Lorrie Moore meets Eudora Welty. -The New Yorker Watts shows us people real souls like the
people we sit next to on the bus people who live down the hall people who could be relatives.
-Edward P. Jones winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction In these powerfully rendered
prizewinning stories working-class African Americans across the South strive for meaning and
search for direction in lives shaped by forces beyond their control-now available as a Harper
Perennial Olive Edition. The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties
that bind and the gulf that separates generations from children confronting the fallibility of
their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again
and again. In Highway 18 a young Jehovah's Witness going door to door with an expert
field-service partner from up north is at a crossroads: will she go to college or continue to
serve the church? If You Hit Randall County You've Gone Too Far tells of a family trying to
make it through a tense celebratory dinner for a son just out on bail. And in the collection's
title story a young girl experiences loss for the first time in the fallout from her father's
relationship with her babysitter. Startling intimate and prescient on their own these
stories build to a kaleidoscopic understanding of both the individual and the collective black
experience over the last fifty years in the American South. With We Are Taking Only What We
Need Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted an incredibly assured and emotionally affecting
meditation on everything from the large institutional forces to the small interpersonal moments
that impress upon us and direct our lives. This book is part of a special series from Harper
Perennial called Olive Editions-exclusive small-format editions of some of our bestselling and
celebrated titles featuring beautiful and unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive
Editions are available for a limited time only.
