A New Life combines ten of the best contemporary writers of Southern fiction with eye-opening new work from extraordinary Southern photographers. These images and short stories portray the South not as we might imagine or remember it, but as it is lived - in condos and malls, on golf courses and interstates, in family rooms and bedrooms, and in the hearts and minds of Southern people. Stories and images combine to make a rich and complex portrait of the suburban South.

The photos represent years of work by the photographers - from the Vietnamese neighborhoods of east New Orleans, to the mixed-race suburbs of Atlanta, to the hills above Knoxville, Tennessee, each photographer tells a story, and the images reveal the diversity of life in the South today.

The stories are a wonderful amalgamation of perspectives on the contemporary South. Julius Lester gives us his theories on interstates and the rise of suburbia. A drunk and desperate clown turns up at a five-year-old's party in Richard Bausch's Tandolfo the Great. In Lee Smith's The Interpretation of Dreams, a saleswoman in a North Carolina mall dreams of romance and searches for solutions to life's problems.

In Tobrah, Bobbie Ann Mason tells the painful story of a woman returning for her father's funeral only to assume responsibility for a child he left behind. The life of a black Muslim family is played out in Marita Golden's A Woman's Place. In Robert Olen Butler's The Trip Back, a Vietnamese family in Louisiana faces family ghosts. A dad contemplates his daughter home from college in Jonathan Bowen's Pulling Jane. Nanci Kincaid renders a Southern Baptists daughter's relationship to her father in Pretty Please. In the title piece by Mary Ward Brown, a recent widow is harassed by well-meaning born-again Christians.

In Dreamland, the closing story of the book, Alan Cheuse throws a divorce and newcomer to Atlanta into a delirious night of debauchery. And, Allan Gurganus provides a hilarious and sharp afterword to A New Life with his essay Toward a Creation Myth of Suburbia.