All over but the Shoutin'

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.

But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

• My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South
• Ava's Man
• The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table
• The Prince of Frogtown
• The Most They Ever Had
• My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South
• Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg
• Ava's Man
• Joe Gould's Secret
• This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever