As I stood in the sun and the sea wind, with my shadow falling upon
those rocks, I certainly was reminded of the transience of human existence,
and my own in particular. As Pindar put it: “A dream about a
shadow is man.” I began to ponder more the being and nature of God
and his relation to the late twentieth-century situation, which science and
technology had created in the western world. Where did the ancient
world of rock and ocean fit into an environment in which nuclear physics
and the computer were playing an increasingly prominent part? . . .

When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, it was a thriving state. But the Civil War and Reconstruction left it reeling, impoverished, and so deeply divided that it never regained the level of prosperity it had previously enjoyed. Although most of the major battles of the war occurred elsewhere, Arkansas was critical to the Confederate war effort in the vast Trans-Mississippi region, and Arkansas soldiers served—some for the Union and more for the Confederacy—in every major theater of the war. And the war within the state was devastating. Union troops occupied various areas, citizens suffered greatly from the war’s economic disruption, and guerilla conflict and factional tensions left a bitter legacy. Reconstruction was in many ways a continuation of the war as the prewar elite fought to regain economic and political power.

In this, the fourth volume in the Histories of Arkansas series, Thomas DeBlack not only describes the major players and events in this dramatic and painful story, but also explores the experiences of ordinary people. Although the historical evidence is complex—and much of the secondary literature is extraordinarily partisan—DeBlack offers a balanced, vivid overview of the state’s most tumultuous period.

Food Studies in Latin American Literature presents a timely collection of essays analyzing a wide array of Latin American narratives through the lens of food studies. Topics explored include potato and maize in colonial and contemporary global narratives; the role of cooking in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetics; the centrality of desire in twentieth-century cooking writing by women; the relationship among food, recipes, and national identity; the role of food in travel narratives; and the impact of advertisements on domestic roles.

The contributors included here—experts in Latin American history, literature, and cultural studies—bring a novel, interdisciplinary approach to these explorations, presenting new perspectives on Latin American literature and culture.

The critic Norman Granz called tenor saxophonist Lester Young "the greatest musician I have heard on the instrument." Douglas Ramsey speaks of Young as "the gentle bedeviled genius whose vision of beauty found expression even though he was hounded throughout his life by nearly every demon the twentieth century had managed to spawn." This is his story, told with love and candor.

The remarkable detail and subtly stylized lines characterizing the artistry of celebrated woodcarver Ivan Denton are in abundant evidence in this beautifully illustrated volume of The Art of I. Denton. Behind each carving presented here, is its story from a piece of wood to a work of art, told in the words of Mr. Denton himself.

This is, in fact, a tour guided by Ivan Denton covering the best of his efforts, his love for the wood, and the process which turns a craftsman into an artist. As he says in describing his work: “Art exists only when you share it. When a tree falls in the woods, in school they said, ‘This tree doesn’t make a noise if someone doesn’t hear it.’ Because, you know, the sound waves don’t bump against the eardrum . . . The idea of not being able to get rid of a piece is basically the concept of an amateur. Not only does a professional need the money, and not only does he need his ego flattered, it’s just that the art doesn’t really exist until it’s shared. That’s an even deeper joy than the ego.”

Chosen from collections across the country, these pieces represent the masterworks from one of a disappearing breed of artisans. But The Art of I. Denton is more than a document of our cultural heritage, it is a tribute to the man and his art.

Honored with the 1990 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, Fay Jones is an Arkansas original. In receiving the medal from Prince Charles of Great Britain, Jones was hailed as a “powerful and special genius who embodies nearly all the qualities we admire in an architect” and as an artist who used his vision to craft “mysterious and magical places” not only in Arkansas but all over the world.

This book accompanied a special museum exhibit of Jones’s life and work at the Old State House in Little Rock. It traces Jones’s development from his early years as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, to the culmination of his ability in such arresting structures as Pinecote Pavilion in Picayune, Mississippi; Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Chapman University Chapel in Orange, California. Through the black-and-white photographs of the homes, chapels, and other buildings that Jones has created and the accompanying captions and interviews of the architect, the reader is allowed a view into this man’s remarkable talent.

Designing structures that fuse architecture and landscape, the organic and the man-made, Jones has created special places which touch their viewers with the power and subtlety of poetry. Herein we learn why.

From the Foreword by Robert Adams Ivy Jr.:

“Fay Jones’s architecture begins in order and ends in mystery. . . . His role can perhaps best be understood as mediator, a human consciousness that has arisen from the Arkansas soil and scoured the cosmos, then spoken through the voices of stone and wood, steel and glass. Art, philosophy, craft, and human aspiration coalesce in his masterworks, transformed from acts of will into harmonies: Jones lets space sing.”

Danielle Cadena Deulen's debut collection, Lovely Asunder, is filled with beautiful dangers. These poems, sharp and graceful, brutal and vulnerable, create from language a kind of chiaroscuro-both light and dark made more vivid by their juxtaposition. Throughout the collection, the poet appraises ancient myths through a feminine and feminist perspective, evincing the ways in which narratives transform personal experience and vice versa. The figure of the fruit, in all its implied and literal lushness, recurs like a chorus, and the speakers of these poems are haunted by the Fall-confined by the body, the mind, and the irrevocable past.

More than seventy-five years after its publication, Gone with the Wind remains thoroughly embedded in American culture. Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the film produced by David O. Selznick have melded with the broader forces of southern history, southern mythology, and marketing to become, and remain, a cultural phenomenon.

