Research Catalog

Title

Strangers and sojourners : stories from the lowcountry / Mary Potter Engel.

Author

Engel, Mary Potter.

Publication

New York : Counterpoint, [2004], ©2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 222 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"A one-hundred-and-fourteen-year old woman living alone; a deaf recluse, a Jewish alligator hunter and his New York wife; a gay African-American drummer; a woman accused of poisoning her husband; a homeless, transgendered person; a woman scarred by a dog attack; a Jewish shopkeeper with unfulfilled aspirations; a wife with an AIDS-afflicted husband. The twenty-one linked stories of Strangers and Sojourners bear loving witness to the diverse and vital rural culture of the Lowcountry of South Carolina. In strongly-voiced stories the inhabitants of Coosawaw County - black and white, Jewish and Christian, gay, transgendered, and straight, poor and middle-class - bump up against one another, trying to cope with racial, gender, economic, religious and others, less effable, differences. As each one struggles to wrest meaning from the tragic events of their lives, they create novel and lively views of God, the world, and justice that sustain them in their confusion and grief."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• South Carolina > Social life and customs > Fiction

Contents

Queen Esther Coosawaw -- You got to learn how to read things right -- All that we need -- Let them big animals come back -- Lowcountry cold -- Why -- A soldier's disease -- Rat -- Who calls each one by name -- Philosophy of education -- Unnatural acts -- Redeeming the dead -- Tongues of angels -- What Addie wants -- M to F -- A better man -- What we ought to be -- Dis Aliter Visum -- Those who shine like the stars -- Epiphany -- Strangers and Sojourners.

ISBN

1582432643 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2003020892

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries