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In this freewheeling debut collection, Daniel A. Hoyt takes us from the swamps of Florida to the streets of Dresden, to the skies above America, to the tourist hotels of Acapulco, to the southwest corner of Nebraska. Along the way, we encounter a remarkable group of characters all struggling to find their footing in an unsettling world. 

Sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, sometimes absurd, these stories reveal people teetering on the dangerous edge of their lives. In “Amar,” a Turkish restaurant owner deals with skinheads and the specter of violence that haunts his family. In “Boy, Sea, Boy,” a shipwrecked sailor receives a surreal visitor, a version of himself as a child. In “The Collection,” a father and son squander a trove of bizarre and fanciful objects. And in “The Kids,” a suburban couple grasp for meaning after discovering children eating from their trash. 

In each of these stories, characters find themselves challenged by the political, cultural, and spiritual forces that define their lives. With a clear eye and a steady hand, Hoyt explores a fragile balance: the flames—fueled by love, loss, hope, and family—shed new light on us. Sometimes we feel warmth, and sometimes we simply burn.

They Die Strangers, a novella and thirteen short stories, is the first full-length work of the distinguished Yemeni writer Mohammad Abdul-Wali to appear in English. Abdul-Wali died tragically in an aviation accident, and his stories were collected after his death by the translators Abubaker Bagader and Deborah Akers.

Abdul-Wali was born in Ethiopia of Arab Yemeni parents. His stories, filled with nostalgia and the bitterness of exile, deal with the common experiences of Yemenis like himself who are caught between cultures by the displacements of civil war or labor migration. His characters include women left behind, children raised without fathers, and men returning home after years of absence. He explores the human condition through the eyes of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is particularly sympathetic to the plight of women.

Step into Alabama’s haunted history—one story at a time.

One of the best-known and widely shared books about the South, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey has haunted the imaginations of generations of delighted young readers since it was first published in 1969. Written by nationally acclaimed folklorists Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, the book recounts Alabama’s thirteen most ghoulish and eerie ghost legends.

Curated with loving expertise, these thirteen tales showcase both Windham and Figh’s masterful selection of stories and their artful and suspenseful writing style. In crafting stories treasured by children and adults alike, the authors tell much more than ghost tales. Embedded in each is a wealth of fact and folklore about Alabama history and the old South. “I don’t care whether you believe in ghosts,” Windham was fond of saying. “The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts.”

Millions of readers cherish memories of being chilled as teachers and parents read them unforgettable stories like “The Unquiet Ghost at Gaineswood,” about the ghost of Evelyn Carter, who fills this Demopolis antebellum mansion with midnight musical lamentations because her body wasn’t returned to her native Virginia, and “The Phantom Steamboat of the Tombigbee,” about the wreck of the steamboat Eliza Battle, which caught fire on the way to Mobile and sank one February night in 1858. People who live along the river say the flaming steamboat wreck still rises on cold nights, its cotton cargo blazing across the waves while its terrified survivors cry for help from the icy water.

The title’s “Jeffrey” refers to a friendly ghost who resides in the Windham home and who served as Windham’s unofficial collaborator in this work and the subsequent books in this popular series, all of which are now available in high-quality reproductions of their spooky originals.

A deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to the Volunteer State’s most enduring ghost stories.

In Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, beloved and best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham presents a spine-tingling collection of Tennessee’s eeriest ghost tales. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home, Windham traveled from the mysterious muds of Memphis to the haunted hollow’s of east Tennessee to collect the spookiest collection of Volunteer State revenants ever written.

In these perennial favorites, Windham captures the gentle folk humor of native Tennesseans as well as fascinating facts about the state’s rich history. In “The Dark Legend,” Windham recounts the story of explorer Merriwether Lewis, who met an untimely end on the Natchez Trace 1809 and whose spirit, it is said, still treads through Tennessee’s forests. Windham also visits central Tennessee’s Chapel Hill, where people who know the town say those who stand on the train tracks on dark, lonely nights can often see a disembodied light floating along the tracks. Neighbors say it’s the ghost of a headless flagman who returns to cavort with night-time guests.

High in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains, Windham encounters Martin, the phantom fiddler of Johnson County. Legend has it that in life Martin’s musical skills so mesmerized the snakes of the Stone Mountains that they would slither from their dens to listen tamely to his fiddling. Intrepid visitors to the rocky tops of northeast Tennessee’s mountains say you can still hear Martin’s ghost fiddling in the hollows.

This handsome, new commemorative hardback edition returns Windham’s suspenseful classic to its original keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children. 

This volume brings together all of the known poetry and a selection of correspondence by an enormously talented but underappreciated poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Cousin of novelist Dorothy West and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson (1905–1995) first gained literary prominence when James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost selected three of her poems for prizes in a 1926 competition. During the late 1920s and early 1930s her poetry appeared in various small magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Quill, Palms, Opportunity, and Harlem. In 1933 Johnson married, and two years later her last published poem, “Let Me Sing My Song,” appeared in Challenge, the journal West had founded to revive the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. 

In his well-researched introduction, Verner D. Mitchell reconstructs Johnson's life, the details of which have long been veiled from public view, and places her in the context of a vital literary tradition. In addition to discussing her relationship with West, Hurston, and other black women writers, he explores the distinctive, at times radical, qualities of her work. Ever willing to defy the genteel conventions that governed women's writing, Johnson wrote poems on erotic themes and engaged the aesthetic, gender, and racial politics of her time. 

Cheryl A. Wall's foreword also celebrates Johnson's talent, particularly the ease with which she moved among various verse forms—from the rigor of the sonnet to the improvisational creativity of free black vernacular. “An unexpected and most welcome gift,” This Waiting for Love, Wall writes, is “an enduring tribute” to “the vibrant poetry of Helene Johnson.”

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award

These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South.

Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting.

Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives.

First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for "seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting." With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.

In the study of sound waves and optics, the term transmission loss refers to how a signal grows weaker as it travels across distance and between objects. In this book, Chelsea Jennings reimagines the term in poems that register attenuated signals, mark presence and loss, and treat the body as an instrument sensitive to the weather of immediate experience. Threading together landscapes, abstract paintings, family heirlooms, maps, manuscripts, and photographs, these poems follow the seasons and traverse the spectrum of visible light. Vivid and precise, Transmission Loss brings us to the boundary between inside and outside, “As if what the hand knows / could be held in the hand.”