Kirjahaku

A complex and compulsively readable novel about how unresolved family history and the racial tensions of the past threaten a love affair between two young Floridians. Jolie Hoyt is a good Southern girl living in Hendrix, a small Florida Panhandle town. All too aware of her family's closet full of secrets and long-held distrust of outsiders, Jolie throws caution to the wind when she meets Sam Lense, a Jewish anthropology student from Miami, who is in town to study the ethnic makeup of the region. Jolie and Sam fall recklessly in love, but their affair ends abruptly when Sam is discovered to have pried too deeply into Hendrix's dark racial history and he becomes the latest victim in a long tradition of small-town violence. Twelve years later, Jolie and Sam are forced to revisit the unresolved issues of their young love and finally shed light on the ugly history of Jolie's hometown. A complex and compulsively readable Southern saga, American Ghost is a richly woven exploration of how the events of our past haunt our present.

Though our roots are in the Colonial South, we Crackers are essentially just another American fusion culture, and our table and our stories are constantly expanding -- nearly as fast as our waistlines. We aren't ashamed of either, and we're always delighted with the prospect of company: someone to feed and make laugh, to listen to our hundred thousand stories of food and family and our long American past. Crackers, rednecks, hillbillies, and country boys have long been the brunt of many jokes, yet this old Southern culture is a rich and vibrant part of Amer-ican history. In The Cracker Kitchen, Janis Owens traces the root of the word Cracker back to its origins in Shakespeare's Elizabethan England -- when it meant braggart or big shot -- through its proliferation in America, where it became a derogatory term to describe poor and working-class Southerners. This compelling anthropological exploration peels back the historic misconceptions connected with the word to reveal a breed of proud, fiercely independent Americans with a deep love of their families, their country, their stories, and, most important, their food. With 150 recipes from over twenty different seasonal menus, The Cracker Kitchen offers a full year's worth of eating and rejoicing: from spring's Easter Dinner -- which includes recipes for Easter Ham, Green Bean Bundles, and, of course, Cracklin' Cornbread -- to summer's Fish Frys, fall's Tailgate Parties, and winter's In Celebration of Soul, honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Recounted in Owens's delightful and hilarious voice, the family legends accompanying each of these menus leap off the page. We meet Uncle Kelly, the Prince of the Funny Funeral Story, who has family and friends howling with laughter at otherwise solemn occasions. We spend a morning with Janis and her friends at a Christmas Cookie Brunch as they bake delectable gifts for everyone on their holiday lists. And Janis's own father donates his famous fundamentalist biscuit recipe; truly a foretaste of glory divine. The Cracker Kitchen is a charming, irresistible celebration of family, storytelling, and good old-fashioned eating sure to appeal to anyone with an appreciation of Americana.

Winner of the Chatauqua South Award for FictionOut of the shotgun houses and deep, shaded porches of a west Florida mill town comes this extraordinary novel of love and redemption as told by Gabriel Catts. On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Gabe attempts to reconcile a family shattered by his betrayal of his older brother, Michael. As Gabe contends with a host of personal demons, he recounts his lifelong love for his brother's wife, Myra, whose own demons threaten to overwhelm all three of them. Circumstance and passion push them beyond the moral boundaries of their close-knit community in this intimate view of a Southern family.The story told in My Brother Michael is retold in Myra Sims, Janis Owens second novel, from Myras point of view

Hidden in Plain Sight: A History of the Newberry Mass Lynching of 1916 is a fast-paced narrative history of a 1916 mass lynching in North Florida, where six members of a tight-knit Black family were killed by a white mob of the "best men" in the district. The lynching garnered brief, nationwide attention, including an investigation by the NAACP and condemnation by W. E. B. Dubois, before it was buried in a vow of silence that endured for nearly a hundred years.With an abundance of citation and uncommon insight, Hidden in Plain Sight: A History of the Newberry Mass Lynching of 1916 draws a portrait of a struggling, turn-of-the-century farming town and the families, Black and white, who were pitched headlong into a weekend of bloodlust and revenge that would change the town forever. With a scope of a hundred years, the story that begins in anguish unexpectedly ends in recent steps to reconciliation and remembrance.

Hidden in Plain Sight: A History of the Newberry Mass Lynching of 1916 is a fast-paced narrative history of a 1916 mass lynching in North Florida, where six members of a tight-knit Black family were killed by a white mob of the "best men" in the district. The lynching garnered brief, nationwide attention, including an investigation by the NAACP and condemnation by W. E. B. Dubois, before it was buried in a vow of silence that endured for nearly a hundred years.With an abundance of citation and uncommon insight, Hidden in Plain Sight: A History of the Newberry Mass Lynching of 1916 draws a portrait of a struggling, turn-of-the-century farming town and the families, Black and white, who were pitched headlong into a weekend of bloodlust and revenge that would change the town forever. With a scope of a hundred years, the story that begins in anguish unexpectedly ends in recent steps to reconciliation and remembrance.

Readers received a refreshing introduction to the Sims and Catts families in Owens' first novel, My Brother Michael, narrated by the inimitable Gabriel Catts. Here to tell her side is Myra Sims, the apex of a love triangle that includes Gabe and his brother, Michael. Myra's fresh perspective will bring new insight to a story of incest, adultery, and hard-won love among the denizens of Magnolia Hill, a Florida Panhandle mill town. We follow Myra from her violent childhood and entrancement with Gabe's snap-eyed genius, through her marriage to the older and more stable Michael, to her breakdown and renewal as she battles the demons from her childhood that haunt all three of them. In the end, you will, as both Gabe and Myra do, love Michael.