The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed the world's most famous bird. From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he'd spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco's urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the Free Flaco movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end--with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system--serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we've done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.

It's 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel's personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room--each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

Winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize

Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle's masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric's street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric's grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric--in a dream, a hallucination, or something else--discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people--those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

A history of the rich culture of the Gullah people-a story of upheaval, endurance, and survival in the Lowcountry of the American South.

Gullah Culture in America chronicles the history and culture of the Gullah people, African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the American South. This book, written for the general public, chronicles the arrival of enslaved West Africans to the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia; the melding of their African cultures, which created distinct creole language, cuisine, traditions, and arts; and the establishment of the Penn School, dedicated to education and support of the Gullah freedmen following the Civil War.

Original author Wilbur Cross, writing in 2008, describes the ongoing Gullah story: the preservation of the culture sheltered in a rural setting, the continued influence of the Penn School (now called the Penn Center) in preserving and documenting the Gullah Geechee cultures. Today, more than 300,000 Gullah people live in the remote areas of the sea islands of St. Helena, Edisto, Coosay, Ossabaw, Sapelo, Daufuskie, and Cumberland, their way of life endangered by overdevelopment in an increasingly popular tourist destination.

For the second edition of this popular book, Eric Crawford, Gullah Geechee scholar, has updated the text with new information and a fresh perspective on the Gullah Geechee culture.

For centuries, the mountains of western North Carolina have inspired wonder and awe. It was only natural that man, after gazing at such scenic wonders, would turn some of the mystery he felt into legend. Sometimes these legends attempted to explain natural phenomena, sometimes they attempted to explain an occurrence that appeared to be supernatural, and sometimes they grew up around the eccentric characters that were drawn to the isolation of these mysterious hills. This collection of eighteen stories presents some of the mystery and awe that the mountains convey, and it may alter your perception of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains forever. You may never stand atop Roan Mountain during a storm without thinking you hear a ghostly choir. You may gaze at the top of Chimney Rock during a hazy summer afternoon and wonder if it really is a ghostly cavalry fight you see. If you spend the night near High Hampton, you may find yourself listening for the call of the lonesome white owl. If you stand at Wiseman's View, you will probably think that you, too, can see the Brown Mountain Lights. Standing atop Clingman's Dome, you may wonder if there really is an enchanted lake where animals flock to heal their wounds somewhere in the valley below. And you will always wonder if the fly you hear on your mountain walk means that Spearfinger is lurking nearby.

For several years, folklorists Randy Russell and Janet Barnett have taught a course about Southern folklore at the North Carolina Center for Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Russell is also the author of several mysteries, including Edgar Award nominee Hot Wire. They live in Asheville, North Carolina.

A motherless young man must stitch his life together among his relatives and other lively folks of Free Creek Kentucky.

Steven Leyva's second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man's lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.

In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva's poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come. For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you'll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one's self represented in art and film.

This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask What is the opposite of cruelty? The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man's hand touching another man's face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, not a season of phantasmal peace, but what's left / when the world's terrors retreat.

Two orphaned sisters, one Pentecostal, one wild, must raise each other and themselves in the mountains of post-WWII Kentucky.

On a patched-up family vacation to Key West, a young girl seeks out movie stars and redemption for her fractured family.

In 1900s Kentucky, Saul Sullivan leaves his bride behind to seek work, and his brother steps in, with violent consequences.

Starting in the 1930s, the Black caddies of Augusta National walked the course with the world's greatest golfers. This book tells their stories, forever entwined with the history of the game.

They used nicknames like Stovepipe, Burnt Biscuits, Skillet, Skinny, and Marble Eye. They worked for presidents of the United States, captains of industry, and the greatest golfers in the world. Their real names were Carl Jackson, Willie Perteet, and Matthew Palmer--and they witnessed every great moment, both private and public, at Augusta National beginning in the1930s--from Gene Sarazen's shot heard 'round the world to Jack Nicklaus winning a record five of his six Masters. Read why Nicklaus said he wouldn't trade caddie Willie Pete Peterson for a million dollars and what Willie Cemetery Perteet really thought of President Eisenhower's golf game. The Black caddies of Augusta National also endured, in their own ways, the racist social order of the sport and at the same time participated, albeit vicariously, in its many thrills. Ward Clayton documents their stories--history as compelling as the game of golf itself.

The Gullah culture, though borne of isolation and slavery, thrived on the US East Coast sea islands from pre-Civil War times until today, and nowhere more prominently than on Hilton Head Island, SC. On this small barrier island descendants of the first generations of Gullah people continue to preserve Gullah language, customs, arts, and cuisine. The three authors of Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956 are among those descendants, and in this book, they chronicle the amazing history of their secluded community from the Civil War through the 1950s, when real estate development connected Hilton Head Island to the mainland with a bridge.
The history of these Gullah islanders, little celebrated until now, is an amazing American story. Hilton Head Island was one of the first areas liberated by Union troops after Fort Sumter. With plantation owners absent, the society of formerly enslaved Gullah people embarked on the activities of freedom: enlisting in fighting for the Union army; creating the first black-governed community in the South, complete with a police force; and, when formal emancipation arrived, running for office, campaigning, and voting.
This book illustrates in vivid detail the story of that vibrant post-Civil War era and the tangled perils of Reconstruction that followed, along with all of the progress and setbacks of African Americans in the South over 150 years via the lives of Gullah Hilton Head Islanders. Authors rely on the historical records and amazing first-person accounts they have gathered from their relatives and other community members to tell this riveting story.

