Results by title
55 books match the query 'Small Town & Rural' and 4 start with w
Weave Me a Crooked Basket
A NovelCharles Goodrich
University of Nevada Press, 2023
A beautifully unconventional love story.
It’s the summer of 2008, and thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, reeling from the breakup of a bad marriage, has abandoned her career as a botanist and moved home to the family farm to start a wholesale garden-plant greenhouse, and, perhaps more importantly, to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, now that a shoulder injury has ended his NFL career, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm to Camas Valley State University, which has promised to create a research facility on the land, but Bodie and his idealistic wife, Fleece, are committed to farming.
Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the Tunder farm. Nu gets pressed into service helping Bodie with farm chores and taking care of Joe, so Ursula seizes the opportunity to get away from the farm, accepting a temporary job surveying native plants in the Cascades. But when Joe’s health plummets and Bodie’s finances crash, Ursula abandons her summer job to return home once again.
Facing bankruptcy, Ursula, Bodie, and Nu enlist a ragtag troupe of land-defenders in a festival of resistance in a last-ditch effort to save a way of life that may disappear forever.
It’s the summer of 2008, and thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, reeling from the breakup of a bad marriage, has abandoned her career as a botanist and moved home to the family farm to start a wholesale garden-plant greenhouse, and, perhaps more importantly, to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, now that a shoulder injury has ended his NFL career, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm to Camas Valley State University, which has promised to create a research facility on the land, but Bodie and his idealistic wife, Fleece, are committed to farming.
Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the Tunder farm. Nu gets pressed into service helping Bodie with farm chores and taking care of Joe, so Ursula seizes the opportunity to get away from the farm, accepting a temporary job surveying native plants in the Cascades. But when Joe’s health plummets and Bodie’s finances crash, Ursula abandons her summer job to return home once again.
Facing bankruptcy, Ursula, Bodie, and Nu enlist a ragtag troupe of land-defenders in a festival of resistance in a last-ditch effort to save a way of life that may disappear forever.
[more]
Weedeater
An Illustrated NovelRobert Gipe
Ohio University Press, 2018
A finalist for the 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction, Weedeater is a contemporary story of love and loss told by a pair of eastern Kentucky mountaineers: Gene, the lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics, a family beset by both environmental and self-destruction; and Dawn Jewell, a young mother searching—for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart. Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, in Weedeater, the reader finds Canard County living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the community’s battle with opioid abuse. The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. They are told through a voice by turns taciturn and angry, yet also balanced with humor and stoic grace. Weedeater is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose the things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.
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What We Don't Talk About
James Janko
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Orville, Illinois, is bucolic, charming, and almost Norman Rockwellesque—if you’re white. But like many midwestern cities in the 1960s, it is a “sundown” town—a place where Black Americans are prohibited from entering or remaining after dark.
The town’s most adventurous woman, Cassie Zeul, is an outcast because she has no husband and takes an occasional lover. Her son, Gus, guided by Sister Damien, aspires to be a priest, but he is increasingly overwhelmed by his infatuation with Pat Lemkey—who is herself drawn to Jenny Biel, considered by many to be the most beautiful girl in town. Gus’s best friend, Fenza Ryzchik Jr., a somewhat notorious bully desperate for his father’s attention, hates “colored people,” doesn’t think he knows any, and is certain he can convince Jenny to marry him one day—without realizing that her devout mother has been passing for white her entire life. Events come to a head when a visiting nun from the South brings an African American friend with her to Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve.
The dreams and desires of these characters collide and intersect as they navigate life and coming of age in the rural Midwest. In Janko’s masterful hands, the darkness—of prejudice, privilege, and power—that they don’t even recognize threatens to overwhelm their lives and their plans for the future. This novel forces us, as well as its characters, to acknowledge the cost of hiding our true selves, and of judging others based on the color of their skin or the longing of their hearts.
The town’s most adventurous woman, Cassie Zeul, is an outcast because she has no husband and takes an occasional lover. Her son, Gus, guided by Sister Damien, aspires to be a priest, but he is increasingly overwhelmed by his infatuation with Pat Lemkey—who is herself drawn to Jenny Biel, considered by many to be the most beautiful girl in town. Gus’s best friend, Fenza Ryzchik Jr., a somewhat notorious bully desperate for his father’s attention, hates “colored people,” doesn’t think he knows any, and is certain he can convince Jenny to marry him one day—without realizing that her devout mother has been passing for white her entire life. Events come to a head when a visiting nun from the South brings an African American friend with her to Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve.
The dreams and desires of these characters collide and intersect as they navigate life and coming of age in the rural Midwest. In Janko’s masterful hands, the darkness—of prejudice, privilege, and power—that they don’t even recognize threatens to overwhelm their lives and their plans for the future. This novel forces us, as well as its characters, to acknowledge the cost of hiding our true selves, and of judging others based on the color of their skin or the longing of their hearts.
[more]
Working It Off in Labor County
StoriesLarry D. Thacker
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Humorous and wry stories of misfits and ordinary people in an Appalachian community struggling creatively to make sense of an often nonsensical world.
“It seems like everybody but people from here are sure about what we’re about, and they make money being wrong about it.” The residents of Labor County, a fictional small community in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, may be short on cash, but they are rich in creativity and tirelessly inventive as they concoct new schemes to make ends meet, settle old scores, and work off their debts to society and, in a way, to themselves.
A zealous history professor is caught stealing from the local museum in protest of petty theft; an arsonist strikes it lucky—twice; a skilled leatherworker saddles a turkey and finds a rider; an angel aspires to be a punk rock Roller Derby princess; a grieving artist carves a miracle into a roadside rock face; and affable Uncle Archie produces a seemingly unending supply of new and bizarre items to display in his Odditorium.
More than a collection of tales, Working It Off in Labor County assembles memorable characters who recur across these seventeen linked stories, sharing in one another’s struggles and stumbling upon humor and mystery, the grotesque and the divine, each in many forms.
“It seems like everybody but people from here are sure about what we’re about, and they make money being wrong about it.” The residents of Labor County, a fictional small community in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, may be short on cash, but they are rich in creativity and tirelessly inventive as they concoct new schemes to make ends meet, settle old scores, and work off their debts to society and, in a way, to themselves.
A zealous history professor is caught stealing from the local museum in protest of petty theft; an arsonist strikes it lucky—twice; a skilled leatherworker saddles a turkey and finds a rider; an angel aspires to be a punk rock Roller Derby princess; a grieving artist carves a miracle into a roadside rock face; and affable Uncle Archie produces a seemingly unending supply of new and bizarre items to display in his Odditorium.
More than a collection of tales, Working It Off in Labor County assembles memorable characters who recur across these seventeen linked stories, sharing in one another’s struggles and stumbling upon humor and mystery, the grotesque and the divine, each in many forms.
[more]