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I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.
It is doubtful that anyone has been more associated with an American region than Vance Randolph is with the Ozarks. Ornery and darkly romantic, Randolph was always attracted to people on the margins. Few were more marginal than the Ozarkers in the early twentieth century. While we must take a lot of Randolph’s “nonfiction” with a dose of salt, The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, was the first book-length documentary take on the region and its people. It set the stage for generations of Ozarks observations to come.
Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described "hack writer," he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph's first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph's interests - in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and…
I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.
It may be pure fiction, but Harington’s saga of the remote community of Stay More (home, of course, to the Stay Morons) is still the best, most entertaining history of the Ozarks in existence. Beneath the postmodern devices and 1970s-era subversiveness, Harington’s abiding love for the Ozarks and its people shines through. From the backcountry dialect to the intricacies of a century and a half of regional history, it remains – for my money – the best thing ever written about the Ozarks.
Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader's imagination. The Ingledew saga-which follows six generations of 'Stay Morons' through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving-is the heart of Harington's jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year's ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.
I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft may have been a condescending, greenhorn Easterner when he ventured through the sparsely settled Ozarks more than two centuries ago, but his descriptions of the terrain he traversed and the frontier settlements he saw are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and geography of the region. Cultural geographer Milt Rafferty’s maps and annotations put us in the woods and on the streams with Schoolcraft every step of the way.
In the winter of 1818, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out from Potosi, Missouri, to document lead mines in the interior of the Ozarks. Intending only to make his fortune by publishing an account of the area's mineral resources, he became the first skilled observer to witness and record frontier life in the Ozarks.
The journal kept by Schoolcraft as he traveled ninety days in the rugged terrain of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas was originally published in 1821 and has become an essential record of Ozark territorial society and natural history documenting some of the earliest American settlers in the…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.
Harington was one of the great unheralded—or at least under heralded—novelists of the last fifty years, bursting with stories and whole populations of flawlessly captured human voices, and With was one of his highest achievements. It follows the fortunes of a kidnapped girl in the Arkansas Ozarks who befriends the woods’ menagerie of animals, as well as the ghost (or, as Harington would style it, the “in-habit”) of a twelve-year-old boy whose body did not die but moved away and abandoned him. Recommended if you like your ghosts warm-hearted and aching for home.
With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.
I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them.
This author has a talent for using just a hint of magic to flirt with the reader in an otherwise rural, modern, realistic environment. Okay, okay, there may not be machine guns of ass-kicking in this novel, but there is an ass-kicking female lead who renders an Oscar-worthy performance of compelling the story forward. If you want a feisty book with a little less guts spilled (maybe…), this is my recommendation. Although I read this book long ago, I’m always drawn back into it the second I reopen to page one, like a tsunami of nostalgia wrapped in a sheet of music. Maybe on a pillow of bear fur. (Seriously, just read it).
Dani’s met two new friends this summer: bad boy Eli, and a big black bear. She doesn’t know which one is more dangerous….
Dani Moser is a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of being a blues guitarist and singer like her hero, Janis Joplin. When her dad takes Dani and her annoying little brother to his hometown for the summer—a tiny little town in the Arkansas Ozarks—she thinks she’s in for the most boring summer of her life.
She didn’t expect she would meet a small-town bad boy named Eli, and join his bluegrass band. She didn’t expect she’d get in…
I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.
Woodrell is best known for the ominous, lyrical Winter’s Bone, but I’m such a fan that my favorite Woodrell novel is always the most recent one I’ve re-read. So here’s Give Us a Kiss, his first foray into the wild and rural Ozarks of West Table and Howl County. The novel is also a hard-charging, nuanced look into the life of a mostly unsuccessful writer facing an inner struggle over just how far, if at all, he should get above his raising. It’s a concern for anyone caught between different worlds, and we are fortunate that the autobiographical sinews between author and protagonist were severed before Doyle Redmond spun out of control.
"My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place." And now Doyle Redmond, thirty-five-year-old nowhere writer, has crossed the line between imagination and real live trouble. On the lam in his soon-to-be ex-wife's Volvo, he's running a family errand back in his boyhood home of West Table, Missouri -- the heart of the red-dirt Ozarks. The law wants his big brother, Smoke, on a felony warrant, and Doyle's supposed to talk him into giving up. But Smoke is hunkered down in the hills with his partner, Big Annie, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Niagra, making other plans: they're about to…
On Draakensky Windmill Estate, magick and mystery rule. Sketch artist Charlotte Knight is hired to live on the estate while illustrating poetry under the direction of the reclusive spinster, and wind witch, Jaa Morland—who believes in ghosts. Charlotte quickly encounters the voice…
I'm an ‘expert’ when it comes to books because I've been ‘reading’ books since before I could talk – even at two years old, holding the books upside down, but somehow still immersed. I presume all of you are experts, too. Your love of books has brought you to this site. Books became my escape when the world seemed too large and too cruel to cope with. But what makes me even more of an expert, was my dedication to books….that two-year-old loved books so much he would tear out pages and eat them, he would stuff pieces in his nose….Grossed out? Well, what can I tell ya’, I was dedicated lol.
