Fiction | Small Town & Rural

Against a Darkening Sky
By Janet Lewis

Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.

Night Garden
A Novel
By Carrie Mullins

Set in rural Kentucky and told from the perspective of seventeen-year-old Marie Massey, this gut-wrenching novel about addiction and family ties offers an unflinching look at the opioid crisis and its devastating effects on a generation of young Americans.

Pop
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

The third and final novel in Robert Gipe’s renowned Canard County series, Pop follows three generations of a family as they reckon with the changing landscape of Appalachia during the Trump era.

How Fire Runs
A Novel
By Charles Dodd White

Set in rural Appalachia and told through the voices of three different present-day narrators, this harrowing novel about white supremacists attempting to take over a small town focuses an unflinching eye on America’s ongoing, fraught relationship with racial and political injustice.

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 filled with humor and grace.

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Sherwood Anderson
· Edited by Ray Lewis White

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago ad man facing professional and personal crises published a modest book of stories intended to “reform” American literature. Against all expectations, it achieved what its author, Sherwood Anderson, intended: after Winesburg, Ohio, American literature would be written and read freshly and differently.

Trampoline
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

When Dawn Jewell—fifteen, restless, curious, and wry—joins her grandmother’s fight against mountaintop removal mining in spite of herself, she has to decide whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life. Inspired by oral tradition and punctuated by Gipe’s raw and whimsical drawings Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place.

Sarah’s Girls
A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek
By Lenore McComas Coberly

Situated in a remote outpost in West Virginia at the turn of the last century, the story that Lenore McComas Coberly tells in Sarah’s Girls is one of place, people, and unquenchable spirit. In this fictionalized account of her recent ancestors, Coberly masterfully traces the journeys of their lives, their dreams, and their hardships over the course of the twentieth century.At

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Sherwood Anderson
· Edited by Ray Lewis White

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago ad man facing professional and personal crises published a modest book of stories intended to “reform” American literature. Against all expectations, it achieved what its author, Sherwood Anderson, intended: after Winesburg, Ohio, American literature would be written and read freshly and differently.

Against a Darkening Sky
By Janet Lewis

Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.