Author : Geoffrey Walters
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 14,37 MB
Release : 2022-05-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1666794015
How does Gregory Thackery, a novice reporter working for a third-rate newsweekly, scoop the New York Press, the New York Daily Tribune, New York News Journal, and the vaunted New York Dispatch, America's so-called "newspaper of historical memory"? Luck? Common sense? Hidden connections? Even the clueless Gregory doesn't know for sure.
Author : Geoffrey Smagacz
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 23,69 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Appalachian Region
ISBN : 9780615879659
Fiction. As the Russian great Anton Chekov infamously noted, when a loaded rifle appears on page one, it absolutely must go off. In A WASTE OF SHAME Geoffrey Smagacz does not ignore this dramatic principle. Before the last page is turned, someone sadly pulls the trigger. Smagacz debuts a short novel and an accompanying collection of short stories written in a vein that carries the blood of Hemingway, Wodehouse, Nathaniel West, and Sherwood Anderson. Enter a small town where tragedy collides with fish fry cooks, soap-opera addicts, and the convenient but strained friendships of youth. Minimalist through and through, this is literary fiction that scrupulously avoids being literary. Eight of the stories/chapters collected in A WASTE OF SHAME have been previously published in print and online literary magazines, and the first chapter has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Author : Flannery O'Connor
Publisher : Wyatt North Publishing, LLC
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 43,57 MB
Release : 1980
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was an American author. Wise Blood was her first novel and one of her most famous works.
Author : David Hackett Fischer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 981 pages
File Size : 41,42 MB
Release : 1991-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 019974369X
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Author : Hubert Skidmore
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 39,41 MB
Release : 2019-08-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1621905500
Appalachian Echoes Thomas E. Douglass, series fiction editor The building of a tunnel at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, beginning in 1930 has been called the worst industrial disaster in American history: more died there than in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Sunshine and Farmington mine disasters combined. And when native West Virginian Hubert Skidmore tried to tell the real story in his 1941 novel, Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation apparently convinced publisher Doubleday, Doran & Co. to pull the book from publication after only a few hundred copies had appeared. Now the Appalachian Echoes series makes Hawk’s Nest available to a new generation of readers. This is the riveting tale of starving men and women making their way from all over the Depression-era United States to the hope and promise of jobs and a new life. What they find in West Virginia is “tunnelitis,” or silicosis, a disease which killed at least seven hundred workers—probably many more—a large number of them African American, virtually all of them poor. Skidmore’s roman à clef provides a narrative with emotional drive, interwoven with individual stories that capture the hopes and the desperation of the Depression: the Reips who come from the farm with their pots and pans and hard-working children, the immigrants Pete and Anna, kind waitress Lessie Lee, and “hobos” Jim Martin, “Long” Legg, and Owl Jones, the last of whom, as an African American, receives the worst treatment. This important story of conscience encompasses labor history, Appalachian studies, and literary finesse.
Author : Marie Manilla
Publisher : HMH
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 37,68 MB
Release : 2014-06-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 054413348X
Catholic lore, American tales, and Sicilian superstition blend in this “clever, funny, heartbreaking, and heartwarming” novel (Publishers Weekly). Born with unruly red hair, a sharp tongue, and wine-colored marks all over her body—marks that oddly mimick a map of the world and make her subject to endless ridicule—Garnet Ferrari would hardly consider herself blessed. So when an emissary from the Vatican shows up at her door, convinced that her seeming ability to cure the skin ailments of others qualifies her for sainthood, she’s not quite convinced—or pleased. Garnet sets off on a quest to better understand who she is and where she and her unusual gifts came from. Tracing a twisted path that leads from Sicily to West Virginia, poverty to riches, romance to loss, reality to mythology, Garnet uncovers a truth far more powerful than any dermatological miracle: that the things of which we are most ashamed often become our greatest strengths. “A cleareyed, touching fable of a girl learning the hard truths about herself and others.” —Kirkus Reviews
Author : Tara Westover
Publisher : Random House
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 28,2 MB
Release : 2018-02-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 039959051X
#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University “Extraordinary . . . an act of courage and self-invention.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST • FINALIST: National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home. “Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Westover’s] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”—Vogue NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • Time • NPR • Good Morning America • San Francisco Chronicle • The Guardian • The Economist • Financial Times • Newsday • New York Post • theSkimm • Refinery29 • Bloomberg • Self • Real Simple • Town & Country • Bustle • Paste • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • LibraryReads • Book Riot • Pamela Paul, KQED • New York Public Library
Author : Fredrik deBoer
Publisher : All Points Books
Page : 149 pages
File Size : 44,90 MB
Release : 2020-08-04
Category : Education
ISBN : 1250200385
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.
Author : Muriel Rukeyser
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 14,60 MB
Release : 2018
Category : History
ISBN : 9781946684219
Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
Author : Harry M. Claudill
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
Page : 617 pages
File Size : 16,63 MB
Release : 2015-11-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1786252007
“At the time it was first published in 1962, it framed such an urgent appeal to the American conscience that it actually prompted the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia. Caudill’s study begins in the violence of the Indian wars and ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. Two hundred years ago, the Cumberland Plateau was a land of great promise. Its deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands. The surrounding mountains were teeming with game and covered with valuable timber. The people who came into this land scratched out a living by farming, hunting, and making all the things they need-including whiskey. The quality of life in Appalachia declined during the Civil War and Appalachia remained “in a bad way” for the next century. By the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Appalachia had become an island of poverty in a national sea of plenty and prosperity. Caudill’s book alerted the mainstream world to our problems and their causes. Since then the ARC has provided millions of dollars to strengthen the brick and mortar infrastructure of Appalachia and to help us recover from a century of economic problems that had greatly undermined our quality of life.”-Print ed.
