I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
Kentuckian Harriet Arnow married the child of Jewish immigrants and lived much of her life in Michigan.
Her great American novel, Hunter’s Horn, however, is set back in Kentucky. Rich in local color, the novel’s main storyline centers on the hunt for the great fox known as King Devil.
The men’s challenge of catching the fox, though, is just the warp thread for a tapestry of conflict and interplay among industrialization, old folkways, popular culture, and the aspiration to join the larger culture. The novel, which also proves to be strongly feminist, ends with the resounding close of a trap, which is a warning to all of us.
In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people - the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages".
Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska - with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions,…
West Virginian Denise Giardina’s brilliant Great American Novel is the fictionalized account of the mine wars of 1920 and 1922 in the coal fields of southern West Virginia.
I love it for the mix of the lives of real (albeit fictional) human beings with actual history and allusions to labor figures and other American political struggles and strikes. Giardina, an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, grew up herself in a mining camp, and gives us a perfect introduction to the struggles of industrial workers of central Appalachia– and a grand epic of American life.
“Brilliant, diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, tough and tender.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy—land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.
Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C.J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rose Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines.
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
This is the most current of the books on my list, and it is Kingsolver’s finest. She never hesitates to include political messages in her fiction.
This one centers on the opioid crisis in Appalachia, and, by extension, in all the poor regions of the United States. She also looks at the insufferable sneering of the media and many individual Americans at Appalachian Americans.
Kingsolver makes it clear that much of the devastation is from the outside: timber companies and coal barons who stripped the region of its resources, and now Big Pharma. The story loosely follows the plot of Dickens’ David Copperfield, and never loses momentum.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
This is a foul-mouthed, sexist, scatological, absolutely hilarious novel about a boy’s last year in his hometown.
It is a traditional American young-man-coming-of-age novel, set during the Korean War. The real star is the tall tale version of a real town in Southern West Virginia called Crum. It is a great American novel from Appalachia in its quintessential form of coming of age and breaking away.
It is about friendship, sexual initiation, and growing up. Much of the novel sits just this side of the line separating humor from ugly stereotypes, and Maynard often pushes very close to the line, but always somehow brings us through safely to understanding and affection.
In Crum, a gritty coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls. The adults are cramped in and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains. The weight of wonder, dejection, and even possibility loom over this tiny, suffocating town. This story is the tale of Jesse Stone, who doesn't know where he's going, but knows he is leaving, and whose rebellion against the people and the place of his childhood allows him to reject the comfort and familiarity of his home in search of his place in a larger world.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will…
Kentucky writer Robert Gipe’s graphic novel is about a teen-age girl growing up in Appalachia.
Dawn tells the story of her drug-dealing junk-food-scarfing Kentucky family and their dilemmas. Like Maynard’s characters, Gipe’s border stereotypes, or would, if Gipe didn’t know and respect his people so well. These are the descendants of the hunters of Hunter’s Horn and the battling miners of Storming Heaven.
There is also a strong political thread about Dawn's grandmother who is an organizer against mountaintop removal. The novel has the bonus of Gipe’s wry little black and white illustrations.
Dawn Jewell is fifteen. She is restless, curious, and wry. She listens to Black Flag, speaks her mind, and joins her grandmother's fight against mountaintop removal mining almost in spite of herself. "I write by ear," says Robert Gipe, and Dawn's voice is the essence of his debut novel, Trampoline. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her Mamaw, whose stance against the coal companies has earned her the community's ire. Jagged and honest, Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place struggling with the economic and social forces that threaten and define it. Inspired by oral…
Three friends from dysfunctional families bond as children, and then, when they are adults, move to West Virginia and reconnect. This is not, however, a nostalgic story of making new lives in the mountains. Richie uses his wealth to build a compound with a helicopter pad, a safe room, and a security system created by former Israeli security operatives where he thinks he can organize his world just as he wants. Grace, the most superficially normal of the three, is tortured by the fear that she is going to harm her own children. Dinah, the older sister, marries a self-ordained preacher and is determined to keep her children separate from society. No one gets what they think they want.
ThePianist's Only Daughter is a frank, humorous, and heartbreaking exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her mother, an English scholar and poet, and her father, a pianist…
