Books published by publisher Farrar Strauss Gireax

A family history in patches and storiesSummer evenings at Grandma’s house always end just the way Sadie likes – with Grandma tucking her in with the name quilt. As Sadie chooses from among the patchwork of hand-stitched names of generations of relatives, Grandma tells story after story – stories of hog-riding and hornets and Grandma’s own wedding. Then one summer day, a fierce storm comes on too quickly to get the washing off the line, and the quilt is blown away. That night, Sadie worries that more than just the quilt has disappeared, until Grandma shows her that all her favorite names and stories are more a part of Sadie than she knows. Phyllis Root’s loving tribute to a bedtime ritual from her own childhood and Margot Apple’s intricate illustrations bring the story of Sadie and the name quilt to the page with just the right touch of humor and heart. The Name Quilt is a 2004 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Urged at the age of eighteen to marry a man she doesn't want, Nell delays the event by working on a quilt, slowly starving herself, and observing the unhappy lot of many women in turn-of-the century Massachusetts before arriving at a decision to rescue herself from the brink of death and take charge of her life.Yearning to attend college and work for the women's suffrage movement, eighteen-year-old Nell feels trapped by her parents' inability to manage the farm without her and seeks refuge in the creation of a quilt, in a story set at the turn of the century

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment. The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Similarly, ''The Comforts of Home'' is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot. The other stories are ''A View of the Woods,'' ''Parker's Back,'' ''The Enduring Chill,'' ''Greenleaf,'' ''The Lame Shall Enter First,'' ''Revelation,'' and ''Judgment Day.'' Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.