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Nancy Culpepper » (Reprint)

Book cover image of Nancy Culpepper by Bobbie Ann Mason

Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
ISBN-13: 9780812976670, ISBN-10: 0812976673
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: August 2007
Edition: Reprint

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Author Biography: Bobbie Ann Mason

Book Synopsis

Kentucky native Nancy Culpepper boldly left home to attend school in Massachusetts, married a Yankee, and raised her son in the Northeast. “One day I was feeding chickens and listening to Hank Williams and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what,” she tells her husband, Jack. Yet no matter where she travels, her rural southern heritage is never far from her thoughts, her habits, and her heart.

Nancy is on a lifelong quest to understand her place in the world. Returning home to the family farm, she searches for photographic evidence of an ancestor bearing her own name. Still in her jeans, she brings home strange ideas and an assertiveness she learned up north.
Always adventurous, Nancy travels far and wide–searching, seeking. The narrative sweep of her life traverses the turbulent sixties, the Vietnam War, the eighties and the foreboding death of John Lennon, and finally the new millennium–when a self-assured Nancy finally emerges. These humorous and often touching stories recount her courtship and marriage to Jack, her relationship with her precocious son, and the deep, loving bond between her parents, Spence and Lila Culpepper. Eventually Nancy’s marriage is threatened by a cultural divide that plagued her and Jack from the start. But when she inherits the Culpepper family farm and discovers more pieces of her ancestral puzzle, she realizes that her life is assuming its proper shape. Later, standing on a lonely mountain in England, she sees the world from a surprising perspective.

Bestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason’s prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Southern Review, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella Spence + Lila, two new, never-before-published stories, and one Pushcart Prize winner. Heartfelt and thought-provoking, Nancy Culpepper is a poignant depiction of change and growth in a modern-day heroine.


The Washington Post - Carolyn See

Nancy Culpepper, the heroine of this thoughtful, achingly nostalgic collection of short stories that reads like a novel, is a smarter-than-average woman coming of age in the 1960s, when, with unusual vigor, a whole generation became convinced that they were smarter, better, hipper and wiser than their parents.

Table of Contents

Nancy Culpepper3
Blue country19
Lying doggo34
Spence + Lila53
Proper gypsies163
The heirs179
The prelude205

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