Appalachian Echoes
Thomas E. Douglass, series fiction editor

“Very real and tremendously moving. . . . Not only an obvious brief for the unfortunate but a well told and honest story.” —New York Times

“Hubert Skidmore, a native West Virginian, wrote as a witness from inside the belly of the beast. His gift is for pitch-perfect dialogue, a varied cast of characters, and the calling up of emotion, of anger, fear, dread, and love. To encounter this novel at last is a sort of resurrection, both for its persecuted author and the Depression poor whose lives it evokes.” —Denise Giardina, author of The Unquiet Earth and Storming Heaven

The building of a tunnel at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, beginning in 1930 has been called the worst industrial disaster in American history: more died there than in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Sunshine and Farmington mine disasters combined. And when native West Virginian Hubert Skidmore tried to tell the real story in his 1941 novel, Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation apparently convinced publisher Doubleday, Doran & Co. to pull the book from publication after only a few hundred copies had appeared.

Now the Appalachian Echoes series makes Hawk’s Nest available to a new generation of readers. This is the riveting tale of starving men and women making their way from all over the Depression-era United States to the hope and promise of jobs and a new life. What they find in West Virginia is “tunnelitis,” or silicosis, a disease which killed at least seven hundred workers—probably many more—a large number of them African American, virtually all of them poor. Skidmore’s roman à clef provides a narrative with emotional drive, interwoven with individual stories that capture the hopes and the desperation of the Depression: the Reips who come from the farm with their pots and pans and hard-working children, the immigrants Pete and Anna, kind waitress Lessie Lee, and “hobos” Jim Martin, “Long” Legg, and Owl Jones, the last of whom, as an African American, receives the worst treatment. This important story of conscience encompasses labor history, Appalachian studies, and literary finesse.

Hubert Skidmore (1909–1946) was the author of five other novels: I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (1936), Heaven Came So Near (1938), River Rising (1939), Hill Doctor (1950), and Hill Lawyer (1942). He died in a house fire at the age of thirty-seven.

The newest novel by Elisabeth Sheffield, the award-winning author of Gone and Fort Da

What does it mean to really live? Or not?
 
Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husband’s death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifter’s dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow “revenants.”
 
Their intertwined stories explore the mistakes, miscarriages, inadequacies, and defeats that may have led to their divorce, including his failure (according to her) to “fully live.”
 
As it investigates the theme of what it means to “really live” or not, Elisabeth Sheffield’s brilliant new novel is also an exploration of virtual reality in the sense of the experience provided by literature. It is a novel awash in a multitude of voices, from the obscenity-laced, Nabokovian soliloquys of the dead Ukrainian doctor, to the trade-school / midcentury-romance-novel-constrained style of his dead mother-in-law.

A timely new novel evocative of the biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist by a major American writer.

Hugh Helton, a prosperous attorney in a progressive town, has married his brother's ex-wife, Nora. As Hugh negotiates his relationships with his new spouse, her daughter, Jean, and parish priest Father John Riley, Nora’s growing hate for the church into which they were all born and from which they have all lapsed drives her to desperate acts of deceit and manipulation.

Father Riley himself wrestles with his own sense of purpose and mission. But when Nora attempts to discredit him as an authority figure in the minds of both her husband and their community, she uses her devoted daughter as the springboard for a series of accusations against the priest that has catastrophic results for all involved.

Grappling with issues of faith, trust, family loyalty, child molestation, and scandal in the Catholic Church, Herod’s Wife is a timely exploration of subjects from today's headlines. It illuminates the isolation and search for meaning of characters young and old, innocent and experienced, in a rapidly changing and bewildering southern landscape. Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Soul's Rising, writes, “The main plot revolves around a mother pressuring a child to express her will in a more concrete way than she would or could herself—so that the child ultimately commits acts which are both criminal and morally horrifying. . . . [Herod’s Wife] is a morality play set in contemporary conditions, with its eye on eternal verities.”

Madison Jones is the author of 10 previous novels, including An Exile and A Cry of Absence. He has won the T. S. Eliot Award from the Ingersoll Foundation, the Michael Shaara Award from the United States Civil War Center, and the Harper Lee Award.

The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

It’s summer on the South Side of Chicago, and ten-year-old boys Earl and Wilford are frequently courtside watching their role model Nathaniel “Cornbread” Hamilton as he prepares to leave for college on a basketball scholarship. Their world comes crashing down in an alley when two cops—one white, one black—mistake Cornbread for a fleeing burglary suspect. What follows threatens to tear apart the community. Earl and Wilford know what happened, but will they stand up for their hero in a city in which power trumps justice, and each player must decide whether to fold to the system, or risk losing it all?

Instantly recognized as a gritty classic when it was first published in 1966, Hog Butcher was later adapted for the 1975 film Cornbread, Earl and Me. This new edition brings back into print Fair’s startlingly relevant indictment of Chicago’s inequalities.

"How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel."
---Rick Bass

"How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit."
---Pam Houston


How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself.

In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son.

While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him.

With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.

A classic of Japanese speculative fiction that blurs the line between consumption and creation when a cyborg assumes the form and spirit of a murdered child

Until he escaped, he had been called “Sample B #3,” but he had never liked this name. That would surprise them—that he could feel one way or another about it. He was designed to reshape himself based on whatever life forms he ingested; he was not made to think, and certainly not to assume the shape of a repair technician whose cells he had sampled and then simply walk out of the secure compound.

Artificial Intelligence is all too real in this classic of Japanese science fiction by Mariko Ōhara. Jonah, a child murdered by her mother, has become the spirit of an AI-controlled house where the rogue cyborg once known as Sample B #3 takes refuge and, making a meal of the dead girl buried under the house, takes Jonah’s form. On faraway Planet Caritas, an outpost of human civilization, the female AI system that governs society has become insane. Meanwhile, the threat of the Adiaptron Empire, the machine race that #3 was built to fight, remains. 

With the familiar strangeness of a fairy tale, Ōhara’s novel traverses the mysterious distance between body and mind, between the mechanics of life and the ghost in the machine, between the infinitesimal and infinity. The child as mother, the mother as monster, the monster as hero: this shape-shifting story of nourishment, nurture, and parturition is a rare feminist work of speculative fiction and received the prestigious Seiun (Nebula) Award in 1991. Hybrid Child is the first English translation of a major work of science fiction by a female Japanese author.