{"title":"Bobbie Mason","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"in-country-book-bobbie-ann-mason-9780060809591","title":"In Country","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBobbie Ann Mason's debut novel--a brilliant and moving book. a moral tale that entwines public history with private anguish. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e --\u003cem\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow Ms. Mason conjures a vivid image of the futility of war and its searing legacy of confusion out of the searching questions or a na ve later generation is nothing short of masterful. --\u003cem\u003eKansas City Star\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSamantha Sam Hughes is in her senior year of high school in rural Kentucky. Her father, whom she never knew, was killed in Vietnam before she was born. Sam lives with her uncle Emmett, a veteran who appears to be suffering from exposure to Agent Orange. Amidst worrying about her uncle and yearning to figure out who she is and learn about the father she never knew, Sam develops feelings for Tom, one of Emmett's veteran buddies. Tom and Emmett attempt to shield Sam from the truth of what they endured, but she has become convinced that her life is bound to the war in Vietnam. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIn Country\u003c\/em\u003e is both a powerful and touching novel of America's ghosts and a beautiful portrayal of a family, not unlike many others, left bruised and twisted by the war. At the time of its publication in 1985, Richard Eder's rave \u003cem\u003eLA Times\u003c\/em\u003e review concluded: One of the questions for post-war American literature, dealt with variously by Updike, Cheever, Roth, Salinger and a host of others, is whether the larger capacities of the human spirit can be exercised, so to speak, in a motel room equipped with color TV and a drinks refrigerator. The answers vary; Mason has found her own striking variety of 'yes.'\u003c\/p\u003e ","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50145289175313,"sku":"CIN0060809590A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50624623608081,"sku":"CIN0060809590VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415398842641,"sku":"CIN0060809590G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0060809590.jpg?v=1750842928"},{"product_id":"dear-ann-book-bobbie-ann-mason-9780062986658","title":"Dear Ann","description":"\u003cp\u003eLonglisted for the 2021\u003cbr\u003e PEN\/Faulkner Award for Fiction\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA Kirkus Best Book of the Year\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrom the acclaimed author of the classics Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country comes a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnn\u003cbr\u003e Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who's traveled from rural Kentucky to\u003cbr\u003e graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently\u003cbr\u003e seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for--a boyfriend. But not\u003cbr\u003e any boy. She wants the \"Real Thing,\" to be in love with someone who loves her\u003cbr\u003e equally.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cp\u003eThen\u003cbr\u003e Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place,\u003cbr\u003e upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects\u003cbr\u003e his upbringing and questions everything. Ann and Jimmy bond through music and\u003cbr\u003e literature and their own quirkiness, diving headfirst into what seems to be a\u003cbr\u003e perfect relationship. But with the Vietnam War looming and the country in\u003cbr\u003e turmoil, their future is uncertain.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cp\u003eMany\u003cbr\u003e years later, Ann recalls this time of innocence--and her own obsession with\u003cbr\u003e Jimmy--as she faces another life crisis. Seeking escape from her problems, she\u003cbr\u003e tries to imagine where she might be if she had chosen differently all those\u003cbr\u003e years ago. What if she had gone to Stanford University, as her mentor had\u003cbr\u003e urged, instead of a small school on the East Coast? Would she have been caught\u003cbr\u003e up in the Summer of Love and its subsequent dark turns? Or would her own good\u003cbr\u003e sense have saved her from disaster?\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cp\u003eBeautifully\u003cbr\u003e written and expertly told, Dear Ann is the wrenching story of one\u003cbr\u003e woman's life and the choices she has made. Bobbie Ann Mason captures at once\u003cbr\u003e the excitement of youth and the nostalgia of age, and how consideration of the\u003cbr\u003e road not taken--the interplay of memory and imagination--can illuminate, and\u003cbr\u003e perhaps overtake, our present.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50163104514321,"sku":"CIN0062986651G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50343683293457,"sku":"CIN0062986651A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52375699816721,"sku":"GOR014509290","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53373729964305,"sku":"CIN0062986651VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0062986651.jpg?v=1750778744"},{"product_id":"zigzagging-down-a-wild-trail-book-bobbie-ann-mason-9780375760617","title":"Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail","description":"In this remarkable book, the author of \u003cb\u003eShiloh and Other Stories\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eIn Country\u003c\/b\u003e, and other award-winning books gives us powerful new stories that capture the restless energy of life in contemporary America. The characters here are travelers and seekers, feeling their way toward, or away from the defining moments of their lives. They roam out into the world to England, Alaska, Texas, Saudi Arabia, or ricochet back home to Kentucky, ceaselessly searching, exploring, testing for limits. