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Love Palace
The narrator of Meredith Sue Willis's new novel has just turned forty, quit her job, been jilted by her live-in boyfriend and suspended by her therapist for nonpayment. Against her better judgment, she takes a job at a settlement house known as "Love Palace" in a run-down community that is about to be razed for urban renewal. Here Martha discovers that she has a talent for managing the dysfunctional institution and its staff. She is attracted by the charismatic reverend who oversees Love Palace as well as by Robby, one of the staff members, who is rich, handsome, recently released from a hospital after a suicide attempt, and intensely ambivalent about his sexuality. Along with the Love Palace crew of runaways, derelicts, struggling blue collar workers, and a former Black Panther among others, Martha has to deal with her ex-hillbilly mother, who favors shoulder pads and big hair; her sister the big-shot lawyer; and her dying Jewish grandmother.
A Space Apart
Willis fleshes out with warmth and tenderness the complexities of family love, which not only defines commitment but deepens the need. An important new talent. -The Kirkus Reviews This is the story of a broken family trying to mend itself through three generations. It is a painful but essential process, and like all such repair jobs, it is only partly successful. Before it is over we come to know John and Vera and Mary Kay, as well as Vera's daughters, Lee and Tonie-to understand the wars they must declare and the peaces that they are able to proclaim within the state of being Scarlins. -The Philadelphia Inquirer Willis views the Scarlin family ties and loyalties, limits and tensions, with realism, sensitivity and precision. A noteworthy first novel. -Publisher's Weekly
Their Houses
"As children, two sisters make homes for their toys out of matchboxes and shoeboxes, trying to create safe places after the loss of their mother to psychosis. Grace, a schoolteacher married to a doctor, appears to have a conventional life but has a breakdown during a move from one house to another. Dinah has married a self-ordained preacher and tries to keep her children safely separate from the world. Meanwhile, a childhood friend is linked to a militia's abortive attempt to blow up the FBI's fingerprint records facility in West Virginia, and later builds an isolated survivalist compound in the mountains. These three adults, closely bonded in childhood, are reunited on this acreage once owned by a white supremacist group, where they discover in various ways that there is no final protection, no matter how hard they strive to find it or make it"--
Out of the Mountains
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities. Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.
Appalachian Gateway
Featuring the work of twenty-five fiction writers and poets, this anthology is a captivating introduction to the finest of contemporary Appalachian literature. Here are short stories and poems by some of the region’s most dynamic and best-loved authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan, Lisa Alther, and Lee Smith among others. In addition to compelling selections from each writer’s work, the book includes illuminating biographical sketches and bibliographies for each author. These works encompass a variety of themes that, collectively, capture the essence of Appalachia: love of the land, family ties, and the struggle to blend progress with heritage. Readers wil...
Only Great Changes
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School Prayer and Discrimination
"Frank Ravitch has written a fine book, one that offers a fair and thorough treatment of a difficult and vexing political and constitutional issue." Law and Politics Book Review
Our Young Family
Thomas Young was born in about 1747 in Baltimore County, Maryland. He married Naomi Hyatt, daughter of Seth Hyatt and Priscilla, in about 1768. They had four children. Thomas died in 1829 in North Carolina. Ancestors, descendants and relatives lived mainly in North Carolina.
Oradell at Sea
This contemporary novel takes place in two main settings: on a cruise ship and through flashbacks to the narrator's fictional West Virginia hometown. The transitions from present to past are well done and help the reader see how a now-wealthy woman came to her current view of the world. It also shows why she has such difficulty handling her present crisis. This well-crafted story, told by an older woman, but filled with interesting characters of all ages from West Virginia and around the world, will appeal to the general fiction reader. However, residents of West Virginia will be particularly fascinated as the narrator's story unfolds. For more information about Meredith Sue Willis visit her web site at: http://www.meredithsuewillis.com.
