Rick Bragg

"Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the FedEx man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock and rolling in donkey manure and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg's house. Speck arrived in Rick's life at a moment of looing uncertainty,...

"Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, [Rick Bragg] explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoon bread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of...

Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. She measures by "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. Many of her recipes, recorded here for the first time, pre-date the Civil War-- handed down skillet by skillet from one generation of Braggs to the next. Here Rick Bragg finally preserves his heritage by telling stories that framed his mother's cooking and education, from childhood...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

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...

"Immersive reporting and dramatic storytelling from the middle of the horrific superstorm of April 2011, a weather event that killed 348 people"--