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eI felt strange, says Chrissy in \u003ci\u003eWith Jazz\u003c\/i\u003e, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place. In\u003ci\u003e Charger\u003c\/i\u003e, a teenage boy races along the interstate, seeking the father who abandoned him years before. In \u003ci\u003eRolling into Atlanta\u003c\/i\u003e, a young woman searches for the kind of authenticity she remembers from her rural childhood. In \u003ci\u003eProper Gypsies\u003c\/i\u003e, Nancy deals with the shock of being robbed in London. In \u003ci\u003eThe Funeral Side\u003c\/i\u003e, Sandra comes home to try to fulfill her responsibilities to her family, but yearns to escape again to Alaska and the northern lights that haunt her. Writing in the spare, precise, beautifully nuanced language for which she is famous, Bobbie Ann Mason expands her art here in dramatic and illuminating fashion. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThese fascinating stories bring to life surprising individuals whose journeys shine a bright light on life as it is lived by many Americans today. \u003cb\u003eZigzagging Down a Wild Trail\u003c\/b\u003e is a beautiful book by one of America's finest writers, a book full of drama, humor, and startling insights into the timeless longings of the human heart. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrom the Hardcover edition.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50213577818385,"sku":"CIN037576061XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50352050143505,"sku":"CIN037576061XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50617150898449,"sku":"CIN037576061XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/037576061X.jpg?v=1750696327"},{"product_id":"shiloh-and-other-stories-book-bobbie-ann-mason-9780375758430","title":"Shiloh and Other Stories","description":"These stories will last, said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN\/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. \u003cbr\u003eBobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader, said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50218585653521,"sku":"CIN0375758437G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329879740689,"sku":"CIN0375758437A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50767855911185,"sku":"GOR008893047","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001916915985,"sku":"NIN9780375758430","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415739793681,"sku":"CIN0375758437VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53261764100369,"sku":"GOR009902888","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375758437.jpg?v=1751442737"},{"product_id":"girl-sleuth-book-bobbie-ann-mason-9780820317397","title":"The Girl Sleuth","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Girl Sleuth\u003c\/i\u003e is a book for anyone who fondly recalls her late-night adventures inside a bedspread cave with a flashlight, a handful of snitched cookies, and a savvy heroine who has just two chapters left in which to decode the message, find the jewels, unmask the impostor, and then catch the next express to the big city. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this long-out-of-print work, which was first published in 1975, Bobbie Ann Mason examines the girl detective in her various guises through a combination of childhood reminiscences and insights as a fiction writer and observer of American popular culture. Mason ranges in her coverage from the Bobbsey Twins to the glamorous career-girl detectives Vicki Barr, Cherry Ames, and Beverly Gray to her own adolescent favorites--Judy Bolton, Nancy Drew, and Trixie Belden, a farm girl like herself. Mason's personal recollections of a rural youth spent longing for mysteries to solve represent a quintessential American girlhood experience. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMason reveals Nancy Drew (as cool as Mata Hari and as sweet as Betty Crocker) to be a paradoxical figure: on the one hand a model of independence and courage; on the other, a lady, eternally feminine and firmly devoted to the preservation of middle-class values. The girl sleuths thrilled us and contented us at the same time, the author writes. Holding up Nancy Drew as a model of the conventional and the revolutionary in one compact package, Mason shows how the series heroines encouraged young readers to dream big and stay open to life's possibilities, dished up antidotes to spoon-fed notions of traditional femininity, and amiably subverted the literary snobbery of child experts, librarians, and book reviewers. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eEveryone who grew up reading mystery books will enjoy Bobbie Ann Mason's witty, sometimes nostalgic, observations on popular culture, childhood, and the pleasures of reading and writing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50298524664081,"sku":"CIN082031739XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008548012305,"sku":"NIN9780820317397","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52145312235793,"sku":"NLS9780820317397","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53113698844945,"sku":"CIN082031739XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/082031739X.jpg?v=1750703711"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-bobbie-mason.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}