The compelling story of a talented potter, enslaved by the author's ancestors, who became one of the singular artists of the nineteenth century.

He signed many of his works simply as Dave and is known today as Potter David Drake. He made pots and storage jars--everyday items, but because of their beauty and massive size, and because Dave signed and inscribed many with poems, they are valuable works of art, now commanding six figures at auction. Many of Dave's astounding jars are found now in America's finest museums.

There is no other enslaved artist on record who dared to put his name on his work, a dangerous advertisement of literacy. Fascinated by this man and by his own troubling family history, Leonard Todd moved from Manhattan to Edgefield, South Carolina, the place where his ancestors had established a thriving pottery industry in the early 1800s. Todd studied each of Dave's poems for biographical clues, which he pieced together with local records and family letters to create this moving and dramatic chronicle of Dave's life―a story of creative triumph in the midst of slavery.

River Road is a collection of narrative poems in the voice of Susan McFalls, writing from her new home in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains.

Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee, returns to North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains to continue the story of Susan McFalls, who is left on Mount Pisgah after the death of her dear friend and neighbor Posey Green. These poems follow Susan as she moves to and renovates an old house on River Road, vividly bringing to life the wild and beautiful land and culture of the Blue Ridge and the cherished memories and new friends that continue to anchor her to this special place.

River Road is a companion to Caldwell's first poetry collection, Woodsmoke, and while the two can stand alone, together they paint a fuller picture of friendship, loss, and the ways in which lives are shaped by the North Carolina mountains.

Straight from the roux bayou, a culinary memoir about how a centuries old Cajun and Creole secret―gumbo―has become one of the world's most beloved dishes.

The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans―all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many, in America and around the world?

A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers. His obsession goes back to his childhood in the Cajun bastion of Bayou Black, where his French-speaking mother's gumbo often got started with a chicken chased down in the yard. In Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou, Wells shares his lifelong quest to explore gumbo's roots and mysteries. He spends time with octogenarian chefs to make a gourmet gumbo; joins a team at a highly competitive gumbo contest; visits a factory that churns out gumbo by the ton; and observes the gumbo-making rituals of an iconic New Orleans restaurant where high-end Creole cooking and Cajun cuisine first merged.

Gumbo Life, rendered in Wells' affable prose, makes clear that gumbo is more than a dish: it's an attitude, a way of seeing the world. This is a tasty culinary memoir―to be enjoyed like a simmering pot of gumbo.

This edition includes recipe additions as well as a story about the author's quest for authentic Cajun Dark Roux, which involved a hunt for (thankfully scarce) bear lard.

Grieving her father's death, Charlotte McConnell seeks solace at the Outer Banks inn owned by her best friend's family, but she finds them dealing with their own family drama and soon lands in the center of an unexpected love triangle.

Her hotel family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty and longing, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

From her unique vantage point in New Orleans, Sybil Haydel Morial's life spans one of the most critical periods in our country's history. In this remarkable memoir, Morial chronicles her life as both witness to and catalyst for sweeping changes--desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, and the fight for voting rights. These changes transformed the nation during her lifetime. Morial's story is welcome inspiration for the struggle for political empowerment that continues.

As Ambassador Andrew Young, a childhood friend and later Sybil's prom date, relates in his foreword: It is doubtful that New Orleans could have produced two mayors with the dynamic, creative, and visionary leadership of 'Dutch' and Marc Morial without a wife and mother of Sybil's loving strength, intelligence, and moral courage. But the life she lived in the crucible times and her perception of the civil rights movement in New Orleans goes far beyond that.

An Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023

David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Finalist

A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants--and the fragility of citizenship--are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

In August 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a mecca for middle-class black citizens. Many of the city's lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals were black, as were all the tradesmen and stevedores. The black community outnumbered the white community by more than two to one. But white civic leaders, many descended from the antebellum aristocracy, did not consider this progress. They looked around and saw working-class white citizens out of jobs. They heard black citizens addressing white neighbors in the familiar. They hated the fact that local government was run by Republican Fusionists sympathetic to the black majority. In this roiling environment, the newspaper office turned into an arsenal, secret societies espousing white supremacy were formed, and isolated acts of violence ensued. The situation was inflamed further by public speeches from both sides. One morning in November, the almost inevitable gunfire began. By the time it was over, a government had fallen, citizens died or dispersed, and Wilmington would never be the same again. Based on actual events,  Cape Fear Rising tells a story of one city's racial nightmare--a nightmare that was repeated throughout the South at the turn of the century. Although told as fiction, the core of this novel strikes at the heart of racial strife in America.

A lively and poignant exploration of life's latter decades.

In The Rest of Our Lives, memoirist Judy Goldman brings her devoted readers dispatches from the edge of life, when turning eighty can be as surprising and baffling as losing your virginity or seeing The Beatles at Shea Stadium. In this lively and poignant exploration of aging, Goldman circles to those other uncharted moments of our lives when we are at once anxious and excited about just what might happen next. Goldman's telling and retelling of pivotal stories of her own family and friends-romances, births, late-night taxi-cab rides, falls, frailty, and even death--are altogether new in her hands.