Edisto

A Novel

Padgett Powell

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781480441576
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossoms
Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina , in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother (known to local blacks as "the Duchess"), who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate and literary as any English professor.
When Taurus, a soft-spoken African American stranger, moves into the cabin recently vacated by the Manigaults' longtime maid, a friendship forms. The lonely, excitable Simons and the quiet, thoughtful Taurus, who has appointed himself Simons's guide in the ways of the grown-up world, bond over the course of a hot Southern summer.
But Taurus may be playing a larger role in the Manigaults' life than he is willing to let on—a suspicion that is confirmed when Simons's absent father suddenly returns to the family fold. An evocative, thoughtful novel about growing up, written in language that sparkles and soars, Padgett Powell's Edisto is the first novel of one of the most important southern writers of the last quarter century. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Assignment
• An Assessment of the Stranger
• A Summons at Edisto
• A Question of Heredity
• We See a Fight in Charleston
• How He Got His Name
• The Federal Oral History Program
• One of My Custody Junkets
• We Entertain: A Faculty Raree
• On the Prevention of --ease Only
• A New Kind of Custody Junket Dawns
• The End of Inquiry by Direct Methods
• A Time Like Sweet Potatoes
• Chemistry Never Changes
• A Saturday without Cartoons
• Mullet
• A Vision of Snug Harbor
• Photos For the Record
• A Revelation of Foolery
• We Take Communion
• Taking Leave
• A Farewell to a Shack
• Edisto Was Over
• Doctor, Duchess, Soldier, Mother
• Taurus in a Spot of Trouble
• The Official Hiatus of Simons Manigault Begins
• About the Author
• Copyright