Appalachian State Silences the Big House


Book Description

They are known as "cupcake games"--lower division teams get paid to travel to college football Meccas where the hosts make a nice profit from an extra game. On September 1, 2007, the University of Michigan Wolverines, with more wins than any team in history, hosted the Appalachian State Mountaineers from Boone, North Carolina, in the first such game at Michigan Stadium, the largest stadium in the country. App State was no cupcake. Coach Jerry Moore, in the spirit of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team and other memorable underdogs, assembled his team with two things in mind--speed and character--and conditioned them to the breaking point. "We're fixin' to shock 'em," he shouted at practice, in the locker room, at the dinner table. This book tells the inside story of Moore's legendary team and the Mountaineers' historic win.




Silas House


Book Description

Bestselling author, journalist, playwright, and activist Silas House has focused nearly all of his work on Appalachia. His acclaimed and diverse body of work includes the novels Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, and Southernmost. Well known for its lyrical style, diverse and sympathetic characters, and political engagement, House's work is overdue for deeper critical study. In this groundbreaking book, editor and coauthor Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt brings together established and rising scholars to discuss House and his writings through a critical lens. Various chapters address different aspects of House's fiction and nonfiction, including the ways in which he deconstructs regional stereotypes, how he explores issues of diversity, his environmental activism, and his approach to LGBTQ issues. The collection begins with a foreword by Denise Giardina and concludes with a chapter by celebrated poet Maurice Manning exploring the lyricism that distinguishes House's work. Featuring an interview with House that further illuminates his philosophy and art, this timely volume offers an important critical appraisal of his oeuvre to date and illustrates why he is one of the most significant voices in Appalachian and American literature today.




Burnt House to Paw Paw


Book Description

Merrill Gilfillan is the award-winning short story writer and poet whose Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains, won the first PEN/Martha Albrand Award for non-fiction. Five years later, Gilfillan returns to the genre with a new collection of poetic essays that grew from his travels along the folkloric backroads of Appalachia.




Miracle in a Dry Season (Appalachian Blessings Book #1)


Book Description

Wonderful, simply wonderful. A story of love, healing, and forgiveness sure to grip the heart of every reader. --Debbie Macomber, New York Times #1 bestselling author In a Drought, It's the Darkest Cloud That Brings Hope It's 1954 and Perla Long's arrival in the sleepy town of Wise, West Virginia, was supposed to go unnoticed. She just wants a quiet, safe place for her and her daughter, Sadie, where the mistakes of her past can stay hidden. But then drought comes to Wise, and Perla is pulled into the turmoil of a town desperately in need of a miracle. Casewell Phillips has resigned himself to life as a bachelor...until he meets Perla. She's everything he's sought in a woman, but he can't get past the sense that she's hiding something. As the drought worsens, Perla's unique gift divides the town in two, bringing both gratitude and condemnation, and placing the pair in the middle of a storm of anger and forgiveness, fear and faith. -- This debut novel is splendid. The story is genuine and heartfelt, with just a touch of the Divine. A story of forgiveness and reckoning, and realizing love does cover a multitude of sins. Thomas will be a go-to author after you read Miracle in a Dry Season. --Rachel Hauck, bestselling author of The Wedding Dress and Once Upon a Prince Charming, whimsical, and intelligently written, Miracle in a Dry Season is a beautiful debut novel! --Ann Tatlock, Christy-award winning author of Promises to Keep




Clay's Quilt


Book Description

On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore, a coal miner in love with his town but unsure of his place within it, finds a family to call his own. And it's the story of the people who become part of the life he shapes: Aunt Easter, always filled with a sense of foreboding and bound to her faith above all; Uncle Paul, quietly producing quilt after quilt; Dreama, beautiful and flighty; Evangeline, the untameable daughter of a famous gospel singer; and Alma, the fiddler whose song wends its way into Clay's heart. Together, they all help Clay to fashion a quilt of a life from what treasured pieces are around him. Authentic and moving, Clay's Quilt is both the story of a young man's journey and of Appalachian people struggling to hold on to their heritage.




