Take a break from spring cleaning and settle down with our first-ever Home Sweet Home Issue. Dedicated to overturning the newsstand conventions of the genre, our home issue investigates the real places we live, tapping into the intimate relationships we have with our domestic spaces—and how what we shape also shapes us. There is no place like home, especially in a dangerous economy, and our writers specify why, offering perspectives on the homeless and the homesick, the modern masterpieces you’ve not heard about, the highs and lows of home ownership, and the settings that exude our personal histories and innermost secrets. As Harriet Beecher Stowe observed, “Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve.” We are proud to present this unique and eye-opening “house tour” that reveals what Southerners are really like behind closed doors. Featuring Hal Crowther, Sarah M. Broom, Michael Donohue, Vivé Griffith, Jack Pendarvis, Michael Knight, Chris Bachelder, Dana Shavin, Roy Blount, Jr., John T. Edge, Paul Reyes, a star-studded team of contemporary architects led by Robert Ivy, and many others. Cover photograph by Julie Blackmon.

Growing up, Sarah M. Broom was embarrassed by her shabby home in New Orleans, but when she returns after Katrina has destroyed it, she discovers a new perspective. The essay explores shame and the ways that we hide from ourselves.

Hal Crowther warns us to pay attention, folks, the housing crisis can’t be completely blamed on predatory lenders and Wall Street greed. This scathing critique indicts the American obsession with grand homes—and pretty much anyone who has ever lusted for a luxurious dream pad.

“House worship has long been a cult and a vice among more fortunate Southerners, not least in my home town of Hillsborough, North Carolina, where tours of historic homes attract herds of orderly, often elderly tourists with guidebooks and maps. But long before there was Southern Living, there was Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! with his French architect and his Caribbean slaves, obsessively transforming a tract of virgin swamp into the grandest plantation North Mississippi had ever seen.”

Keith Pandolfi presents a gallery of works by Gaston Callum,  a photographer on a mission to rescue the Old South—its structures, at least—from oblivion. His photographs of abandoned, unloved buildings capture the spirit of place without resorting to clichés. Many of the houses Callum photographs are for sale, too, but only to the owners who will restore them and love them.

“Callum has spent the better part of two decades amassing more than a thousand photographs of architectural relics—Greek Revivals, Gothic Revivals, Federal—what’s left of the Old South’s signature buildings. But he does much more than just document these houses; he resurrects them.”

Contemporary architects select the best modern homes in the South

Think Southern architecture is all about antebellum plantations and moss-drenched mansions? This spectacular presentation of Southern homes proves that forward-looking aesthetic creativity flourished in the region during the latter half of the twentieth century. Robert Ivy and a superstar roster of contemporary architects pick the best Southern homes you haven't heard about.

Robert Ivy's advice: “If anyone denigrates Southern architecture, or relegates it to columnar houses from 1856, tell them to wake up and smell the wisteria. The real world of the South calls out with unanticipated diversity—a colorful, fully dimensional world of small towns and cities, filled with houses to reckon with.”

Vivé Griffith describes how she wound up living above the bustling, traffic-packed NAFTA Superhighway. “I ended up in a house five hundred feet above I-35 listening to the trucks, the trucks all night, in the most simple of ways. I fell in love with a man. He fell in love with a house.”

Art by Jesse Lefkowitz.

Chris Bachelder learns that selling a home, even a charming home, is hard work: "Selling your home means turning your life inside out. What is private becomes public. People come to our house, enter it, don’t buy it. At night we sit dejected in our crappy, overpriced dining room. ‘It’s not just that they didn’t like our house,’ my wife says. ‘They didn’t like the way we live.’” Photograph by Matthew Schenning.

Jack Pendarvis and Michael Knight serve up two antic tales of passion and treachery and “ordinary” men plotting violent revenge.

From Knight's story: "You give money to charity. You don't cheat on your taxes. You vote the party line. Barely an hour ago, you were sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, running all this through your head, when that hollowness in your stomach, the feeling that's been nagging you since suspicion first took root, gave way to something more dense, something altogether darker than the kitchen, and you retrieved the shotgun from the attic."

Art by Kirk Fanelly.

Paul Reyes explores the life (and death by fire) of a historic home in Little Rock. Jay and Barbara were deeply immersed in restoring and transforming a building—and had invested their life savings and grueling years of labor—into the home of their dreams. And then one night, the couple woke up to the smell of smoke. Within an hour or so, their home had burned down, leaving "just four charred walls and a hollowed inside." Reyes tracks the legal and bureaucratic battles (the fire started with the cruise control device in Jay's pickup truck and there is a lawsuit pending), the couple's conflicts with the local historic preservation board, the emotional fallout caused by losing all of one's possessions, and the unusual process by which a destroyed building can be resurrected through its parts (the floor's main support beam, copper wiring, and bricks). Photograph by Natalee Ferguson.

Dana Shavin moves into an unusual house, built by a one-armed man, with her husband and their marriage starts to change. But, as she observes: “Whenever I am tempted to complain, like about how cramped the bedroom is, for instance, or that there are no cabinets in the kitchen, I remind myself about Bob Rollins and the hardship he must’ve gone through just to build it. How, with just one arm, he had to power the saw and feed the wood through at the same time. The thought of him building this place always makes me feel better, like the house liberated him in some way, freed him from the larger world of insurmountable mansions and four-car garages and circular driveways.” Art by Michael C. Hsiung.

Karen Russell tours Florida's Coral Castle, a bizarre monument created for an unrequited love; Michael Donohue inaugurates our new “Southerner Abroad” department (from China); Kate Sweeney covers eco-burials; William Caverlee dreams up a Southern movie palace; Mike Powell remembers an eerie, bleak house; Dolores Alfieri moves far from her family; Stella Capek describes her relationship with her Czechoslovakian mother; Richard Schweid reports on homeless kids; amazing art and photography; and much more.

This issue is available for the bargain price of $4.95 at newsstands, in your local bookstore, or through this website.

If you'd like to send us comments (and we love getting reader reactions!), please email the editors at oamag@oxfordamericanmag.com.

Oxford American House Party (& Fundraiser)!

Join us for a special event hosted by our Little Rock friends on May 29, 2008. For more info, http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/events.cfm