Olympia Vernon

Scandalizing her rural Mississippi town when she draws a naked woman in the Bible during Sunday School, precocious fourteen-year-old Maddy is made to spend the weekends caring for her terminally ill aunt, a relationship that results in her confrontations with disturbing secrets that overshadow their community. A first novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Logic

A horrific period from the annals of the American South is resurrected in this novel that exposes the fragile hierarchy of a society poisoned by racism and hatred and shows the power of an individual to defy tradition, in a novel set against the backdrop of a small Mississippi town. Reader's Guide available.

A Killing in this Town

A “profoundly raw and gripping” novel of a young girl in Mississippi struggling with poverty and a troubled family (The Baltimore Sun). In Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield has just impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother’s response is to force her to spend weekends nursing her Aunt Pip—an outcast who lives on the edge of town. Now Maddy moves between her own home—which she shares with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother and her drinking, gambling, womanizing father—and Commitment Road, where she serves as caregiver for her aunt, who is dying of breast cancer. Grievances from the past have left Pip estranged from the family, but as Maddy spends time with her and her eccentric neighbor, Fat, she begins to discover the exhilaration of speaking your own mind and living life on your own terms—as well as the cost extracted by both. And as she confronts the injustice and cruelty of the world around her, she will come to understand both the burden and the blessing of her newfound knowledge. “The rural countryside of Pyke County, Mississippi, resembles a scorched paradise—an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Maddy Dangerfield, who is reminiscent of Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or Ellen Foster in Kaye Gibbons’s eponymous novel, must grapple with a cruel, impoverished existence . . . As emotionally powerful as it is poetic, Vernon’s raw and fierce first novel possesses a beautiful, albeit brutal, lyricism and introduces a strong new Southern voice.” —Library Journal

A Novel

Eden

In this historic 1971 debate, two of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers discuss whether there is such a thing as innate human nature. In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Elders to debate an age-old question: Is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences? The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers. Above all, their discussion serves as a concise introduction to their two opposing theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics. In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes substantial additional texts by Chomsky and Foucault. “[Chomsky is] arguably the most important intellectual alive.” —The New York Times “Foucault . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” —Edward Said

Olympia Vernon

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