Book picks similar to
Eureka Mill by Ron Rash
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Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories
Gurney Norman - 1977
A series of short stories unfolds surrounding Wilgus Collier and his large extended family, as the boy grows to manhood in the eastern Kentucky mountains
Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads
Paul Theroux - 2015
Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America — the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye. On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.” He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families — the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without. From the writer whose “great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself — and thus, to challenge us” (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.
Father and Son
Larry Brown - 1996
After being released from prison, Glen Davis returns to his hometown only to commit double homicide within forty-eight hours of his return. Sheriff Bobby Blanchard, as upright as Glen is despicable, walks in the path of Glen’s destruction and tries to rebuild the fragile ties of the families and community they share. Dark secrets that have been simmering for two generations explode to the surface, allowing us a chilling glimpse at how evil can fester in a man’s heart and eat up his soul.“This is the novel that will live with you day and night.” — Kaye Gibbons“Cancel the competition for the suspense thriller of the year. Larry Brown has already won it with Father and Son.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Larry Brown is one of the great unsung heroes of American fiction... His work is a reminder of a reason to read.” —San Jose Mercury News
Kettle Bottom
Diane Gilliam Fisher - 2004
These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.
No Art: Poems
Ben Lerner - 2016
No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.
Places to Stay the Night
Ann Hood - 1993
In Places To Stay In The Night, the lives of two families are irrevocably altered by heartbreaking tragedies. "Ann Hood's big book, her 'breakthrough'".--Booklist.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Allan Gurganus - 1984
Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature.Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems
Joy Harjo - 2015
Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
The Tall Woman
Wilma Dykeman - 1962
Her husband went off to fight for the Union while her father and brother fought for the Confederates. While the men were gone, outliers raided Lydia's mother's home, assaulting her and stealing the livestock. A pregnant Lydia returned to her old home place to tend to her mother and brothers and sisters. When her labor began, the doctor was too inebriated to come, so Lydia's Aunt Tildy delivered the baby, who was turned the wrong way, causing brain damage. After the war, when Mark returned, Lydia learned he had been imprisoned. Her Mark was a changed man who dealt with demons from the war and harbored a deep hatred for the men who had raided Lydia's mother's home, blaming his son's mental problems on them. Through the years, Lydia had more children while dealing with her husband's alienation and cynicism, hoping that through her love, he would become the man he used to be. Times were rough in their mountain region, but Lydia worked hard, trying to do her best for her children and their small community.
Everything Else in the World: Poems
Stephen Dunn - 2006
In his fourteenth collection of poems, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn reveals his concerns, ranging from meditations on salvation and time to the difficulties and pleasures of loving in this "already brutal century." In language that Gerald Stern has called "unbearably fearless and beautiful," Dunn continues to probe the elusive in the lives we live.
Wicked Temper
Randy Thornhorn - 2012
Lovecraft...an unnerving literary experience." ~ Kirkus Reviews"Thornhorn, where the hell have you been?" ~ William Peter Blatty (author of The Exorcist) In the long and jagged shadow of Riddle Top lies a darkling mountain world—-a world of unholy mirth and madness, of gods and demons you never knew existed. Hitch a wild-ass ride with two runaway teens—-the runty but tough preacher's girl Tizzy Polk and her punk boyfriend Matthew. They might think they are Bonnie and Clyde, but they might also race headlong into an evil far greater than their own. They may come to see things darkly different and seldom seen on that bewitched mountain known below as Riddle Top. Take care, folks say in story and song. Watch your step. And beware up there where the wind doth howl like the hellhound electric. Up there, where Tizzy and Matthew come knocking on a strange door. For nobody knows what awaits once you've disturbed your disturbing host. Your hands are in his hands now. And the scariest thing of all? He's got all the time in this world. A Tale Untold by a Riddle Top Magpie Stark, poetic, haunting: Wicked Temper unfolds like a waking fever dream, a rockabilly heart of darkness. The kind you can kill but it don't stop beating. Wicked Temper is the premeditated prequel to Randy Thornhorn's The Kestrel Waters. "One of the South's wildest new voices..." ~ The Oxford American Magazine
Ray
Barry Hannah - 1980
Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.
The Land Breakers
John Ehle - 1964
Five years of struggle to create a community ensue, in which part of the struggle is just to survive. This is the story of late 18th century life in an untamed country.