Reynolds Price

First published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time, and among the most influential.Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland summer home in Virginia, Sally Manns extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal truths that embody the individuality of her own family yet ultimately take on a universal quality. With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Manns pictures explore the eternal struggle between the childs simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomythe holding on and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in these astonishing photographs. This reissue of Immediate Family is printed using new scans and separations from Manns original prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a freshness and sumptuousness true to the original edition.Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of Americas most renowned photographers. Her work has been exhibited around the world and is held by such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. She has received numerous honors, including a doctorate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

First published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time, and among the most influential.Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland summer home in Virginia, Sally Manns extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal truths that embody the individuality of her own family yet ultimately take on a universal quality. With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Manns pictures explore the eternal struggle between the childs simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomythe holding on and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in these astonishing photographs. This reissue of Immediate Family is printed using new scans and separations from Manns original prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a freshness and sumptuousness true to the original edition.Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of Americas most renowned photographers. Her work has been exhibited around the world and is held by such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. She has received numerous honors, including a doctorate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

In the year 2000 acclaimed author Reynolds Price became honorary godfather to Harper Peck Voll. As a christening gift, Price composed a letter to the child, one intended as a brief guide for Harpers spiritual future. The letter sketched the crucial roles which faith had played in Prices own life and whittled down those lessons the author felt were most valuable. Later, Price realized that in a rapidly complicating world, his thoughts might also be useful for other children and their parents. Here, then, is an expanded version of the original letter -- an eloquent, thoughtful, and inspiring look at faith from one of the most revered American writers and most respected students of religion. In Letter to a Godchild, Price recounts how his life has been shaped by numerous and varied spiritual influences -- from the Bible-story books his parents bought him before he could read, to the childhood days spent exploring dense woods near his home (woods where he searched for arrowheads and spied on numerous wild animals), to Sundays at church with his father and mother, his travels around the world to magisterial structures as various as St. Peters and the old Penn Station, and years of study both in and out of the classroom. With no trace of self-pity, he explains how his faith grew and deepened when in 1984 -- after a life of robust health -- he suffered a cancer that eventually led to paralysis of his lower body. Letter to a Godchild includes striking pictures of the buildings, objects, places, and events that have deepened the authors religious sensibility. He has also compiled a comprehensive section on further reading, looking, and listening that provides suggestions for books, art, and music that will entertain as well as enhance this volume. A profoundly intelligent and moving explication of religion and spirituality, Letter to a Godchild is an exhilarating experience for readers of all faiths.

When renowned novelist and poet Reynolds Price, one of Christianitys most eloquent outlaws, was invited to deliver the annual Peabody Lecture at Harvard University Memorial Church in 2001, he chose to explore a subject of fierce debate and timeless relevance: the ethics of Jesus.In two succeeding lectures at the National Cathedral and at Auburn Seminary, Price continued to explore the apparently contradictory ethics that Jesus articulates in the Gospels and in a controversial act of artistic license, Price reimagined the historical Jesus. In A Serious Way of Wondering, Price expands these lectures to present Jesus with three problems of burning moral concernsuicide, homosexuality, and the plight of women in male-dominated cultures and faiths. A sweeping view of the inescapable implications of Jesus merciful life and all-embracing thoughtand of the benefits of enlarging our notions of humanity, community, and equalityA Serious Way of Wondering is a significant contribution to Prices penetrating works of religious inquiry.

Award-winning novelist Reynolds Price provides the best of his winning lot (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) of memoirsa vivid portrait of his life in the mid-1950s leading up to the publication of his brilliant first novel A Long and Happy Life.After two earlier autobiographical worksClear Pictures and A Whole New Lifeacclaimed writer Reynolds Price offers a full account of his life from the mid-1950s to the publication of his first novel in 1962. Oxford University and Britainwhich had scarcely recovered from the severe demands of World War IIwere places of enormous vitality for Price, both academic and personal. From spotting J. R. R. Tolkien on the street in Oxford to intimate dinners with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, young Price was welcomed into the company of the most respected intellectual and artistic circles. Fully entrenched in the culture of his era, Price unfailingly makes clear the connections between his experience and the great tradition of world literature. In lucid and frequently witty prose, Price offers full access to six years in the early adulthood of a rich lifea gallery of portraits and sexual discovery (The Weekly Standard ) and part of the great train of human accomplishment in which Price so ardently believed.

