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June 2000

Note: Prices listed below reflect the publisher's suggested list price. They are subject to change without notice.

Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had

Nonfiction by Rick Bass

Houghton Mifflin (Hardcover, $22.00, ISBN: 0395926181)

Publication date: June 2000

Description:

Colter was the runt of the litter, and Rick Bass took him only because nobody else would. Soon, though, Bass realized he had a raging genius on his hands, and he raided his daughters’ college fund to send Colter to the best schools. Colter could be a champion, Rick was told, but he’d have to be broken, slowed down. Rick “could no more imagine a slowing-down Colter than a slow-motion bolt of lightning in the sky,” and instead of breaking Colter he followed him. Colter led him into new territory, an unexplored land where he felt more alive, more intimately connected to the world, than he’d ever been before. In the course of telling us Colter’s story, Rick Bass also tells us of his childhood fascination with snapping turtles and dirt, and of the other animals—including people—that have shaped his life. Colter is an interspecies love story that vividly captures the relationship between humans and dogs. Like all of Bass’s work, it is passionate, poetic, and original.

Collected Plays: Volume I, 1980-1989

Plays by Beth Henley

Smith & Kraus (Paperback, $19.95, ISBN: 0810150778)

Publication date: June 2000

Description:

This collection includes the plays Crimes of the Heart, Am I Blue, The Wake of Jamey Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Lucky Spot, and The Debutante Ball.

Mississippi Bridge

By Mildred D. Taylor

Puffin (Paperback, $4.99, ISBN: 0141308176)

Publication date: June 2000 (reprint edition)

Description from Horn Book:

In Depression-era Mississippi, Jeremy Sims, a ten-year-old white boy, watches as black passengers on a bus are forced to leave to make room for white passengers. He reacts with dismay, but then witnesses an ironic tragedy as the bus spins out of control into the flood-swollen river. Taylor has again underscored a moral dilemma without losing her sure grasp of narrative development. —Copyright © 1991 The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved.

A Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884: What a Bright, Educated, Witty, Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics

By Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell, edited by Anne Razey Gowdy

University of Tennessee Press (Hardcover, $42.00, ISBN: 1572330678)

Publication date: June 2000

Description from Library Journal:

Born in Mississippi, McDowell (1849-83) traveled to Boston in search of both educational opportunities and employment. There she found the literary world she longed for and formed a lifelong connection with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As a teenager, she sold her first romance for publication to the Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, and her short fiction was published in national magazines between 1875 and 1884 under the name of Sherwood Bonner. She is considered a preeminent writer of local-color dialect fiction by literary scholars.

In this hefty volume, Gowdy (English, Tennessee Wesleyan Coll.) has compiled a comprehensive collection of work by this unusual woman. Included are travel columns and letters; essays, profiles, and sketches; tales and stories; and poetry and lyrics. It is the life’s work of someone who loved to tell stories, loved to write, and loved observing the world around her and the people she met. Recommended for public and academic libraries with strong literature collections. —Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Familiar Obsession

By Caroline Burnes (Carolyn Haines)

Harlequin (Paperback, $4.00, ISBN: 0373225709)

Publication date: June 2000