Lee Smith

A consummate storyteller in the Southern tradition, Lee Smith tugs at her listeners' heartstrings with this haunting narrative that reads like a country ballad. Touching, funny, and sad, its down-to-earth characters are somehow familiar and endearing as they do their best to meet the demands of...

Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. With each chapter, Lee Smith, a master of regional voices, adds another branch to a family tree that sings with secrets and sadness, beauty and joy. Researching an...

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork...

First published in 1982, Cakewalk was the first short story collection by iconic Southern writer Lee Smith. Comic and observant, Smith's fourteen tales in Cakewalk introduce readers to a host of memorable Southern characters. Her protagonists include aging gossips, a soap opera–hooked...

Award-winning, best-selling author Lee Smith is among the most authentic voices of the South and has been hailed as one of America's most accomplished authors. In this rich and bittersweet tale, she follows the shifting fortunes of a young North Carolina girl whose life is shattered by the Civil...

Lee Smith is one of today's most critically acclaimed authors writing about contemporary life in the South. In Family Linen, with a remarkable economy of description and dialogue, Smith sketches eccentric, yet familiar characters moving through a family drama that resonates with both tension and...

Lee Smith, author of the acclaimed The Last Girls, delights with a tale of dry wit. Smith has won many prizes, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Academy Award in Literature. Speed, Alabama, is celebrating its sesquicentennial, 150 years of proud existence, and its...

This funny and endearing novel of family, secrets, and aging follows an elderly man who heads off on a joyride with a new young friend—who may have some secrets of her own. A driving force in literature, the one and only Lee Smith returns with a road trip novel, a story full of hope and humor...

In her first work of nonfiction, Lee Smith deploys the wit, wisdom, and graceful prose for which she is beloved to conjure her early days in the small coal town of Grundy, Virginia - and beyond. For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For 45 years, her fiction has lived and breathed...

When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is...

Having justly earned her reputation as a master storyteller, Lee Smith's name evokes images of authentic country folk struggling through some of life's most arduous tests. Saving Grace adds a stunning spiritual dimension. The daughter of a snake-handling preacher who ignores the needs of his...

Lee Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of The Last Girls and the recipient of a Lyndhurst Grant and a Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Library Journal calls her "one of our most accomplished authors". Here she delivers the heartwarming tale of three generations of women who record...

This disarming first novel from award-winning author Lee Smith vibrantly displays the remarkable talent that led her to become one of America's most popular fiction writers. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, it evokes the hot summer nights of childhood's lost innocence. Nine-year-old Susan has the...