Reynolds Price pays tribute to his literary love of translation in this adaptation of the Gospels of Mark and John, in addition to a gospel written by the esteemed novelist himself.Esteemed novelist, dramatist, scholar, essayist, and poet, Reynolds Price turns his attention back to a literary love he had discovered earlier in his career: translation.But for Reynolds that didnt mean abandoning his passion for writing original work; powerful and imaginative, Three Gospels offers eloquent translations of the Gospels of Mark and John as well as a gospel never before seenan original one written by Price himself.These stunning triumphs of imagination tell and retell some of the most iconic ancient stories in Prices unparalleled literary voice.

On its initial publication in 1962, Eudora Welty said of A Long and Happy Life,"Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer Ive come across in a long time. His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of Kate Vaiden, his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didnt also mention in glowing terms the reviewers fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the clothbound edition of this truly enduring work as a companion volume to his brilliant book of essays, A Common Room, published simultaneously.

Does God Exist and Does He Care?In April 1997 Reynolds Price received an eloquent letter from a reader of his cancer memoir, A Whole New Life. The correspondent, a young medical student diagnosed with cancer himself and facing his own mortality, asked these difficultQuestions. The two began a long-distance correspondence, culminating in Prices thoughtful response, originally delivered as the Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary, and now expanded onto the printed page as Letter to a Man in the Fire.Harvesting a variety of sources -- diverse religious traditions, classical and modern texts, and a lifetime of personal experiences, interactions, and spiritual encounters -- Price meditates on Gods participation in our fate. With candor and sympathy, he offers the reader such a rich variety of tools to explore these questions as to place this work in the company of other great tetsaments of faith from St. Augustine to C. S. Lewis.Letter to a Man in the Fire moves as much as it educates. It is a rare combination of deep erudition, vivid prose, and profound humanity.

For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of Americas most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections -- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors -- as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before.In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed -- for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life -- to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance....A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writers preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose -- the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keatss assertion that the excellence of every Art is its intensity has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat -- passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery Ive found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter -- and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act."There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories -- many of them set in Reynolds Prices native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas," the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons," and a number in Europe -- will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.

A Moving Fable For Readers Of All Ages -- From National Book Critics Circle Award-Winning Author Reynolds PriceBen Barks loved elephants long before hed seen one. He sometimes wondered how that love started....Its been a whole year since Bens mother died, and nothing has soothed his broken heart -- except thinking about elephants, those magnificent creatures his mother loved too. Imagining their awesome grace always calms him in a way that his sad father and closest friends never can. When a one-ring circus comes to Bens small town, he discovers Sala, an elephant who survived a wicked trainers abuses. And soon, their powerful bond becomes a miraculous healer -- and gives Ben renewed hope for the future.

The final booka memoir on which he was working at the time of his deathfrom Reynolds Price, one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction (The New York Times).In her foreword, Anne Tyler calls Reynolds Price an exclamation point in a landscape of mostly declarative sentences. When Price died in 2011, he left behind a final manuscripttwo hundred candid, heartrending, and marvelously written pages about a critical period in his young adulthood. Approaching thirty, Price writes, is to face the notion that This is it. Im now the person Im likely to be. Midstream details the final youthful adventures of a man on the cusp of artistic acclaim. Here, Price chases a doomed love to England, only to meet heartbreak. Determined to pursue other pleasures, Price journeys to Rome with poet Stephen Spender, sharing an afternoon with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Price finds company in New York with a group of artists as he awaits the publication of his first novel, and, back in North Carolina, he begins his illustrious career at Duke, which would span a half century. Midstream is a fitting bookend for Prices remarkable career, and it reinforces his place in the pantheon of American literature.

