In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man's return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival -- and his death -- has on his family. Wade Mayfield's parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.

On its initial publication in 1962, Eudora Welty said of A Long and Happy Life, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of Kate Vaiden, his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didn't also mention in glowing terms the reviewer's fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the...

Reynolds Price, one of America's most distinguished and honored writers, has produced such masterpieces as Noble Norfleet, Roxanna Slade, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now in The Good Priest's Son, his fourteenth novel and thirty-sixth book, Price gives us another penetrating study — full-length portraits of five arresting characters.On September 11, 2001, Mabry Kincaid — a fiftyish art conservator — is flying home after a much-needed rest in Rome and Paris. Halfway across the Atlantic, his plane is diverted from New York to Nova Scotia. Two days later, when the United States has recovered sufficiently from the attack on the World Trade Center, Mabry discovers that his downtown New York loft is uninhabitable. He flies south to North Carolina instead to visit his aged father. A widowed Episcopal priest, Tasker Kincaid has been injured in a recent fall and is cared for by live-in Audrey Thornton, an...

For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections — The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors — as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before. In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed — for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life — to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance....A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that...

A Moving Fable For Readers Of All Ages -- From National Book Critics Circle Award-Winning Author Reynolds PriceBen Barks loved elephants long before he'd seen one. He sometimes wondered how that love started....It's been a whole year since Ben's mother died, and nothing has soothed his broken heart -- except thinking about elephants, those magnificent creatures his mother loved too. Imagining their awesome grace always calms him in a way that his sad father and closest friends never can. When a one-ring circus comes to Ben's small town, he discovers Sala, an elephant who survived a wicked trainer's abuses. And soon, their powerful bond becomes a miraculous healer -- and gives Ben renewed hope for the future.

“I’m as peaceful a man as you’re likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can’t say it’s haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try...." A summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, the deceptively tranquil 1950s, a classic semicomic cast and setting (teachers, swarms of rowdy boys, crafts, Indian lore, campfires), the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher and one superbly gifted boy, haunted by a tragic past yet calmly heroic. All advance through splendid weather, natural grandeur and riotous fun toward a startling fate that none will forget. In his eighth novel, Reynolds Price provides again the kind of voice that won his readers in Kate Vaiden, winner of the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. A sane adult looks back at his life, finds and gives us the interesting facts, the meanings he thought he learned for good on the threshold of manhood and how they look now, in full maturity. The Tongues of Angels is intimate, enveloping, relentless and rich. Any veteran of summer camp, boys’ or girls’, will hear deep echoes, recalling the buried forecasts of youth. Any reader stands to gain throughout.