Southern Comforts

To her fans, Roxanne Scarbrough is the genteel Southern queen of good taste—she's built an empire around the howto's of gracious living. To her critics—and there are many— Roxanne is a tyrant. And now somebody wants her dead. Chelsea Cassidy, Roxanne's official biographer, knows that Roxanne is determined to keep her dark secrets buried, whatever the cost. But when Chelsea begins to unearth the truth about Roxanne's life, her search leads her back into the arms of her college love, Cash Beaudine—a man Roxanne wants for herself. And suddenly Chelsea's investigation takes on a very personal nature—with potentially fatal consequences.

Some people need continuous change in order to feel vital and alive. Others are terrified of unsettling the peace that they have established. Two-time O'Neill Playwright's Conference participant Kathleen Clark uses her words to detail this tour-de-force journey of a widow and widower who meet later in life and find a way into each other's hearts. Southern Comforts is a beautiful exploration of the intimate workings of all relationships. In a sprawling New Jersey Victorian, a taciturn Yankee widower and a vivacious grandmother from Tennessee find what they least expected - a second chance at love. Their funny, awkward, and enchanting romance is filled with sweet surprise and unpredictable tribulation. Told with warmth and perceptive humor, this off-Broadway success is an affecting, late-in-life journey of compromise and rejuvenation, of personal risk and the rewards of change.

The Florida I love is perishing, says Sudye Cauthen. In Southern Comforts, this fifth-generation Floridian blends memoir, oral history, and cultural geography to explore the tensions between community and environment in America today and her own ambivalence about Alachua, the place just north of Gainesville where she was born and reared. Cauthen raises a cry for all that is lost as Florida's--and America's--landscapes and traditions are replaced by interstates, condos, shopping malls, and the new way of life they represent. Part self-reflection, part meditation, and part social analysis, Cauthen's work threads through the stories of blacks, whites, and Native Americans--men and women--including her own family members. Through their words and hers, Cauthen explores northern Florida's unique history, culture, and geography while she seeks a greater understanding of herself and her surroundings. Cauthen's journey takes readers down dirt roads and city streets, to her people's tobacco fields and churches. She sifts sand at an archaeological dig for the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, peers into an aboriginal grave, and everywhere marshals evidence for the primacy of place in determining who we are. One story takes us on a fox hunt; another reveals lingering racial problems. Permeating the book is the ever-present menace of growth and development and what it holds for Cauthen's Florida.

Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South. Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Complexities of race, class, and gender remain hidden amid familiar images, catchy slogans, and convenient stories. As the first collection of scholarship that investigates the relationship between drinking and the South, Southern Comforts challenges popular assumptions by examining evocative topics drawn from literature, music, film, city life, and cocktail culture. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate that exaggerated representations of drinking oversimplify the South’s relationship to alcohol, in effect absorbing it into narratives of southern exceptionalism that persist to this day. From Edgar Allan Poe to Richard Wright, Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash, Bourbon Street tourism to post-Katrina disaster capitalism and more, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South uncovers the reciprocal relationship between mythologies of drinking and mythologies of region.

"Category: romance with more"--Page 4 of cover.

Prodigal son and bad boy extraordinaire, Beau Stuart is finally coming home. He knows the town isn't anxious to welcome back the rebel they drove out years ago. But one person is very happy to see him. And she's about to make him an offer he can't refuse…. Lily Matthews is tired of being a "good" girl. It's time she learned what it is to be a real woman—with a real man. So when she hears that sexy-as-sin scoundrel Beau Stuart is coming home, she knows he's the one to help her. After all, what hot-blooded male could possibly turn down some good old-fashioned Southern comforts…?

They were three wild girls, all grown up…but not quite settled down. Growing up in rural Orla, Oklahoma, the three George cousins were as wild as a pack of heathens. But with Bess's passing, it's up to Minnie and Charma Deane to remember their motto: Live without limits. Love without question. Laugh without apologies. Not that they're laughing much these days. The family farmhouse is filled to the brim with friends and relatives alike, and even Charma Deane—the self-appointed caregiver—can't keep up. When her son and Minnie's daughter show up, things get even more complicated. But as Charma Deane discovers, when you're at the end of your rope, the ties that bind can be a saving grace. Because nothing soothes a tired heart like the comfort of family….

