**NATIONAL BESTSELLEROne of Billboard's "Ten Essential Music Books That Make Great Gifts"A vivid, joyful, moving window onto the life and heart of an American icon.**In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading so...

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane.Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in ...

The author of City of Refuge returns with a startling and powerful novel of race, violence, and identity set on the eve of the Civil War.The year is 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he earns money living by his wits and performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass, leader...

“WhateverTom Piazza writes is touched with magic." —Douglas BrinkleyAcclaimed author Tom Piazza follows hisprize-winning novel City of Refuge and the post-Katrinaclassic Why New Orleans Matters with a dynamic collection ofessays and journalism about American music and American character, in DevilSent the Rain.“TomPiazza’s writing is filled with energy, and with tender, insightful words forthe brilliant and irascible, from Jimmy Martin to Norman Mailer. Time and timeagain, P...

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate—from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane.Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American f...

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Confere...

At the edge of the world, an ocean away, a sailor named Martel has retired to land. He clings to his most valued possession-a series of letters written to his granddaughter, whom he lost contact with long ago. Telling of their ancestral past, his life at sea, and the choices upon which their lives have been built, Martels letters illuminate the power of stories passed down through generations-stories that changed over time, and that ruptured their family narrative, tearing them all apart....

February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, clutching a suitcase and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her small Italian village for a new home (and husband) halfway across the world in Argentina. Upon her arrival in Buenos Aires, Leda is shocked to find that her bridegroom has been killed. Unable to fathom the idea of returning home, she remains in this unfamiliar city, living in a commune, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. She finally acts on a passion she has kept ...

One amazing year in a remarkable woman¹s life journey becomes the inspiration for generations when she takes a huge risk, follows her heart, embraces forbidden love, and unwittingly becomes the champion of a winged world that is on the brink of extinction. It’s 1903, the world is poised for drastic change, and Julia Briton is a naive, beautiful Boston socialite who suffers a series of devastating losses and discovers that her beloved husband is involved in the plume trade—the massive slaug...