Ever since I was a kid tagging along with my contractor Dad to the construction site, I’ve been in love with the physical act of creating and building. All novels are stories of making and unmaking: selves, relationships, futures, worlds. I’m especially intrigued by the subset of writings that foreground this process, novels that build things, novels in which something is convincingly, authoritatively, made, and we’re jacked into, however briefly, the experience or process of work. That’s the gift of these maker novels: they offer glimpses of the human mind figuring out its world in a practical, hands-on sort of way.
I had read Melville’s Billy Budd as a school assignment, so I thought I knew what I was in for with Moby-Dick: sailors, the arcane and elided names of ship parts, and one man’s vendetta against a whale. What I wasn’t expecting was the deadly, gore-filled business of whaling. The cetology chapter blew my mind and forever altered my understanding of what I could expect from a novel. I remain in awe of the impossibility of the goal that took men out to sea with eighteenth-century technology to hunt animals as large as their boats, equally unbelieving at the terrible and disastrous efficacy with which they succeeded at their task.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
The beauty of craft and human labor is a theme that runs through Michael Ondaatje’s novels. His The English Patient is a creation as lovely as the paintings that the mysterious burned patient recalls during his convalescence. I’d never given much thought to WWII bomb defusal until I read the Kip section, but in the decades since, it’s never left my imagination. Draw a Venn diagram comprised of a compelling story, beautiful language, and the practical ballet of technical work—Ondaatje resides right at its center.
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.
In Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary, we get glimpses of the American railway being built, one painful railroad tie at a time, hewn from the raw landscape at a cost of human misery and lives. This novel is funny, poignant, and serves up a full course of rich, historical story that never lets you go, whether giving insights into the tough realities faced by the suffragist movement or the grim mistreatment of Chinese workers as they built the western railways.
In the Old West in 1873, a woman of indeterminate age and great ugliness appears without warning in the camp of Chinese railway workers, babbling incomprehensibly. Chin Ah Kin thinks she may be an immortal sent to enchant him - his more practical uncle sees trouble.
I was in my mid-twenties when I fell under the sway of the old-school master of western writing, Wallace Stegner. His Angle of Repose is a triumph, mixing elements of failed love and mine engineering to tell a tale in which the raw material of the West is carved into its modern shape. The story captures the struggles of marriage and tribulations of making a home out on the frontier of American civilization. Concrete is invented, no less.
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
In Serena, Ron Rash gives us a vivid look at an industry largely concerned with un-making: the timber industry of 1930s North Carolina. Through lush descriptions of vast, virgin tracts spread across Blue Ridge mountain vistas, he captures the heartbreak of it. There are rattlesnakes and widow-makers and all manner of axes and saws.
George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together in a rural logging town. But Serena Pemberton is unlike any woman this town has ever seen: overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes and even saving her husband in the wilderness. So when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she is determined that her intensely passionate marriage will not unravel. A course of events unfolds that will change the lives of everyone in their rural community and bring this riveting tale of love and revenge to its shocking reckoning.
Amidst construction of a federal dam in rural Tennessee, Nathan, an engineer hiding from his past, meets Claire, a small-town housewife struggling to find her footing in the newly-electrified, job-hungry, post-Depression South. As Nathan wrestles with the burdens of a secret guilt and tangled love, Claire struggles to balance motherhood and a newfound freedom that awakens ambitions and a sexuality she hadn’t known she possessed. The arrival of electricity in the rural community, where prostitution and dog-fighting are commonplace, thrusts together modern and backcountry values. Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place.
A retired English teacher has come home to Appalachia, a land of industrial disaster and natural beauty. He has been enticed with stories of Wildcat’s transformation: of the collective action embodied in Hotel Wildcat as well as the artisanal pursuits springing to life in the old iron mill. But in returning, he must confront his dark memories: the lost love of his hippie chic girlfriend not to mention the lost trust between his middle-class family and working-class Wildcat.
Written in the lyrical grit so characteristic of America’s Rust Belt, Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance is a testament to the redemptive potential…
Journey into Appalachia's Heart: Love, Loss, and the Resilience of a Forgotten Land
Discover the captivating allure of the Appalachian region as Jeffrey Dunn skillfully weaves a tale of love, loss, and redemption in his exquisitely crafted literary fiction masterpiece, Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance. Immerse yourself in the depths of the rust belt's rugged landscapes, where the echoes of industrial disaster intertwine with the sublime beauty of nature, all while the characters navigate the delicate dance between past and future.
In this poignant narrative, our protagonist, a retired English teacher, returns to his roots, lured back to the once-shuttered Hotel…
