Books of Passage
27 North Carolina Writers on the
Books that Changed Their Lives

Edited by David Perkins

978-1-878086-53-2
1-878086-53-7
$22.95 hardcover
 6" x 9" 
204 pages  black-and-white illustrations

Down Home Press
Raleigh News & Observer

Hurlburt's Bible taught me the shape of urgent plot with serious issues at stake. It briefed me at a young age on the many Biblical allusions to be later found in western literature....Though I could not have verbalized it then, Hurlburt convinced me that individuals mattered, their biographies were significant, their small lives passed under the eye of God, and that even a story could be a vessel for truth. No, not 'could,' but 'should.' --Doris Betts

"As W. H. Auden once said, we don't read books, they read us," David Perkins writes in his introduction to Books of Passage.

"A good book takes us off the shelf, dusts us off, and turns our pages until it finds something with a capacity for feeling, a sense of wonder or beauty that we hadn't suspected was in us."

How these books find us and change our lives is the subject of this remarkable collection from some of America's finest writers.

For Reynolds Price, this book was Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. He read it at 15 "in a powerless unbroken trance," and it left him with "a  bursting head of steamy new knowledge. I'd suddenly learned, with just my eyes and my fresh young memory, all I'd ever know about self-deceived passion and the death it entails."

For Lee Smith, it was Appalachian writer James Still's River of Earth. She finished the novel and burst into tears. "Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact, it didn't seem like a book at all. River of Earth was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I'd grown up among."

For Tim McLaurin, there were two books, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and William Kennedy's Ironweed. Both were from authors whose "stories of misfits and deadbeats and heroes showed me that my own 'redneck,' hard-living Southerners have stories to tell, and that their lives are important as long as I write from the heart."

Anybody who has ever been chosen by a book and felt its transforming power is sure to be seized by this one.

Authors featured in Books of Passage include:

about the editor and illustrator
David Perkins is the former book editor of The News & Observer. Since 1991, he has also reviewed classical music for the paper. A graduate of Yale University, Perkins is a former assistant editor of the New Leader in New York City and a former reporter for the Anniston (AL) Star. Since 1991, he has lectured on journalism in the English department at N.C. State University. He is also the editor of Raleigh: A Living History of North Carolina's Capital and Pete and Shirley: The Great Tar Heel Novel.

David Terry, a native of East Tennessee, holds degrees from the University of the South, Duke University, the University of Virginia, and the Breadloaf School. A writer, teacher, and artist, he lives in Durham.