Appalachia

Weedeater
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

Weedeater picks up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, and continues the story of the people of Canard County, Kentucky, living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and battling with opioid abuse. The events it chronicles are frantic, but its voice is by turns taciturn and angry, filled with humor and grace.

Weedeater
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

Weedeater picks up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, and continues the story of the people of Canard County, Kentucky, living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and battling with opioid abuse. The events it chronicles are frantic, but its voice is by turns taciturn and angry, filled with humor and grace.

Goshen Road
A Novel
By Bonnie Proudfoot

Set from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, this elegiac, unvarnished, and empathetic novel captures one working-class family in rural West Virginia as they balance on the dividing line between Appalachia old and new, with sisters Dessie and Billie Price as its urgently beating heart.

The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell
Contemporary Appalachian Tables
Edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt and Lora E. Smith
· Afterword by Ronni Lundy

Blue ridge tacos, kimchi with soup beans and cornbread, family stories hiding in cookbook marginalia, African American mountain gardens—this wide-ranging anthology considers all these and more. Diverse contributors show us that contemporary Appalachian tables offer new ways into understanding past, present, and future American food practices.

Planted by the Signs
Poems
By Misty Skaggs

Planted by the Signs brings us the contemporary Appalachian poetry of Misty Skaggs. With a knack for pointed personal and social observation, she tells the stories of generations of women who have learned to navigate a harsh world with a little help from the Farmers’ Almanac and the stars: women who know how to plant by the signs.

Fire Is Your Water
A Novel
By Jim Minick

At age twenty, Ada’s reputation as a faith healer defines her in her rural Pennsylvania community. But on the day in 1953 that her family’s barn is consumed by flame, her identity is upended: for the first time, she fears death and doubts God. Fire Is Your Water, acclaimed memoirist Jim Minick’s first novel, builds on magical realism and social observation to offer an insider’s glimpse into the culture of Appalachia.

Yellow Stonefly
A Novel
By Tim Poland

Haunted by her past and the deaths that marked it, Sandy Holston wields her fly rod with uncanny accuracy as her life plays out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. In this rare fly fishing novel with a female protagonist, Tim Poland weaves suspense and introspection into an unforgettable read.

Appalachian Mushrooms
A Field Guide
By Walter E. Sturgeon

From one of the region’s foremost mushroom hunters, Walter E. Sturgeon, comes a long-overdue field guide to finding and identifying the mushrooms found in the Appalachian mountains. This guide is destined to be an indispensable authority on the subject for everyone from beginning hobbyists to trained experts, throughout Appalachia and beyond.

In the House of Wilderness
A Novel
By Charles Dodd White

After months of wandering homeless through the landscape of Appalachia, a young woman named Rain finds herself part of a desperate family driven by exploitation and abuse. A harrowing story of choice and sacrifice, In the House of Wilderness is a novel about the modern South and how we fight through hardship and grief to find a way home.

Gone Dollywood
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream
By Graham Hoppe

Country music superstar Dolly Parton’s Dollywood is a 150-acre fantasyland that hosts three million people a year. What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America as a whole? Hoppe blends tourism, public history, and personal reflection into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern American identity.

Maggie Boylan
By Michael Henson

Set in rural America amid an epidemic of opiate abuse, this collection of stories tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption. Addict, thief, and liar, Maggie Boylan is queen of profanity, a hungry trickster. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and strength. Her journey is by turns frightening, funny, and deeply moving.

Counting Down
A Memoir of Foster Parenting and Beyond
By Deborah Gold

When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time.In Counting Down, Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system.

Fall or Fly
The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia
By Wendy Welch

Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through “the system.” The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out.In

Fire Is Your Water
A Novel
By Jim Minick

At age twenty, Ada’s reputation as a faith healer defines her in her rural Pennsylvania community. But on the day in 1953 that her family’s barn is consumed by flame, her identity is upended: for the first time, she fears death and doubts God. Fire Is Your Water, acclaimed memoirist Jim Minick’s first novel, builds on magical realism and social observation to offer an insider’s glimpse into the culture of Appalachia.

When Grandma Gatewood Took a Hike
By Michelle Houts and Erica Magnus

In 1955, sixty-seven-year-old Emma “Grandma” Gatewood became the first woman to solo hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one through hike. Michelle Houts and Erica Magnus bring us the first children’s book about her feat and the unexpected challenges she encountered on the journey she initially called a “lark.”