"A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity."-The New York Times Book Review "This is Smith at her finest."-Library Journal, starred review Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy's dimestore. When she was sent off to college to gain some "culture," she understood that perhaps the richest culture she would ever know was the one she was leaving. Lee Smith's fiction has always lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Dimestore's fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Together, they create an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished. Award-winning author Lee Smith's fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. Now she has written her own story in fifteen essays that are both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one's heritage. Lee Smith began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece. Since then, she has written seventeen works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Guests on Earth, and most recently, Dimestore. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. "With restrained prose and charming humor, [Smith] illuminated a way of life that has all but disappeared and explores the impulse to bear witness that underpins the storyteller in all of us." -People (Book of the Week) "Smith delivers a memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity. Although DIMESTORE is constructed as a series of personal essays, it presents as full a sense of a life as any traditional narrative." -The New York Times Book Review "…heartwarming… Dimestore shares the habits that may have saved Smith from her own tendency to get too "wrought up," one of which was to approach storytelling "the way other people write in their journals," in order to make it through the night. Fiction became her lifelong outlet, a means of sustaining and reaffirming the connection to her work, as well as a way to preserve the rich mountain culture she so loved as a child." -Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Dimestore may prove to be a work that connects wildly with readers. Because truth is often more powerful than fiction, and because the tale she has actually lived so far to tell is rendered keenly, irrepressibly and without self-pity. Lee Smith, the person, emerges as one of nonfiction's great protagonists." -Raleigh News Observer "Now, at last, we have Dimestore: A Writer's Life, a seasoned, open-hearted memoir, taking us from her youth in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Va., through her education at private schools in Richmond and Roanoke, Va., to her life since 1974, first in Chapel Hill married to the poet James Seay, and since 1985, to columnist and literary critic Hal Crowther. Throughout, the memoir shows Smith's spunk and spirit…. Yes, Lee Smith is a writer, and without that, we probably would not have this engrossing memoir. But at heart, Lee Smith is a woman - openhearted, spirited, humble - and it is those qualities especially that inspire and make us glad as we read." -Charlotte Observer "…profoundly readable… Like her novels, Smith's memoir is intimate, as though writer and reader are s

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