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Lee Smith

(b.1944)

Lee Smith is the author of eleven novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, The Devil's Dream, and Fair and Tender Ladies, plus three collections of short stories. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, Lee received an Academy Award in Fiction from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her new novel On Agate Hill was published in October 2006.

Genres: Literary Fiction, General Fiction

Novels

   The Last Day The Dogbushes Bloomed (1968)
   Black Mountain Breakdown (1980)
   Oral History (1983)
   Family Linen (1985)
   Fair and Tender Ladies (1988)
   Devil's Dream (1992)
   Fancy Strut (1993)
   Saving Grace (1995)
   The Last Girls (2002)
   On Agate Hill (2006)
   Guests on Earth (2013)
   Silver Alert (2023)

Collections

   Cakewalk (1981)
   Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (1990)
   News of the Spirit (1997)
   Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (2010)

Novellas and Short Stories

The Christmas Letters (1996)
Blue Marlin (2020)

Anthology series

Conjunctions (with Martine Bellen and Bradford Morrow)
29. Tributes (1997)

Non fiction show

Lee Smith recommends

Old Crimes (2024)
Jill McCorkle
"Each story here is so carefully wrought yet wildly original at the same time, deeply wedded to the real world in all its complexity and detail. It seems to me that each one contains an entire life---and often, a whole novel. What a beautiful book."

The Last of What I Am (2023)
Abigail Cutter
"A searing, brilliant, moving, and utterly original Civil War novel, told by the guilt-ravaged Virginia infantryman Tom Smiley whose own war never ended--at least not until a young couple move into his now-historic childhood home and start renovating . . . . A stirring meditation on guilt and redemption."

Lark Ascending (2022)
Silas House
"Just astonishing . . . Terrifying, moving, beautiful, instructive, and haunting. I have never been more deeply moved by a novel."

The Sky Club (2022)
Terry Roberts
"Ever since Terry Roberts took up writing about his ancestors in Western North Carolina, he has produced a remarkably varied and valuable shelf of novels . . . but The Sky Club is the best one yet! Wildly original, this is a truly Appalachian novel all about money, sex, drinking, and the Great Depression . . . along with the more familiar themes of place and family. I especially admire the apparent ease with which Roberts has created the tough, true, funny, and unforgettable Jo Salter, an independent pistol of a woman who tells this lively tale set in a speakeasy on top of a mountain."

Run, Rose, Run (2022)
Dolly Parton and James Patterson
"Dolly Parton is the beating heart and yearning soul of this amazing novel. Enter James Patterson, who knows how to grab a reader by the threat, kick up the suspense, and move a novel along better than anybody else in the world."

The Promise of the Pelican (2022)
Roy Hoffman
"Roy Hoffman has written a fast-paced, mesmerizing and incredibly moving contemporary novel about human and civil rights."

Double Solitaire (2021)
(Quinn Farrell, book 1)
Craig Nova
"Craig Nova has really done it this time. He hooked me in the first paragraph and reeled me in on page nine. Writing with great style and economy, a master of dialogue and suspense, Nova plumbs the depths of the human psyche. Menace and heartbreak walk hand in hand through these swift pages. I'll take another trip with Quinn Farrell anytime."

The Tender Grave (2021)
Sheri Reynolds
"Sheri Reynolds is an essential voice from the American South-rich, haunting, courageous, big, and true."

The Baddest Girl on the Planet (2021)
Heather Frese
"Heather Frese has written a coming-of-age story like no other-with a fiercely original narrative voice that's funny, brave, honest, and occasionally terrifying . . . in fact, compulsively readable!"

Even As We Breathe (2020)
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
"Debut writer Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle lifts the curtain to show us a South we don't know, revealed through the struggles of Cowney Sequoyah, a young man growing up within the Cherokee Nation of far Western North Carolina, and yet another surprise setting when he takes a job at Asheville's fabled Grove Park Inn while it is being used by the US military as a place of internment for Axis prisoners of war during World War II. Even As We Breathe is a wonderful novel, complicated as life itself - thrilling, mysterious, and finally, a revelation!"

When These Mountains Burn (2020)
David Joy
"Revelatory . . . Indelible characters from every side of the law converge in this fast-moving story. As fine a piece of writing as you are ever likely to encounter."

The View From Here (2018)
Lynne Hinton
"Lynne Hinton is a born storyteller, here at the top of her form, writing with compassion and understanding."

Women in Sunlight (2018)
Frances Mayes
"Frances Mayes has outdone herself. The writing is gorgeous, the structure grand and formidable, just like the architecture she writes about so well. I feel like I have lived in Italy. But most of all, I feel like these women--and their men, and children--are still walking around in my mind."

The Promise Between Us (2018)
Barbara Claypole White
"Barbara Claypole White does not merely write about people with mental illness—she inhabits them; she IS Katelyn, the young mother overcome with images of killing her new baby, the mother who leaves her baby to keep her safe…Later White IS that same child, Maisie, now beginning to struggle with OCD herself—and all Maisie’s worries, all her thoughts and the details of her pre-teen life are precisely, exactly right. Perfect. White knows how to tell a story, too, how to fully create each additional realistic and fascinating character, and also how to increase suspense as the family drama unfolds. This brilliant novel about obsessive compulsive disorder is compulsively readable."

Fate Moreland's Widow (2015)
John Lane
"John Lane has written a crackerjack page-turner that brings the whole violent and complicated struggle of the southern textile mills to brilliant, blazing life."

A Different Sun (2013)
Elaine Neil Orr
"As lyrical and passionate a novel as has ever been written."

The Dry Grass of August (2011)
Anna Jean Mayhew
"I read this book straight through."

Dogs (2010)
Abigail DeWitt
"...a brilliant and thought-provoking novel from the extravagantly talented Abigail DeWitt."

The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove (2010)
Susan Gregg Gilmore
"A pure enchantment."

The Last Summer of Her Other Life (2009)
Jean Reynolds Page
"Jean Reynolds Page knows how to hold the reader riveted."

The Piano Teacher (2004)
Lynn York
"Eudora Welty meets Miss Marple in this sweet, sexy Southern tour de force."

Hello to the Cannibals (2002)
Richard Bausch
"One of America's finest writers... Hello to the Cannibals is a wise, brilliant, expansive novel, a fiercely original love story as big as the world."

More recommendations

Books containing stories by Lee Smith

Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South (2005)
(New Stories from the South)
edited by
Shannon Ravenel and Anne Tyler

The Book of Ballads (2004)
edited by
Charles Vess

New Stories from the South 2001 (2001)
The Year's Best
(New Stories from the South)
edited by
Shannon Ravenel

More books

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