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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( S ) : Smith, Lee
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A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in Nnorth Carolina contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It's through these treasured mementos that we meet Molly Petree.
Raised in those ruins and orphaned by the Civil War, Molly is a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. When a mysterious benefactor appears out her father's past to rescue her, she never looks back.
Spanning half a century, On Agate Hill follows Molly’s passionate, picaresque journey through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial—and back home to Agate Hill under circumstances she never could have imagined.
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"A TOUR DE FORCE"
- Los Angeles Times
"The story of Ivy Rowe, born near the turn of the century in the Virginia Mountain enclave of Sugar Fork, is told completely through letters that Ivy is forever writing family and friends...Lee Smith exhibits her own understanding and affection for the traditions of the Appalachians. She is at home with the down-home speech and ways of her characters. They come vividly to life, and none more so than Ivy, whose voice and heart and humor sustain Fair and Tender Ladies."
- Philadelphia Inquirer
"Because of Ivy's narrative ability and her zest for living, Fair and Tender Ladies opens for us like a flower with a gloriously unexpected center. There are unforgettable characters...Few readers will be dry-eyed as they watch this extraordinary woman disappear around that last bend in the road."
-Chicago Tribune
"These beautiful letters...display Ivy's soul up close, the way a just-caught firefly illuminates a jar. So real does she become that it is hard to believe that Ivy did not actually live to write her letters."
-USA Today
"This is about a moving a work of literature as has ever been written." ANNIE DILLARD
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"Delightful and entertaining."
PEOPLE
When Jennifer, a college student, returns to her childhood home of Hoot Owl Holler with a tape recorder, the tales of murder and suicide, incest and blood ties, bring to life a vibrant story of a doomed family that still refuses to give up....
"Deft and assured....[Lee Smith] is nothing less than masterly."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
From the Paperback edition.
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"Brilliant, haunting, dark, joyous, remarkably compelling...immensely difficult to put down...a master storyteller."
THE VILLAGE VOICE
A childhood memory re-experienced, a funeral that brings about a family reunion, and the excavation of a swimming pool on the site of an old well, uncover family secrets and air the dirty linen in this behind-the-scenes look at life and family, memory and forgetfulness, anger and forgiveness in a small Southern town.
"Falls in line with the best of classical Southern fiction...but Ms. Smith's vision is her own and places her among the best of contemporary Southern writers."
THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION
From the Paperback edition.
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Crystal Spangler lives in rural Appalachia. She's the apple of her mother's eye -- not yet beautiful, but she will be. She's the most popular girl at Black Rock High. She makes cheerleader, gets good grades, and is elected beauty queen. Crystal discovers God, goes to college, and falls in love. When she comes home, she's disheveled and confused. Crystal becomes a wealthy politician's wife. But there's something calling her, drawing her back to where it all began, in the shadow of Black Mountain . . .
From the Paperback edition.
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In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:
Dear Friends,
Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page.
In The Christmas Letters, I have used this familiar format to illumine the lives, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of three generations of American women. Much of the story of The Christmas Letters is also told through shared recipes. As Mary, my favorite character, says, "I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crOpes phase, and now it's these salsa years."
I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday--Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are.
With warmest greetings, Lee Smith
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"She writes lyric, luminous prose; her craft is so strong it becomes transparent, and, like the best of storytellers, she knows how to get out of the way so that the story can tell itself."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Moses Bailey, a preacher's son, forbade his fiddle-loving wife Kate Malone to play. But while he was gone on his travels, looking for God, Kate couldn't help herself, and began fiddling for her three children. For the love of music, Kate is willing to defy anyone who tries to stop her. From generation to generation, the gift and love of music cannot be stopped, and no Malone is immune from its spell.
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Speed, Alabama, is frantically preparing for the event of a lifetime: Sesquicentennial Week. And all her proud citizens are kicking up their heels in a lively, pompous fancy strut....
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In these dazzling stories, acclaimed author Lee Smith wants you to meet:
Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse, who writes a "fortnightly" newspaper column called "Between the Lines."
Georgia Rose, the girl whose life is more like a soap opera than the TV serial she's addicted to.
Martha Rasnick, the young housewife in "Dear Phil Donahue" who writes all her troubles to the TV personality.
Florrie, the cake lady in "Cakewalk" who causes her prissy sister no end of embarrassment by "wearing running shoes, at her age, and wooly white athletic socks that fall in crinkles down around her ankles."
From the Paperback edition.
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"LUCID IN EXECUTION, BREATHTAKING IN SCOPE AND HEART-RENDING IN EFFECT--A REDEMPTIVE WORK OF ART. . . . Lee Smith has done more than write another novel about the South. She has broken through the grotesque surface to the underground spring, the music of Scrabble Creek, and the effect is stunning--a beguiling, gentle prose formed by an honesty so severe we are brought to our knees. . . . This novel has a grand and singular purpose, to clothe the spirit with flesh. In this, Lee Smith succeeds."
--The Washington Post Book World
"A compelling journey into all matters southern and spiritual . . . . Set in North Carolina and Tennessee, we follow young Grace Shepherd from a cabin in the bucolic poverty of Scrabble Creek to independence as a single woman. Stops along the way include seduction by a half-brother, a failed marriage, motherhood, the loss of her son, residence in the aptly-named Creekside apartments in Knoxville and a job waitressing. . . . While Grace's path may be a journey many of us would not choose to undertake, we have to raise a small fist of jubilance to Grace for having survived."
