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Start giftingJordan County
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Learn moreBefore Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War he wrote this fictional chronicle—“a landscape in narrative”—of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.
The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a Black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siècle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory ,only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War.
In prose of almost biblical gravity and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives, Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
Stories in this collection are: “Rain Down Home,” “Ride Out,” “A Marriage Portion,” “Child by Fever,” “The Freedom Kick,” “Pillar of Fire,” and “The Sacred Mound.”
Shelby Foote (1916–2005) was an American historian and novelist who came from a long line of Mississippians. After attending the University of North Carolina, he served in World War II as a captain of field artillery in the European theater. He wrote six novels and was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in the twenty-year course of writing his monumental three-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.
Alexander Adams is a pseudonym for narrator Grover Gardner. His most high-profile book to date is the unabridged novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, recorded in a joint effort by BOT and Random House under the Adams moniker. He lives in Maryland.
Reviews
“Mr. Foote’s writing is marvelously exact and positive. His attitude toward his people is respectful and human, as though he had thought about them a great deal and knew too much about them to take them for granted.”
“All [of the stories] are worth listeners’ attention…for Foote’s carefully crafted language and for [Grover Gardner’s] exquisite narration…[Gardner] varies pitch; handles with fine discrimination a multitude of dialects and differences in education, wealth, and social class; and avoids overdramatization, doing all of it with seemingly effortless skill. He becomes the voices of the South and provides a strong accompaniment to Foote’s fine prose. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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