A collection of stories and reminiscences about the games of football, baseball, and basketball recalls quiet southern summers and the vulnerabilities of being young

Product Description: Willie Morris's collection of sports stories, Always Stand In Against The Curve, is a book for those of us lucky enough to have shot baskets under a driveway or shagged fly balls in open fields until it was too dark to see the hoop or the ball against the sky...read more

"I've been asked all over America . . . why Mississippi is so distinctive. You know, we have our failings, but we're coming along all right. But as to why Mississippi is so artistic and athletic I always say there is something in the quality of two things: memory . . . and the sour-mash bourbon." During the three decades since the London Sunday Times trumpeted North Toward Home as "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain," southerner Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books, including a second well-received volume of autobiography. Throughout his lengthy literary career, which began when he contributed his first sports column to a local newspaper at the age of twelve, he attained national prominence as a journalist, nonfiction writer, novelist, editor, and essayist. In Conversations with Willie Morris, the first collection of interviews and profiles devoted to this American author, Jack Bales compiles twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations (some never before published) with a man who for over forty years confronted the turbulent issues of his generation. "I have no alternative to words," Morris occasionally replied when asked about his far-reaching career. And throughout his life he unceasingly spoke out on matters that concerned him, writing at various times with outrage, humor, sadness, and affection -- but always with passion and candor. The diverse topics covered in this collection reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. As he speaks with journalists, public radio and television hosts, social historians, and even a professional comedian, he candidly discusses his own life and literary career, sports, other authors, the 1960s, politics, the Civil War, dogs, the complexities of race relations, and, of course, the South and his beloved Mississippi. After reviewing the author's Homecomings some ten years ago, a Boston Globe writer concluded, "There's damn fine life left in this man's prose." As is evident by Willie Morris's eighteen books, countless essays, and the insightful profiles and interviews gathered here, there is little doubt that this man's prose will be remembered as fresh, lively, and thought-provoking.

Book by Morris, Willie

An insightful analysis of William Faulkner's complex fictional world of YoKnapatawpha County is juxtaposed with evocative photographs of the rural Southern countryside, many of which are enhanced by excerpts from Faulkner's works

The author looks back on his travels through his home state of Mississippi with the crew of the motion picture, Ghosts of Mississippi, exploring the film's relationship to his family's past and Mississippi's history of racism. 30,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The author's boyhood escapades in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi.

Product Description: Book by Morris, Willie

Six essays discuss Oxford, England, the life of a writer, a classroom joke, memories of a grandfather, and Truman Capote, and are accompanied by paintings by a fellow Mississippian

Traces the life of Carol Hollywell, a beautiful and smart debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, as she moves to Washington, D.C., falls in love with a prominent congressman, and struggles to keep her ambitions from ruining her relationship

The author describes life with a strong-willed cat named Spit McGee, exploring the dramatic ways that Spit has transformed his household and offering a close-up look at cats and their behavior, resourcefulness, and character

The author offers an account of growing up in the rural South of the 1940s, sharing anecdotes about his dog, Skip, and reflecting on the relationship between a young boy and his pet

A father and son's eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi An exerpt from the book: "Through the years two of the most singular extremes have been the desire, on the one hand, to dwell forever with all the myths and trimmings of a vanished culture which may never have truly existed in the first place, certainly not the way we wished it to, and the frantic compulsion, on the other, to reforge ourselves as an appendage of the capitalistic, go-getting, entrepreneurial North. . . . Between these two extremes there have been complex lights and shadings, and considerable ambivalence and suffering. Mississippians watch the same television as other Americans, frequent the same shopping malls and national franchise chainstores and fast-food establishments, and live in the same kind of suburbias. . . . At the new century it is the juxtapositions of Mississippi, emotional and in remembrance, and the tensions of its paradoxes that still drive us crazy. . . . In my work on this book certain ironies never failed to tease me." -- Willie Morris, 1999 Few writers have ever approached their native terrains with such an inclusive and compassionate understanding as Willie Morris. This book, his last, circles back home where he started. To love it and discover it one more time, he and his son David Rae take us on a trip through contemporary Mississippi. Who could express so passionately an understanding of the Mississippi landscape? Who could capture so unerringly the state's contrasting and often contradictory faces? For his readers the answer is Willie Morris. For Morris it is his photographer son. Surveying the familiar yet always strangely evocative panorama that became his literary terrain, My Mississippi contemplates the realities of the present day, assesses the most vital concerns of the citizens, gauges how the state has changed, and beholds what Mississippi is like as it enters the twenty-first century. This southern homeland to which Morris returned after terminating his career as a New York editor remained for him a tantalizing mystery, the touchstone for all his thoughts, and one of the last unique places in America. For Morris, despite its flaws, Mississippi is beloved. With father and son in their peregrinations we witness what they see and hear -- "the bugs on our windshield in the Delta springtime, the off-key echoes of high-school bands from the little Piney Woods football fields in the autumn, the supple twilights and sultry breezes on 'the Coast,' the hunting camps and picnics, and parades and pilgrimages, the catfish ponds and graveyards, the roadhouses and joints near the closing hour, the art galleries and concert halls, the riverboat casinos and courthouse squares, the historical landmarks of the old and the industrial complexes of the new." "It has been a pleasure," Morris says, "more than that, an honor, to collaborate with my son on this project." The son grew up in New York City, seeing his father's native land from the perspective of an outsider. As an adult he has chosen to live in or near Mississippi and has spent the past twenty years traveling and photographing the state. In a thoughtful and provocative photographic narrative entitled "Look Away," he presents striking, full-color images of his Mississippi. This complementary collaboration of father and son unites their separate visions and shared love of a place that remains infinitely intriguing for everyone. (view table of contents)

The author describes his years as the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of 'Harper's,' recounting how he rubbed elbows with the likes of Woody Allen and Robert Kennedy

The late journalist and author of My Cat Spit McGee offers a poignant memoir of coming of age during a time of dramatic cultural, social, and political change, rnaging from his childhood in the South to his sojourn in New York during the 1960s as editor of Harper's magazine. 12,500 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Celebrated author Willie Morris and distinguished artist Barry Moser join in a poetic tribute to children’s baseball.

A collection of eloquent, sometimes hard-hitting essays by one of the South's most beloved writers covers forty years in Morris's career as a journalist and columnist. (Literature) (view table of contents)

Product Description: 1966 first edition Harper Colophon paperback. Cover has some rubbing, owner name front free end paper, but book is tight like new. Pages only slightly tanning from age. Private collection.

In a final work by the author of My Dog Skip, sixteen-year-old Mississippi boy Swayze Barksdale is called upon to play 'Taps' at the funerals of his neighborhood's young Korean War casualties and comes into a more mature understanding of friendship, love, and patriotism. Reprint.

Sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale watches from his Mississippi Delta front lawn as the tow's young men go off into the army, and when he is called to unexpected duty himself, his life becomes filled with funerals and the trajic note of the times.

Product Description: Book by Morris, Willie