To outsiders, the former USSR is always been a place where everything is strangely different. All the more so in the Exclusion Zone around the ill-fated Chernobyl power plant, where after a secret experiment went wrong in 2006, the laws of physics are bent and mysterious phenomena manifest.In 2011, another Zone is apparently created after Al-Qaeda detonated nukes in Afghanistan. Ukrainian authorities send a research team to verify the claims. The scientists go missing and a search and rescue operation is launched. For Mikhailo Tarasov, officer in the armed forces who desperately try to contain the Exclusion Zone, this mutant-infested wilderness is his home turf. But when he sets out on his mission into the New Zone, he soon finds himself facing perils he has never encountered before. His mission becomes a struggle against evil permeating the wastelands, confronted with the shadows of the country's troubled history at each step. Tarasov is aided by unlikely allies - outcasts, adventurers, renegade US Marines and a mysterious woman who appears to be the keeper of dark secrets. But beyond all the perils, the ultimate danger awaits: betrayal.The noir, post-apocalyptic narrative of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort goes is a contemporary voyage into the heart of darkness, where not only the laws of physics are bent but the rules of the outside world as well. This is an alternative reality where outcasts prevail, the oppressed take revenge and the faithful revolt. "Whatever power had created the Zone, it has outsmarted us and it has happened again. You will look at the New Zone with fresh eyes... like Strelok did here when everything began." Major Alexander Degtyarev, 2014

The much-anticipated debut cookbook from two of the most admired and innovative young chefs in the South, with 100 recipes featuring their refined, classically-inspired takes on the traditional Southern food they grew up with. Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing are two of the most admired and innovative young chefs in the South. Their distinctive brand of cooking is praised for its brilliant juxtaposition of rustic flavors with refined, classically inspired preparations. Southern Comfort is not only their much-anticipated debut cookbook, but also Allison and Slade’s personal story: their childhood food memories and family traditions growing up in Louisiana and Mississippi, how they met and fell in love in a New Orleans kitchen, and lessons learned working in top restaurants in San Francisco and New York. It also describes their bittersweet homecoming and the opening of their first restaurant just days before Hurricane Katrina hit. And perhaps most importantly, Southern Comfort shares Allison and Slade’s deep-rooted love for the area—its history, its cuisine, and its people—which inspired them to stay in New Orleans and keep cooking. These 100 recipes reflect Allison and Slade’s refreshing approach to regional cuisine, with its pitch-perfect blend of high and low. Dishes like Hush Puppies with Caviar, Sweet Tea–Roasted Duck in Date Sauce, and their legendary Oysters Rockefeller “Deconstructed” are modern in technique and execution, yet inspired by the traditions, ingredients, and down-home philosophy that make Southern food so appealing. At its heart, Southern Comfort is a celebration: of local ingredients, New Orleans’s vibrant food culture, and Allison and Slade’s shared Southern upbringing. Brimming with flavorful recipes and stories, it showcases the very best that the New South has to offer.

The Old South is slow to give up its secrets. Though satellite dishes outnumber banjo players a thousand to one, most traditions haven't died; they've just gone into hiding. Cockfighting is illegal in forty-eight states, yet there are three national cockfighting magazines and cockpits in even the most tranquil communities. Homemade liquor has been outlawed for more than a century, yet moonshiners in Virginia still ship nearly one million gallons a year. Some of these pastimes are ancient, others ultramodern; some are illegal, others merely obscure. But the people who practice them share an undeniable kinship. Instead of wealth, promotion, or a few seconds of prime time, they follow dreams that lead them ever deeper underground. They are reminders, ultimately, that American culture isn't as predictable as it seems-that the weeds growing between its cracks are its most vital signs of life. In these masterfully crafted essays, Burkhard Bilger explores the history and practice of eight such clandestine worlds. Like John McPhee and Ian Frazier, he introduces us to people whose spirit of individualism keeps traditions alive, from a fifty-something female coon hunter who spends 340 nights a year in the woods to a visionary frog farmer and a man whose arms are scarred by the eighty-pound catfish he catches by hand. A fluid combination of adventure, history, and humor, Noodling for Flatheads is evocative, intelligent, and wonder-fully weird-a splendid antidote to the sameness of today's popular culture.