Acclaimed novelist Lawrence Naumoff's books have not spent much time on the childhood of his characters, but this collection of 11 stories does.

The stories are titled: "A Boy, circa 1954, and the Hero of the War," "The Phantom Empire," "The Fatherland," "The Cashmere Sweater, or, No Jews Allowed, But It's Okay, Right?" "The Russian Ring," "Leslie and the Man from the Camps," "Kind of a Zip A Dee Do Dah, But Not So Much," "Fascinating Rhythm," "The Boy Who Forgot How to Talk," "Man Time, 1960," and"The Experimental Boy."

In the collection The Beautiful Couple and Other Stories, acclaimed novelist Lawrence Naumoff begins with a long story about a happily artsy, somewhat bohemian styled couple in Chapel Hill, who are, as students, mythologized by their friends as the "beautiful couple" everyone wants to be like. After graduation, they go to Mexico, to the Pacific coast, and stay in a house overlooking the ocean with a famous writer and his two women. Eventually they return to Chapel Hill, and the story follows them in the decade from the late sixties to the late seventies.

Other stories include a Hemingway spoof titled "Men Like White Elephants," as well as "Tex Gets Married in Arkansas," "Fascinating Rhythm, circa 1953," "Revolutionaries," "Peruvian Goddess Crab Cakes," and, "Taking Your Girl Friend Home to Meet Your Family and She's Pregnant and It's 1973 and She's Methodist and You're Definitely Not and Your Mother Will Cry."

In the comic novel, The Longest Mobile Home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the main character Jimral Isenhour is the classic, eccentric mountain man, although rather than being like one of the Hatfields and McCoys, he doesn't have a mean bone or thought in his body, just lots and lots of bad luck. If he'd been the Wright Brothers' assistant, all airplanes would have flown only in reverse, or only upside down. His unwilling but polite and loving son, Eli, is regularly recruited by his father to be a part of his inventions and schemes, such as building the longest mobile home "in the world," or at least, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Mary Hood's novella Seam Busters (available as a standalone book or as part of the collection A Clear View of the Southern Sky) explores the connections we make to one another, from the simplest of acts to those moments that define life and death. When Irene Morgan returns to Frazier Fabrics, a family-owned cotton mill in the hardscrabble heart of Ready, Georgia, she joins an eclectic group of women workers sharing their interwoven lives inside and outside the factory. Under constant surveillance and beholden to production quotas and endless protocols presented under the auspices of "American Pride," the women sew state-of-the-art camouflage for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, one of whom is Irene's son.

As Irene toils under the stress of the learning curve and production goals in her first ninety days, she comes to embrace the camaraderie of her peers, some of whom play on the mill's bowling team, the Seam Busters. She comes to know Coquita, a shaky veteran returned from three tours in the Middle East; Kit, an angel-haired rule breaker unlucky in love; the stoic Hmong woman Sue Nag; the beaten but not yet defeated K'shaundra; and Jacky, a well-intentioned fool determined to be heard. In time Irene comes to value her bonds with this motley crew as much as with her husband, Deke, on their small farm and with her far-flung children and grandchildren. When the shadow of death travels from the war front to the home front, Hood deftly braids the threads of these disparate lives and stories into a lifeline for Irene, as her entire community gathers together in an impassioned act of mourning ultimately giving rise to mercy.