Brown, among others, coupled with photographic essays. These revealing pictures and stories cover a broad geographical and emotional territory and give us a revealing portrait of the new look and feel of the contemporary South. 100 color photographs and duotones

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About the Author:

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1949, Alex Harris, acclaimed photographer, Duke University professor, and Pulitzer Prize finalist for River of Traps, lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Alice Rose George is a photography editor and consultant to major magazines and collectors. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Perhaps no region of America has contributed as much to 20th-century literature as the South. But as the years progress, the South canonized by Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty is harder and harder to find. Tight-knit, small-town America has slowly given way to acres of sprawling suburbs and anonymous mini-malls. Harris and George have gathered stories and photographs that chronicle this new South. Several are excerpted from previously published books, such as Julius Lester's And All Our Wounds Forgiven, Richard Bausch's Rare and Endangered Species and Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. If these stories lack O'Connor's distinct flair for religion and the absurd or Faulkner's grasp of the weight of the past, that's the idea. In these 10 stories, the Civil War isn't history, it's all but forgotten in favor of the day-to-day histories of its residents. But the truth is that in depicting the quotidian, the stories don't work as well as several of the photograph series. Mark Steinmetz's stark black-and-white photos, culled from his collection "At the Edge of the City," capture teenagers and young adults whose hard stares and awkward glances betray their youth and leisure. Daring to be approached, as if their secrets are too awful to share, this generation of Southerners isn't so different from its peers in the rest of the country.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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