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Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War he wrote this fictional chronicle--"a landscape in narrative"--of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.

The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin de si cle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost biblical gravity, and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives, Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

Stories in this collection are: "Rain Down Home," "Ride Out," "A Marriage Portion," "Child by Fever," "The Freedom Kick," "Pillar of Fire," and "The Sacred Mound."

Shelby Foote (1916-2005) was an American historian and novelist who came from a long line of Mississippians. After attending the University of North Carolina, he served in World War II as a captain of field artillery in the European theater. He wrote six novels and was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in the twenty-year course of writing his monumental three-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.

Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over eight hundred titles to his credit. Named one of the Best Voices of the Century and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.