55 books match the query 'Small Town & Rural' and 4 start with b

cover of Be Faithful Unto Death

Be Faithful Unto Death

Zsigmond Móricz

Central European University Press, 1996

Be Faithful unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes – and grows – are superbly described.

The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Móricz knew so well and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary.

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cover of Bear County, Michigan: Stories

Bear County, Michigan

Stories

John Counts

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest

In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.

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cover of Bratwurst Haven: Stories

Bratwurst Haven

Stories

Rachel King

West Virginia University Press, 2022

2023 Colorado Book Award Winner, Literary Fiction
“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff.” —Kirkus Reviews


It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.

Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.
 
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cover of Bug: A Play

Bug

A Play

Tracy Letts

Northwestern University Press, 2007

Tracy Letts's tale of love, paranoia, and government conspiracy is a thought-provoking psycho-thriller that mixes terror and laughter at a fever pitch.

This dark comedy takes place in a seedy motel room outside Oklahoma City, where Agnes, a drug-addled cocktail waitress, is hiding from her ex-con ex-husband. Her lesbian biker friend R.C. introduces her to Peter, a handsome drifter who might be an AWOL Gulf War veteran. They soon begin a relationship that takes place almost entirely within the increasingly claustrophobic confines of her motel room. Peter begins to rant about the war in Iraq, UFOs, the Oklahoma City bombings, cult suicides, and then secret government experiment on soldiers, of which he believes he is a victim. His delusions infect Agnes and the tension mounts as mysterious strangers appear at their door, past events haunt them at every turn and they are attacked by real bugs. 
 

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