Overview: Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land-from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly,...

Charles Frazier, the author of National Book Award winning Cold Mountain, presents a new novel. In Nightwoods, Frazier envisions a late 1950s North Carolina through the eyes of Luce, a single woman who must care for the quiet twins of her murdered sister, Lily.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....

"In a country as vast as the United States, place looms large. Steven Moore, a former soldier, writes about place, explicitly rural places, in a way that transcends specificity and speaks to the universal: whether the Midwest, Appalachia, or remote West, what Moore has to say about rural places speaks to anyone who has driven a lonely road at night, with nothing but darkness as a cushion between them and the emptiness that surrounds. Place and how...

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

"After the death of her mother, Worie Dressar takes on the care of orphans near their Appalachian mountain home. Plagued with two good-for-nothing brothers, Worie fights to save her home and the children now in her care"--

"A brassy, bighearted debut collection of twelve short stories about rurality, corpses, honeybee collapse, and illicit sex in post-coal Appalachia" --

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great PlainsFor over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn...

"Think you know what rural America is like? Discover a plurality of perspectives in this enlightening anthology of stories that turns preconceptions on their head. Gracie sees a chance of fitting in at her South Carolina private school, until a “white trash”-themed Halloween party has her steering clear of the rich kids. Samuel's Tejano family has both stood up to oppression and been a source of it, but now he's ready to own his true sexual identity....