A Tough Little Patch of History (the phrase was coined by a journalist in 1996 to describe the Margaret Mitchell home after it was spared from destruction by fire) explores how Gone with the Wind has remained an important component of public memory in Atlanta through an analysis of museums and historic sites that focus on this famous work of fiction. Jennifer W. Dickey explores how the book and film threw a spotlight on Atlanta, which found itself simultaneously presented as an emblem of both the Old South and the New South. Exhibitions produced by the Atlanta History Center related to Gone with the Wind are explored, along with nearby Clayton County’s claim to fame as “the Home of Gone with the Wind,” a moniker bestowed on the county by Margaret Mitchell’s estate in 1969. There’s a recounting of the saga of “the Dump,” the tiny apartment in midtown Atlanta where Margaret Mitchell wrote the book, and how this place became a symbol for all that was right and all that was wrong with Mitchell’s writing.

From Native Americans, explorers, and early settlers to entertainers, business people, politicians, lawyers, artists, and many others, the well-known and not-so-well-known Arkansans featured in Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics have fascinating stories. To name a few, there’s the “Hanging Judge,” Isaac C. Parker of Fort Smith, and Hattie Caraway, the first elected female U.S. senator. Isaac T. Gillam, a slave who became a prominent politician in post–Civil War Little Rock, is included, as is Norman McLeod, an eccentric Hot Springs photographer and owner of the city’s first large tourist trap. These entertaining short biographies from Dillard’s Remembering Arkansas column will be enjoyed by all kinds of readers, young and old alike. All the original columns reprinted here have also been enhanced with Dillard’s own recommended reading lists. Statesmen will serve as an introduction or reintroduction to the state’s wonderfully complex heritage, full of rhythm and discord, peopled by generations of hardworking men and women who have contributed much to the region and nation.

In his second collection of poems, Daniel Donaghy uses the power of poetry to connect the Kensington section of Philadelphia he knew as a boy––a place replete with crime, poverty, fractured families, and various other kinds of darkness––to upstate New York’s woods, rural Connecticut’s town greens and small churches, Vancouver’s back alleys, the killing ground of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, Colorado, and the shores of ancient Greece. In doing so, he examines the relationship between memory and identity and strives to give voice to those who might otherwise be forgotten by history. Start with the Trouble is the place of fist fights and first kisses, where we sit beside the dying and where we sing to those not yet born. It is where Michelangelo’s Pieta recreates itself on a Kensington sidewalk, where a mother watches helplessly as two older boys dangle her son from the roof of a building, where a prostitute writes poems between tricks before she disappears without a trace. It is where Bruce Springsteen goes back in time to woo Circe and the Sirens, where a father returns from the dead in the voice of Babe Ruth, where a mother’s spirit rises from the shadows of spruce trees, where Santa forsakes his reindeer and slides into town behind sled dogs. It is where simple gestures such as opening a car trunk or loading a wheelbarrow become portals into faraway, nightmarish worlds in which the young are forced to bear too much witness to the world. Start with the Trouble is a place where beauty exists amidst every kind of ugliness, and where that beauty is made even more precious because of the depths from which it rises.

Through dozens of in-depth interviews representing all sections of the state, farm families recall their best times, their worst times, and day-to-day experiences such as chores, washing, bathing, clothes making, medical care, home remedies, spiritual life, courtship and marriage, and school experiences. Their stories reveal how ordinary men and women, frequently living in abject poverty, endured cataclysmic natural disasters and economic collapse with extraordinary courage, faith, resourcefulness, and a good sense of humor.

This post-revisionist study examines the motives and the concerns of the ex-slaves in South Carolina who supported a movement that eventually led to white supremacy.

Although most freedmen throughout the states of the former Confederacy were Republicans loyal to the party of the Federal government that had emancipated them, they were factions of African-American voters who aligned themselves with local white Democratic leaders. one such group of black conservatives joined the “Red Shirts,” white paramilitary clubs that attempted to restore antebellum values in electing former Confederate general Wade Hampton governor of South Carolina in 1876.

Drago’s fine analysis recovers and explains this lost aspect of Southern black history. Drawing on primary sources that include testimonies of several black Red Shirts before a Congressional investigation of the election and eleven slave narratives, he de-romanticizes the black experience by examining the relationship between black initiative and southern paternalism.

This stunning collection heralds the debut of a most gifted poet, one who turns to the formal traditions of the past to celebrate and elegize our vast and transient world in which human stories—tragedies and triumphs—are invariably bound up with nature. K. E. Duffin’s poems are about transformations, from life to death and from death to life, from the sprawl of experience to the spare music of the poem that can reach the future only through memory. These are poems that court the ear and eye alike. They surprise us with their elegant forms and rich, classical themes; they delight us with their force of language and delicious renderings of the vast complications of things.

This collection of anecdotal stories by the people who know them best introduces Bill and Hillary to the nation as only friends can. The essays collectively place the Clintons into proper social, historical, and geographical context for anyone who wants to know the former First Family on a more personal level.

Leland Duvall was a now-and-again farm worker with a grade-school education when he received his World War II draft notice at his father's farm near Moreland, Arkansas, in March of 1942. He departed for training in California, where he began to write to Letty Jones, a Pottsville girl he'd had a crush on for several years. From the first correspondence through the end of the war, Leland sent Letty a torrent of letters, hundreds of careful and undeniably heartfelt missives-utterly tender but never sentimental, reliably charming and gently humorous-written daily from desert sands, pup tents, hospital beds, armored cars, and bombed-out buildings. That Duvall's writing is a tour de force of wit, elegance, and erudition is all the more poignant because he was a man who was almost entirely self-taught. The letters, discovered by Duvall's daughter four years after his death in 2010, are here enriched by his longtime friend and colleague Ernie Dumas, who provides facts about where Duvall was and the perils he endured while penning his epistles, information that was often missing in dispatches that were necessarily censored and always guided by Duvall's effort not to bore or worry his "dearest Letty." Duvall's lively intelligence and obvious joy in writing come through on every page, joining with vividness the patina of the time and the bright shine of a timeless love affair.