Books published by publisher Scruffy City Press, LLC

If even a small part of a child still lives within your heart, you can't help but be captivated by this deeply moving novella based on bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe's childhood memories.Set in a North Carolina manufacturing town during the 1950s, it is the poignant story of two ten-year-old boys and their search for an angel doll, a search that turned into a lesson of love.Every day Whitey Black reads The Littlest Angel to his sister Sandy, a four-year-old stricken with polio. Now she wants just one thing for Christmas: an angel doll. Unfortunately, in this small North Carolina town, no one has ever heard of such a thing. Nevertheless, Whitey Black and his best friend set out to find her one, at great cost and for even greater reward.Along the way they learn much about sadness and heartbreak, but most important, they learn about the transformative power of love.The Angel Doll is about childhood reaching out in later life and grabbing hold-never to be forgotten or remembered exactly as it was. Timeless and touching, The Angel Doll is sure to become a family favorite and a tradition for years to come.Jerry Bledsoe is the author of "Bitter Blood" which spent 26 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list (April-November 1989).

Largely ignored upon its initial publication in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is now regarded as a precursor of the Harlem Renaissance and a masterpiece of modernist American literature.Some have called Cane a prose poem, but it truly defies classification. Toomer weaves together short stories, poetry, and drama to sketch a provocative and haunting portrait of (mostly) southern African American life that is as deep and rich as the cane fields that feature prominently in the book. Born in Washington, DC, the grandson of a former governor of Louisiana, Toomer attended schools in Wisconsin, Chicago, and New York. He began writing some of the pieces that make up Cane as early as 1918, but it was a stint as principal of a black agricultural institute in Sparta, Georgia, in 1921-22 that inspired his greatest work. After publishing Cane, Toomer would never publish anything like it again—no one has. He died shortly before Cane was “rediscovered” in the late 1960s. After being out of print for four decades, Cane finally began receiving the attention that it deserved. Alice Walker has said of Cane “I love it passionately” and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written that “Cane is arguably the most sophisticated work of literature created over the course of the Harlem Renaissance.”

"There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer of washing machines. ... He was however a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track, he gave way to dreams."So begins Many Marriages, Sherwood Anderson's story of a man's rebirth and the consequences for those who surround him. Winesburg, Ohio made Anderson one of American's most critically celebrated authors, seen as a leader of a new, modern way of writing. He was a mentor to as yet unestablished authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. With Many Marriages, Anderson hoped to redefine the American novel in the way Winesburg, Ohio had redefined the short story. Anderson claimed to want to leave behind conventional elements of the novel like plot and character, and instead explore a structure based upon verbal or psychological coherence. Upon its initial publication, Many Marriages seemed destined to bring Anderson the commercial success that had so far eluded him, until it came under attack for immorality and was officially banned in Boston for its depictions of sexuality. Sales plummeted across the northeast as booksellers in New York and other major markets refused to stock it for fear of raids by their own local Comstock brigades. Many Marriages is an essential read for those who are interested in Anderson's development as a writer and for those interested in the history of censorship in America. This edition of Many Marriages by Scruffy City Press, LLC, meets WCAG 2.0 AA standards for accessibility.