Product Description: Ely's last, terse novel has Chalmers Plumb wanting to manufacture his father's canoe design until his father is murdered by barbed wire strung across a river. Chalmers then saves a Romanian sculptress from attempted suicide but the local preacher denounces this "foreigner" for swimming nude in the river's Baptismal pool...read more

Product Description: An unprecedented series of hurricanes has swollen the Mississippi River to unheard-of levels and is threatening to put New Orleans and most of the low-lying areas of the South under water. Fifteen-year-old Stephen is spending the summer with his father near a small town north of Lake Pontchartrain when another powerful hurricane arrives and the levees on the Mississippi River completely fail...read more

Product Description: Pender Hartwell, an infantryman sickened by the war, deserts to the North Vietnamese. In Hanoi he is put in the hands of a literary-inclined intelligence officer, who teaches him to speak Vietnamese. Together they read the chief work of Vietnamese literature, the epic love poem, The Tale of Kieu, while Pender helps Mr...read more

Product Description: Charlene is an underground dump fire. Louis Sabine is a dead Marine who played the sax. Together, can they help end the racial tension building in Pine, after the needless death of a young mother and her daughter, plus the murder of a grandmother whose voodoo was inflaming matters? Can they save the Looms and the Sabines, historically white and black families, who have interbred? Can they restore any semblance of love...read more

Product Description: Two downriver journeys, disparate in time but oddly merging in intensity and, finally, in intent. . . Robert Day and his three friends imitate an escaped slave's journey down the Pearl River in Missippi, while Robert translates the slave's diary...read more

Product Description: These are stories about people searching for love or attempting to come to terms with an absurd and menacing world. The characters struggle to free themselves from loneliness and obsession, seeking peace that is seldom easy and sometimes impossible to find...read more

Product Description: Loners of one sort or another populate Ely's fiction, from a young man discharged from the marines and working as a solitary gamekeeper to a Vietnam veteran turned professor who exchanges favorable grades for sexual favors from his students...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A wide variety of characters saunter, stalk, run, and sometimes hide in these lively stories about contemporary Southerners. Their experiences revolve around the way life is felt and the way it is lived, reflecting a gap between the plans we make for ourselves and the way things actually turn out...read more

As two soldiers, Jackson, a radioman, and light, a sniper, reach the limits of physical and psychological danger during the Vietnam War, they find that they can no longer distinguish hallucination from reality

The grief, hostility, and competition felt by a father and son who have lost their farm, mother, and wife and who vie for the same woman is manifested only in their pit bull, trained to excel at fighting