This story collection—a finalist for the annual first fiction award presented by the Texas Institute of Letters—explores Austin, Texas, a city famous for music, football, and drunken fun frolics— and famous too for traffic jams, anomie, and dislocation. In Long Time Ago Good, Lowell Mick White imaginatively recreates this city, this region. Here is a folksy reporter covering a chitlins cook-off, a ragged cab driver fighting for his life, a lonely jewelrymaker focusing too much on the past—a high tech worker losing her job, a bureaucrat looking for something more. These stories are populated by depressed men, angry women, frustrated dogs, and fearful cats—filled with heat waves and heartbreaks, thunderstorms and belly-laughs: with all that is modern Texas— and America….

Long Time Ago Good

Literature & Fiction

White, Lowell Mick

Literary

Buffalo Times Press

Professed is a novel filled with the struggles and rivalries and oddities and many weirdnesses American higher education--favor-dodging, ex-girlfriend avoiding, grade-dreading, plagiarist-busting, dissertation-reading, office-mate annoying, litter-box spilling, book-stealing, unprofessional forbidden lusting, unprofessional forbidden lusting-fulfilling, lost cat-chasing, wrist-breaking, inopportune body-betraying, boring boyfriend-dumping planning, dead professor missing, committee-meeting texting, student misfiling, classroom failing, hidden Confederate-history uncovering, book-writing, student advising, professional dysphoria-feeling, drunk-tank loitering, book discussion-leading, unwise nasal behaving, paper researching, non-academic schooling, sink fouling, New Years' kissing, celebratory pool-playing, stranger-disemboweling, paper-writing attempting, paper-writing failing, drinking-game playing, incompletetaking...yet, as the characters fight to fit into a rapidly-changing institution, medicating themselves as best they can with sex, drugs, and literature, learning actually happens----Somehow.

Professed: A Novel of Higher Education

Humor & Satire

Following the divorce of her parents in the mid-1970s, teenager Jackie Stalnaker is sent away to live with her grandmother in the small town of Burnt House in central West Virginia. Not at all bored by the place, grateful to get away from her squabbling parents, and something of a snoop, Jackie is fascinated by the people she comes to know and is determined to discover--or at least imagine--all their stories and secrets. "Tragedies," Jackie reports. "Screw-ups. Cruelties. Bad, bad, sad things that nobody ever forgot, things people never talked about openly but only sometimes related in whispered hinting half-stories after dark." Burnt House is both the story of what Jackie learns about the town and of her own reaction to her increasing knowledge, a darkly comic, gothic exploration of a town and the people who live there--and an examination of the stories they tell and the histories they know.

Burnt House

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Books by Buffalo Times Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Buffalo Times Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Long Time Ago Good

Professed: A Novel of Higher Education

Burnt House