Year: 1956

MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville tells the story of the notorious Confederate Prisoner of War camp, where fifty thousand Union soldiers were held captive–and fourteen thousand died–under inhumane conditions.

A family hides its poverty behind a façade of gentility. A mysterious stranger sows discord in a backwoods hamlet. A man leaves prison only to be drawn back into the darkness of his past. A young bride faces the choice of informing on her husband and his family or enduring a lifetime of deceit.

These nine stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Ann Grau traverse the landscape of the American South, from New Orleans to the Louisiana bayou to the pine woods of Alabama, but their true territory is universal: the mysteries of the human heart.

From the publisher:

Originally published in 1955, Paul Bowles’s remarkable novel set in Fez, Morocco, during the last days of the French colonial empire, is an expansive piece of writing–vintage Bowles

The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.