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"Homecoming Fiction."
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Familiar Ground
A man haunted by the death of his brother and a forty-year-old secret returns to his Tennessee hometown in this novel by the author of A Question of Mercy. A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, Familiar Ground follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly one hundred years old. Jacob aims to confront a moment of violence from forty years in his past that cost him the life of his brother Drue. Elizabeth Cox's debut novel, first published in 1984, is about the recurrence of loss in our lives and of the intractability of guilt that must give way for any measure of self-forgiveness. The novel introduces us to a memorable collection of southern characters. There is the indomitable Callie, who has suffered rape and ostracism from the locals; Soldier, a mentally handicapped man lost in his loneliness; Jacob's alcoholic father and gentle mother; his great-niece and -nephew, whom have already known terrible loss in their young lives; and Jacob's steadfast wife, Molly, whose understanding of her husband is upended by the revelations of his past. With sparse prose and an authentic southern landscape and cast, Cox delivered an impressive first novel, the merits of which still hold up three decades later. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction by the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies. Praise for Familiar Ground \"A writer of deep insights and a talent for conveying a sense of time and place.\" — Publishers Weekly \"[Cox's] calm, clear writing treats the South knowingly... You'll find yourself thinking of these characters exactly as you think of people you know.\" — USA Today \"Cox can use her words like blunt instruments—they deliver a knockout blow... We know we've glimpsed magic that we can't quite explain.\" — Washington Post \"Remarkably full and revealing... a promising novel, one that affirms Elizabeth Cox's tender insight and convincing emotional range.\" — Greensboro News & Record \"A work of startling originality!\" — New York Times
eBook
Together, again
Together again after years apart, can they find a new beginning? Sisters Jolene, Marsha and Annis have convened at their family home following the death of their mother. Born seven years apart, the women are more strangers than sisters, Jolene is a successful romantic novelist whose own marriage is complicated. Marsha has put all of her energy into her work, trying to mend her broken heart. Annis left home aged sixteen and never returned, not even for the death of their beloved father Julian. Until now. So when the sisters discover that their mother has left everything to Annis in her will, it udnermines all they thought they knew. Can saying their final goodbyes to their mother bring them together again?
Back in the Old Country: Homecoming and Belonging in Leonard Kniffel’s A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home and Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
Homecoming travel narratives are typically written by first-wave immigrants, their children, or grandchildren. Usually, homecoming books are accounts of emotionally charged travels that oscillate between nostalgia and idealization of the ancestral land on the one hand and a sense of grief, loss and unbelonging on the other. The present paper examines two homecoming travel narratives that sidestep such pitfalls: Leonard Kniffel’s A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home (2005) and Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace (2020). For both authors, a starting point of the journey is a deep bond with their late maternal grandmothers, whose stories of “the old country” have shaped their sense of identity. Neither Kniffel, a Polish-American author, nor Kassabova, a Bulgarian-born writer writing in English, has ever lived in the countries their grandmothers left as young women—Poland and Macedonia. Return travels not only allow them to better understand the interplay of past and present in their immigrant family history but also to accept their homeland as a complex historical, cultural, and personal legacy. Thus, in both books, returning to the ancestral homeland, undertaken at mid-life, is represented as an essential stage in one’s life journey, which results in a symbolic sense of closure and restoration.
Journal Article
Half of a yellow sun
Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) are glamorous twins from a wealthy Nigerian family. Upon returning to a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria after their expensive English education, the two women make very different choices. Olanna shocks her family by going to live with her lover, the \"revolutionary professor\" Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his devoted houseboy Ugwu (John Boyega) in the dusty university town of Nsukka; Kainene turns out to be a fiercely successful businesswoman when she takes over the family interests, and surprises even herself when she falls in love with Richard (Joseph Mawle), an English writer. Preoccupied by their romantic entanglements, and a betrayal between the sisters, the events of their life seem to loom larger than politics. However, they become caught up in the events of the Nigerian civil war, in which the lgbo people fought an impassioned struggle to establish Biafra as an independent republic, ending in chilling violence which shocked the entire world. A sweeping romantic drama, Half of a Yellow Sun takes the sisters and their lovers on a journey through the war which is powerful, intensely emotional and, as the response of readers around the world has shown, it is a story which can touch everyone's heart.
Streaming Video
Cemetery road
Journalist Marschall McEwan returns to his hometown of Bienville to replace his ailing father as editor-in-chief of the local newspaper and finds himself embroiled in a battle with the shady cartel that has ruled the roost for generations.
Book
The superhero symbol : media, culture, and politics
\"As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol...as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting\".In the 2005 reboot of the Batman film franchise, Batman Begins , Bruce Wayne articulates how the figure of the superhero can serve as a transcendent icon.
eBook
Backlash
The ranch country of Montana is beautiful, unforgiving, and for Colton and Denver McLean, filled with a whole lot of bad memories. It's been seven years since a fire claimed their parents' lives and drove both brothers away. Now their uncle's death has brought them back to a place where loyalty and love runs deep-but so do grudges. Suspicion still swirls about what caused that tragic fire. It created a rift between Denver and the foreman's daughter, Tessa Kramer. Now Tessa hopes to buy the ranch, if Denver and Colton will agree to sell, but the property is beset by problems. A prized stallion disappears. Other horses start falling sick. Someone seems determined to disrupt-or destroy-the McLean family's legacy by any means necessary. And finding answers will turn this homecoming into a time of reckoning with enemies past and present.-- Publisher's description.
Book