--The Boston Sunday Globe
"Ms. Smith possesses a fine talent for creating narrative voices, whether the ungrammatical eloquence of a hill-country healer or the educated affectations of a Richmond gentleman."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Lee Smith patiently woos us into double vision. . . . As her fans know, [she] has one of the truest ears for the speech in her part of the world."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
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It would be easy to describe the stories in this year's collection as typically Southern, if we only knew what that was. As Lee Smith writes in her engaging and provocative preface, the South is both as it always was and profoundly different. Some things have stayed the same: "As a whole, we Southerners are still religious, and we are still violent. We'll bring you a casserole, but we'll kill you, too." And some things have changed: many a Southerner spends more time in the mall than the kitchen, and many a Southerner is really a displaced Northerner. Still, there's something about life below theMason-Dixon line that leads to evocative, hilarious, moving, authentic, rip-your-heart-out stories.
Maybe it's true, as Lee Smith says, that "narrative is as necessary to us as air." Maybe narrative is in the air. This year's collection ranges from small vacant towns to thriving Southern cities, tracking the likes of a violent paperhanger, an ambitious fiddler, a failed adman, and a boy who kidnaps his schoolbus driver.
Nineteen standout writers make appearances in this year's volume: John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, Marshall Boswell, Carrie Brown, Stephen Coyne, Moira Crone, William Gay, Jim Grimsley, Ingrid Hill, Christie Hodgen, Nicola Mason, Edith Pearlman, Kurt Rheinheimer, Jane R. Shippen, George Singleton, Robert Love Taylor, James Ellis Thomas, Elizabeth Tippens, Linda Wendling.
Each story is followed by an author's note. Readers will also find an updated list of magazines consulted by Ravenel and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the inception of the series in 1986.
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A real storyteller can make a great story out of anything, even the most trivial occurrence. Composed between 1863 and 1875, the sixty-three often outrageous sketches in Sketches, New and Old contain, for instance, a piece about the difficulty of getting a pocket watch repaired properly; complaints about barbers and office bores; and satirical comments on bureaucrats, courts of law, the profession of journalism, the claims of science, and the workings of government. In Mark Twain's hands, all these potentially dry and dull topics bristle with vitality and interest. "What fascinates Twain," Lee Smith writes in her introduction, is how people "react to the things that happen to them." Twain "lets them speak in their own voices by and large, in a chorus ranging from high-flown oratory to the plain speech of working people.... It seems generally true that the more elevated the speech, the likelier that person is to be an idiot; words of wisdom and common sense are invariably voiced by the common man"--or woman. "The most profound and moving sketch in this whole collection" Smith writes, is one "told by a freed slave." The candid, ironic, playful, and petulant sketches in this volume are indispensable to our understanding of a harried genius during thirteen quite amazing years.
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In her first collection since Cakewalk, Smith writes about average folk whose average lives are suddenly shakens all.
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How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the story of one woman's discovery of her coal-mining hometown as a potential "literary place."
In this first book of interviews with Smith, she revels in character and sense of place as cornerstones to her art. "What interests me most in writing are the characters," she says. "I have a lot of trouble thinking of plots, but I love to create the people. I think a person that you create is coming out of some aspect of yourself."
Smith's career spans three decades-beginning in 1968 with the publication of The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed-and includes ten novels, three collections of stories, one novella, and numerous essays, nearly all of which, since 1980, have focused on her native Appalachia.
It is through conversation with others that Lee Smith (b. 1944) lives and breathes. Social to the core, defined by her love of talk, her penchant for a story, Smith-like her most memorable storytelling characters, from Granny Younger to Ivy Rowe-comes alive through her own voice. Reading a conversation with Smith is like sitting on the porch with your first cousin, all the old stories tumbling out in a rush.
In interviews, Smith tells why we hear echoes of the novelist's life in Crystal Spangler, the main character in Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), who is literally immobilized by her passivity. While Smith's own story in no way resembles the particulars of Crystal's, Smith reveals in these interviews her own struggle with the assigned gender roles of her region.
Forthright and direct, Smith traces the arc of her career as she talks. In research she conducted for her breakthrough novel Oral History (1983), Smith discovered that the power of her voice lay at home. In Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), Smith created the remarkable Ivy Rowe at a time when she herself personally needed a strong role model. Smith then moved on to The Devil's Dream (1992), a multigenerational tale of the evolution from traditional mountain music to commercialized country music. Just as Smith herself found her voice as a writer when she went home to her mountain roots, so too Katie Cocker-the Dolly Parton-type star of the novel-reconnects with her mountain heritage.
As she talks about these novels and her other works of fiction, Smith beckons us to come close and listen and joins her characters as a strong Appalachian woman in her own right.
Linda Tate is an independent scholar and was formerly an associate professor of English at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, W.V. She has written A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South (1994) and has been published in such periodicals as Mississippi Quarterly, Resources for American Literary Study, and Journal of Appalachian Studies.
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Edited by Martine Bellen, Bradford Morrow and Lee Smith.
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Public Radio commentator Bob Sloan's debut collection of short stories. With an introduction by novelist Lee Smith.