Appalachian House


Book Description




Something's Rising


Book Description

Two Appalachian authors record personal stories of local resistance against the coal industry in this “revelatory work . . . oral history at its best” (Studs Terkel). Developed as an alternative to strip mining, mountaintop removal mining consists of blasting away the tops of mountains, dumping waste into the valleys, and retrieving the exposed coal. This process buries streams, pollutes wells and waterways, and alters fragile ecologies—all of which has a devastating impact on local communities. Something's Rising gives a stirring voice to the lives, culture, and determination of the people fighting this destructive practice in the coalfields of central Appalachia. The people who live, work, and raise families here face not only the destruction of their land but also the loss of their culture and health. Each person's story, unique and unfiltered, is prefaced with a biographical essay that vividly establishes the interview settings and the subjects' connections to their region. Included here are oral histories from Jean Ritchie, "the mother of folk," who doesn't let her eighty-six years slow down her fighting spirit; Judy Bonds, a tough-talking coal-miner's daughter; Kathy Mattea, the beloved country singer who believes cooperation is the key to winning the battle; Jack Spadaro, the heroic whistle-blower who has risked everything to share his insider knowledge of federal mining agencies; Larry Bush, who doesn't back down even when speeding coal trucks are used to intimidate him; Denise Giardina, a celebrated writer who ran for governor to bring attention to the issue; and many more.




Appalachian Home Cooking


Book Description

Mark F. Sohn’s classic book, Mountain Country Cooking, was a James Beard Award nominee in 1997. In Appalachian Home Cooking, Sohn expands and improves upon his earlier work by using his extensive knowledge of cooking to uncover the romantic secrets of Appalachian food, both within and beyond the kitchen. The foods of Appalachia are the medium for the history of a creative culture and a proud people. This is the story of pigs and chickens, corn and beans, and apples and peaches as they reflect the culture that has grown from the region’s topography, climate, and soil. Sohn unfolds the ways of a table that blends Native American, Eastern European, Scotch–Irish, black, and Hispanic influences to become something new—and uniquely American. Sohn shows how food traditions in Appalachia have developed over two centuries from dinner on the grounds, church picnics, school lunches, and family reunions as he celebrates regional signatures such as dumplings, moonshine, and country ham. Food and folkways go hand in hand as he examines wild plants, cast-iron cookware, and the nature of the Appalachian homeplace. Appalachian Home Cooking celebrates mountain food at its best. In addition to a thorough discussion of Appalachian food history and culture, Sohn offers over eighty classic recipes, as well as mail-order sources, information on Appalachian food festivals, photographs, poetry, a glossary of Appalachian and cooking terms, menus for holidays and seasons, and a list of the top 100 Appalachian foods.




The Finder of Forgotten Things


Book Description

It's one thing to say you can find what people need--it's another to actually do it. It's 1932 and Sullivan Harris is on the run. An occasionally successful dowser, he promised the people of Kline, West Virginia, that he would find them water. But when wells turned up dry, he disappeared with their cash just a step or two ahead of Jeremiah Weber, who was elected to run him down. Postmistress Gainey Floyd is suspicious of Sulley's abilities when he appears in her town but reconsiders after new wells fill with sweet water. Rather, it's Sulley who grows uneasy when his success makes folks wonder if he can find more than water--like forgotten items or missing people. He lights out to escape such expectations and runs smack into something worse. Hundreds of men have found jobs digging the Hawks Nest Tunnel--but what they thought was a blessing is killing them. And no one seems to care. Here, Sulley finds something new--a desire to help. With it, he becomes an unexpected catalyst, bringing Jeremiah and Gainey together to find what even he has forgotten: hope. "Sarah Loudin Thomas never disappoints! The Finder of Forgotten Things brings together a rich cast of characters, each at war with conflicting desires and ultimately destined to decide whether, even in the worst events, redemption waits to be discovered."--LISA WINGATE, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends "In a hardscrabble 1930s setting, complex characters wrestle with justice, mercy, inequality, honesty, and the fact that they are all prodigals still searching for the way home. Loudin Thomas delivers a stunning tale of one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history, underlined with a moral imperative to love one's neighbor that still hits home today."--Library Journal "Loudin Thomas introduces a multifaceted cast desperately trying to survive the Great Depression in 1930s West Virginia, in this strong historical. . . . The small-town plot's set against the real-life Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster. . . . giving Loudin Thomas impetus to underline the impact of acts of caring in a community." --Publishers Weekly




Appalachian Reckoning


Book Description

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover