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 every year....

The Color Purple is the story of two sisters -- one a missionary to Africa and the other a child wife living in the South -- who remain loyal to one another across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life--Cover

In his letters to his favorite author, ten-year-old Leigh reveals his problems in coping with his parents' divorce, being the new boy in school, and generally finding his own place in the world.

"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel uses to tell that tale is a series of ... letters...

"This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative voice in contemporary fiction. This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular, hilarious, and devastating." -- Charlie is a freshman. And while he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. He's a wallflower-- shy and introspective, and intelligent...

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O Henry Awards. 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...

Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along

"Joshua and Lauren are the perfect couple. Newly married, they're wildly in love, each on a successful and rewarding career path. Then Lauren is diagnosed with a terminal illness. As Lauren's disease progresses, Joshua struggles to make the most of the time he has left with his wife and to come to terms with his future- a future without the only woman he's ever loved. He's so consumed with finding a way to avoid the inevitable ending that he never...

"The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher Growing up in 1930's Mexico, American Harrison Shepherd quickly learns that his mother is more concerned with social aspirations than his well-being. Due to a tumultuous stint at a Virginia...

After his friend, Iris, dies from a terminal illness at age thirty-three, PR genius Smith Simonyi teams up with Iris' sister, Jade, to make Iris' final request--to get her blog posts published as a book--a reality.