Town Histories

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year...

"A powerfully doomy debut" (The Guardian), Shaun Prescott’s The Town is a novel of a rural Australian community besieged by modern day anxieties and threatened by a supernatural force seeking to consume the dying town. This is Australia, an unnamed, dead-end town in the heart of the...

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the AIDS epidemic devastated communities across America, a small group of activists in Shreveport, Louisiana refused to remain silent. Small Town Rage: Fighting Back in the Deep South tells the story of ordinary people who challenged government indifference, medical neglect, religious condemnation, and public fear during one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history. What began as a struggle for survival grew into a movement that brought national attention to a city few expected to become a center of AIDS activism.

A genteel Border South town not far from the nation’s capital is shaken by a series of vicious slayings at historic sites. These include a Civil War cemetery for escaped slaves; a burial mound of Confederate soldiers; a church associated with George Washington; and a museum on the Antebellum Era. At the same time, violent break-ins take place at venerable banks and townhomes connected with the lives of Washington, Robert E. Lee, and civil rights figures.