Lee Smith

The U.S. ruling class sold out America to China. Can Donald Trump destroy the alliance before it’s too late?

For half a century, America’s establishment has forged an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party—one that enriched elites, hollowed out the middle class, and imperiled U.S. national security. They sold out American workers for cheap labor, Wall Street profits, and political power. But then came Donald Trump.

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Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader's dream" (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along...

"Everywhere about her, from the traffic on Highway 460 to the river that's gone black with coal dust, Crystal Spangler sees a current flowing from the mountain town of Black Rock into the wider world. As a teenager, she is elected beauty queen, gets good grades, and--despite her many enviable qualities--manages also to be well loved. Everyone knows that she is destined to leave town and do great things. And she does. But no one expects her return,...

"Evenly divided between a book about Smiths process and her life, first as a Southern mountain child and, later, as the parent of a schizophrenic child, this book is interesting and compelling. Despite being surrounded by loving family and being blessed with an active imagination, Lee copes with a mentally ill mother. Later, her sons mental illness and early death brings her to the breaking point but she is saved by her writing. This is a read-alike...

Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork. Through births and deaths, marriages and funerals, the decades of Ivy's life are captured in a rich dialect that carries the sounds and sights of the Appalachians in each syllable.

The confession of a preacher's daughter. Turned off religion early in life, Florida Grace Shepherd marries at the first opportunity, only to "backslide" into adultery. By the time she is 33, she feels like an old bag. But one day Grace discovers she has her father's gift for giving meaning to people's lives and she returns to religion, picking up where her father left off. By the author of The Devil's Dream.

Available for the first time as a stand-alone novella, this book centers on the Blue Marlin Motel in 1959, where Jenny, her beautiful socialite mother, and chastened father share their sunny days with movie stars who are in town to make the movie Operation Petticoat. Jenny is precocious and a bit of a sleuth, so her innocent "observations" to uncover the secrets of movie stars also end up revealing the secrets of her own family. Jenny confronts the...

In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.

Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:

Dear Friends,

Like me, you probably get Christmas letters

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Speed, Alabama is frantically preparing for the event of a lifetime: Sesquicentennial Week. And all her proud citizens are kicking up their heels in a lively, pompous fancy strut.