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Lawlessness roams the rural, god-fearing landscape of Ohio and West Virginia, inhabitated by the likes of Pollock's deranged-yet-compelling cast of characters--a husband and wife who take vacations to murder hitchhikers, a faux preacher and his crippled accomplice on the lam for manslaughter, and an orphan with a penchant for exacting violent justice.

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,...

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most....

"Rural America is at a crossroads: either it will manage to sustain itself long-term, or--as current trends suggest--it will continue to disappear through depopulation and urbanization. There have been calls for economic redevelopment, but even with these proposals, J. Tom Mueller argues that policymakers, politicians, and academics rarely make a clear case for why rural America matters and is worth saving in the first place. In this provocative book,...

"Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady...

"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....

"[T]he German forester [Peter Wohlleben] invites readers into his home for the first time in Our Little Farm, describing the steps he and his wife, Miriam, have taken to live sustainably and in harmony with nature. Peter and Miriam moved from the city to a remote forest lodge in the early nineties. Amidst juggling careers and raising a young family, they learned how to plant and rotate crops, harvest and preserve nature's bounty, and tend to the...

Through most of its history, America has been a rural nation, largely made up of farmers. David B. Danbom's Born in the Country was the first-and is still the only-general history of rural America. Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, the book masterfully integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions about the American experience. Danbom employs the stories of particular...

Three stories taking place in a mining town in West Virginia intertwine, examining what it means to live, make connections, deal with trauma, and do more than just exist.

A chronicle based on four years of reporting follows five teenage girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard--Washington County, Maine.