South American Literature

In 1948 most White people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel Black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local Black leaders, and families of lynching victims.

Eleven-year-old Josephine knows that no one is good enough for her daddy. That's why she makes a habit of scaring his new girlfriends away. She's desperate to make it onto her school's cricket team because she'll get to play her favorite sport and use the cricket matches to distract Daddy from dating. But when Coach Broomes announces that girls can't try out for the team, the frustrated Josephine cuts into a powerful silk cotton tree and accidentally summons a bigger problem into her life.

“Dispute in progress, lethal weapons involved.” Deputy Pegasus Quincy takes the call to resolve violence on a Friesian horse ranch in Arizona. Intent on his own personal vendetta, partner Shepherd Malone refuses to declare a murder in a fatal fire at the ranch. Peg unwisely circumvents the law to investigate anyway. Two families feuding over water rights, a Gypsy clan suspected of drug dealing, and a blackmailer on the loose, all lead Pegasus astray on her quest to find the killer in a desert mountain town beset by flash floods and arsenic-laced creeks.

That brash decision lands Pegasus Quincy in the midst of a hostile murder situation. She alienates her new partner and almost gets him killed. She ignores regulations and jeopardizes an ongoing investigation. Just when she thinks things couldn’t get worse - they do! She encounters the Nettle family: an insanely jealous wife, a banished son, and a sister whose little girl has been traumatized by an explosion at the illicit family whiskey still.

Pegasus Quincy, a rookie deputy on temporary assignment in a sleepy mountain town, expects a quiet summer citing jaywalkers and writing traffic tickets. Fate intervenes when a dead body turns up in an old copper mining pit. The man is a three-time loser disowned by even his own mother. Peg’s sheriff boss declares the death an accident and tells her to “move on”. She wants to agree, but then her office is ransacked and her assistant kidnapped...Will they find the killer before he strikes again?

This is the story of Bronx-born David Kokolovitz and his hilarious experiences with sex, Shakespeare, and the South Pacific. We follow David on his journey away from his Bronx home in search of an acting career. In a comedy of opposites, New Yorker David ends up living in the Deep South where he lands his first acting job at a southern Shakespeare repertory company. Just as the hazards of too-tight tights and too-long soliloquies become too much for him, World War II conveniently breaks out and he moves on to entertain the troops.

Set against the backdrop of the antebellum South, this compelling work of historical fiction follows the harrowing journey of a young man, stolen from his family and thrust into the merciless world of slavery. The story unfolds with the abduction of IDI, a bright and resourceful young man who is cruelly torn from his family and homeland. His journey takes him to the American South, where he is subjected to the dehumanizing horrors of servitude. Driven by an unshakable determination to regain his freedom, David befriends a group of fellow slaves who share his longing for escape.

In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being “trouble”—difficult, unruly, fearsome, defiant—is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the Hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood.

DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amid prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?

When young Armstrong Todd's mother sends him to spend the summer in her native rural Mississippi, the Chicago-bred 15-year-old is unused to the segregated ways of the Deep South. So when the black youth utters a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, he has no idea of the impending firestorm he has ignited. Armstrong ends up paying the ultimate price when the offended woman's husband and his friends decide to teach the youth a lesson.

Pattie Mae adores and admires Uncle Buddy. He unsettles the dust and brings fresh ideas to Rehobeth Road. But when Buddy's deliberate inattention to the protocol of 1947 North Carolina lands him in jail for a crime against a white woman that he didn't commit, Pattie Mae and her family are suddenly set to journeying on the long, hard road that leads from loss and rage to forgiveness and pride.

Afice is the last of nine generations of women who have survived enslavement, sickness, and hunger. Alone at age seventeen, she sets out through the Louisiana swamps to follow the trail of her ancestors and hear their songs anew. On this journey, Afice must decide how to honor her ancestors while embracing her own future.

Prince Myers came from Nawlins to ATL to take over the game. His rise was fast and he enjoyed all the luxuries of his hustle, including the fly chick on his arm. But his reign is short lived. Now he is in prison on a bogus murder conviction and everything he had is gone, including his woman. Beautiful and ambitious Lieutenant Nicole Wright is the fantasy of every convict at Georgia State Prison where she works.

MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world?

Ancient Night is a twist on two Nahuatl traditions: the rabbit which the Feathered Serpent placed on the moon, and Yaushu, the Lord Opossum who ruled the earth before humans came, and who stole fire from the gods to create the sun.

From the onset of the war, Basil L. Gildersleeve, native of Charleston, South Carolina, a scholar, and professor of Greek at the University of Virginia left his students every Spring to return to the army until he was wounded during a skirmish in the Shenadoah Valley in 1864. Thirty years later he authored The Creed of the Old South, and A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War included in this audiobook.

In this beautiful collection of memories, Tom Brokaw speaks of growing up in the American heartland during the central decades of the 20th century, and reflects on what has brought so many Americans to lead lives that are a long way from home.