The people in Sweet Mister are broken and derelict, strong and resilient, funny and terrifying. The book opens with overweight thirteen-year-old Shuggie (Sweet Mister) being forced to climb up a drain pipe to break into a building to steal drugs for Red, his mother’s treacherous, drug-addicted boyfriend. We follow through the eyes of Sweet Mister, who doesn’t know who his father is. It’s rumored to be the town’s wealthiest citizen. That rumor, more like fabrication, is told to him in the aftermath of Red’s rage, after he’s torn through the house like a tornado destroying everything in his wake, almost like a fairytale, spinning evermore intricately by Glenda, his adored mother, the most beautiful girl in Missouri. Shug is willing to believe it. Anyone besides Red.
Shug is in love with his mother, and he wants a better life for her. Better than a life of stealing from other people,…
Shug Akins is a lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old boy. His mother, Glenda, is the one person who loves him -- she calls him Sweet Mister and attempts to boost his confidence and give him hope for his future. Shuggie's purported father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises the boy. Into this small-town Ozarks mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce, with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. When he and Glenda begin a torrid affair, a series of violent events is inevitably set in motion. The outcome will break your heart.
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the region’s complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillers—the more atmospheric, the better!
Here’s another book better known for the excellent film adaption, but the novel actually brings the gritty, sometimes brutal daily life in the rural Ozarks alive in the mind’s eye more vividly than a movie ever could.
Daniel Woodrell’s atmospheric story of a teen daughter’s quest to bring her father back for his court date, dead or alive, is a simple narrative rendered with stark, almost Biblical prose. I particularly appreciated the author’s distinctive language and evocative imagery.
This is a fiercely original tale of love, heartbreak and resilience in the lonely wastes of the American Midwest. The last time Ree saw her father, he didn't bring food or money but promised he'd be back soon with a paper sack of cash and a truckload of delights. Since he left, she's had to look after her mother - sedated and losing her looks - and her two younger brothers. Ree hopes the boys won't turn out like the others in the Ozark mountains - hard and mean before they've learnt to shave. One cold winter's day, Ree discovers…
My grandmother had what we in the South call the sight. I have it as well—that sense of foreboding. Of knowing what will happen next. Some call it a premonition, others Deja vu. Whatever you call it, I think it’s something we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. Empathy, telepathy, telekinesis…the list is endless. There’s no proof that psychic abilities exist, but there’s no proof that they don’t, either. I find the concept fascinating, so when I started writing, it was a natural fit for me to combine my love for thrillers and mysteries with the added twist of psychic ability. I hope you love it too.
I have to say it—Charlaine Harris can write a good story. I read all the Stackhouse books, but it was when I found her Harper Connelly series that I was truly hooked. This book has all the elements I love: a complex female protagonist, good supporting characters, and a unique psychic ability.
Combine all that with great writing, and it doesn’t get any better. I read this book and then quickly flew through the rest of the series. This was the first book I’d read featuring a psychic twist, and discovering this new genre opened the door to my writing journey.
Harper Connelly had a lucky escape when she was hit by lightning: she didn't die. But sometimes she wishes she had died, because the lightning strike left her with an unusual talent: she can find dead people - and that's not always comfortable. Everyone wants to know how she does it: it's a little like hearing a bee droning inside her head, or maybe the pop of a Geiger counter, a persistent, irregular noise that increases in strength as she gets closer. It's almost electric: a buzzing all through her body, and the fresher the corpse, the more intense the…
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…
I have always had a passion to engage with the deepest questions of existence, from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to string theory and cosmology. My desire to understand is driven purely by curiosity, and my aim in writing about these topics is to make the wonders of the universe as widely accessible as possible. But scientific knowledge and the advance of technology also has a potentially darker side. It is vital for the future of humanity that science is widely understood so that democratic informed decisions can be made to safeguard against its misuse, and this was the motivation for recommending my list of books.
James Mahaffey is an American physicist who worked in the nuclear industry for many years.
Atomic Accidents is his engaging account of what happens when something goes badly wrong. What I particularly like is that it is written from the perspective of someone who completely understands the science and who is also well informed by his first-hand experience of working with nuclear technology.
Although Mahaffey is clearly a supporter of nuclear research and the nuclear industry, the book presents an objective balanced picture, acknowledging the risks of nuclear technology, but placing the scale of those risks into context. The book is full of interesting stories and offers some reassurance that the nuclear industry is able to learn from the mistakes of the past.