Ranging from his experiences as a writer to topics of faith and racial intolerance, Reynolds Prices stories from National Public Radios All Things Considered showcase the authors consistent talent for lyrical prose and insightful observationsand all those stories are now compiled here in The Feasting Heart.In the fall of 1993, Alice Winkler of National Public Radios "Morning Edition" asked Reynolds Price to write a short story for a Christmas morning broadcast. This assignment would result in NPRs inviting Price to join its varied group of commentators on "All Things Considered." The laws of radio require a concision that became a welcome new discipline for Price; these are all the personal essays which he has broadcast since July 25, 1995.Whether recounting events from his past, examining the details of his current experience as a writer, teacher, traveler, and general witness of the world, Price demonstrates in his direct prose that a writer can instantly connect with his audience. He discusses a few predictable topicsfamily, the poisonous mysteries of racial intolerance, and faithbut he also deals with new matters: capital punishment, Gone With the Wind, his adventures while navigating an immensely inaccessible America in a wheelchair; and he provides a memorable piece on childlessness.Throughout, Price never loses sight of the origin of either the word or the spirit of the essaythe French word connotes a try, an attempt and each piece here is a well-formed, revealing, often amusing, and refreshing foray into a moment unlike any weve encountered in other forms from him. Were unlikely to read more thought-provoking work from a commentator for a great time to come.

Reynolds Price has long been one of Americas most acclaimed and accomplished men of lettersthe author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and now an unforgettable memoir about illness and healing in this more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination.In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in Reynold Prices spinal cord (The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction. He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that failed to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrested it (but hurried his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life.Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface herea determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writers much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means all) doctors, the return to his prolific work, his own resilience, and the now appalling, now astonishing grace of God.A Whole New Life is a memoir of hope and courage, a vivid reflection on illness and identity, and a deeply human narrative about overcoming chronic illness. It speaks to finding strength in illness, explores disability and personal growth, and ultimately charts a path toward spiritual awakening.This inspirational work is a beacon for anyone confronting serious illness or supporting a loved one who is. With honesty, grace, and clarity, Price offers an inspirational story of transformation that restores faith in the enduring power of the human spirit.

Having given voice in previous novels to the extraordinary Kate Vaiden, Blue Calhoun, and Roxanna Slade, Reynolds Price -- one of Americas most respected men of letters -- adds Noble Norfleet to his gallery of compelling portraits. A few days before Noble Norfleets eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship womens bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty hes long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful.

In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a mans return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival -- and his death -- has on his family.Wade Mayfields parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.

Reynolds Price, one of Americas most distinguished and honored writers, has produced such masterpieces as Noble Norfleet, Roxanna Slade, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now in The Good Priests Son, his fourteenth novel and thirty-sixth book, Price gives us another penetrating study -- full-length portraits of five arresting characters. On September 11, 2001, Mabry Kincaid -- a fiftyish art conservator -- is flying home after a much-needed rest in Rome and Paris. Halfway across the Atlantic, his plane is diverted from New York to Nova Scotia. Two days later, when the United States has recovered sufficiently from the attack on the World Trade Center, Mabry discovers that his downtown New York loft is uninhabitable. He flies south to North Carolina instead to visit his aged father. A widowed Episcopal priest, Tasker Kincaid has been injured in a recent fall and is cared for by live-in Audrey Thornton, an African-American divinity student at Duke University, and her grown son, Marcus, an ambitious painter. During a week in North Carolina -- with help from his cantankerous father, from Audrey and Marcus and from Gwyn Williams, an old flame -- Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and with a world that still harbors much that hes loved but has long since abandoned. On his return to New York -- and in a swift and unexpected return to the south -- Mabry must deal with the near-ruin of his loft, with haunting memories of his infidelities to his recently deceased wife, with the end of his childhood family, the uncertainty of his professional career, the ambivalence of his adult daughter, and with a daunting likelihood that is terrifyingly at work inside his body. Reynolds Price writes at peak form in this lean and masterful, comic yet profoundly moving novel -- one that unfolds the stages of one mans hope for ransom in old familiar worlds that are now forever changed.