First Edition hardcover book in like new condition with the exception of a small ripple along top and bottom of cover jacket due to shelving  #nonfiction #socialscience #memoir #rustbelt #hillbillyelegy #Appalachia #Kentucky #poverty #middleclass #firstedition 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy (First Edition)

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#fiction #paperback #healing #appalachia #hope #ashleyblooms #trauma #community #identity 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Alabama

In her rural Appalachian holler, ten-year-old Misty's closest friends are the crawdads. Misty can speak to them, to the birds, to the creek, to everything outside, and she understands how they think. She knows that if she could just speak to her parents in the same way, she could stop all the fighting. But it's too hard. Strange things start to happen in the holler. When her friend William takes their friendship too far,Misty's need to connect is greater than ever, but it's hard to talk about what you don't understand. This is the story of one tough-as-nails girl whose choices are few but whose imagination is boundless, as her coping becomes a battle cry for everyone around her -- a beautifully honest exploration of healing and hope.

Every Bone a Prayer

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#hardcover #sharynmccrumb #appalachia #intrigue #darksecrets #familystrife #hauntinglegends #historicalfiction  #southern #mystery

Oregon

"Randall Stargill lies dying on his southern Appalachian farm, and his four sons have come home to build him a coffin from the cache of rosewood he long has hoarded for the special purpose. Meanwhile, like a vulture hovering over prey, a local real estate developer is readying an offer for the farm that will be extremely hard for the heirs to refuse as soon as the old man is gone. And at the same time, mountain wise-woman Nora Bonesteel, Randall's sweetheart of long ago, must bring to light a small box to be buried with Randall - a box containing human bones." "Thus the stage is set for a tale of family strife, dark secrets, and haunting legends that mix present with past tragedies among mountain people torn between tradition and change. In a style both lyrical and beautifully detailed, with a narrative flow that moves seamlessly from mystically glowing Indian lore and time-burnished tales of Daniel Boone to the sharp-edged, sometimes violent realities of the Appalachia of today, novelist Sharyn McCrumb captures the unique flavor of the region that she has made her own fictional realm as she unfolds her tale of mystery and revelation, mounting tension and shattering denouement."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Rosewood Casket

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#paperback #fiction #love #mountaintowns #appalachia #friendship #hardship #mystery #faith #healing 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Michigan

The mist-covered mountains are a haven for four women, but when faith starts to heal their hearts, can these women hide from the reach of romantic love?

Appalachia

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#hardcover #fiction #nature #romance #barbarakingsolver #multiplestories #multiplepov #appalachia 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Kansas

Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her"extravagantly gifted narrative voice" (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth. With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

Prodigal Summer

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#paperback #suspense #Appalachia  #healing #sexualabuse #trauma #magical #hope #ashleyblooms 

Every Bone a Prayer (ARC)

#hardcover #Appalachia #Kentucky #superstition #humor

Come Back to the Farm

Mississippi

The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

A deeply researched and stunningly written investigation of the murder of two young women-and how a violent crime casts a shadow over an entire community. In the early evening of June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were killed in an isolated clearing in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though suspicion was cast on a succession of local men. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the toll became more inescapable--the unsolved murders were a trauma, experienced on a community scale. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent five years re-investigating these brutal acts, which once captured the national media's imagination, only to fall into obscurity. A one-time New Yorker who took a job in Pocahontas County, Eisenberg shows how a mysterious act of violence against a pair of middle-class outsiders, has loomed over all those involved for generations, shaping their identities, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.

The Third Rainbow Girl

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Georgia

A Collection of Songs and Stories from Appalachia

A collection of eleven traditional songs and three folk tales from Appalachia, including The Frog He Went A'Courting, I Gave My Love a Cherry, and Jack and the Bean Tree.

On Top of Old Smoky

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#tourettesyndrome #comingofage #illness #kentucky #orphan #womanhood #appalachia #oprahsbookclub   A New York Times notable book.


A New York Times Notable Book and the March 2001 selection of Oprah's Book Club® ! Icy Sparks is the sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950’s. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will Treed in Cold Sassy Tree. At the age of ten, Icy, a bright, curious child orphaned as a baby but raised by adoring grandparents, begins to have strange experiences. Try as she might, her "secrets"—verbal croaks, groans, and physical spasms—keep afflicting her. As an adult, she will find out she has Tourette’s Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, but for years her behavior is the source of mystery, confusion, and deep humiliation. Narrated by a grown up Icy, the book chronicles a difficult, but ultimately hilarious and heartwarming journey, from her first spasms to her self-acceptance as a young woman. Curious about life beyond the hills, talented, and energetic, Icy learns to cut through all barriers—physical, mental, and spiritual—in order to find community and acceptance. Along her journey, Icy faces the jeers of her classmates as well as the malevolence of her often-ignorant teachers—including Mrs. Stilton, one of the most evil fourth grade teachers ever created by a writer. Called willful by her teachers and "Frog Child" by her schoolmates, she is exiled from the schoolroom and sent to a children’s asylum where it is hoped that the roots of her mysterious behavior can be discovered. Here Icy learns about difference—her own and those who are even more scarred than she. Yet, it isn’t until Icy returns home that she really begins to flower, especially through her friendship with the eccentric and obese Miss Emily, who knows first-hand how it feels to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community. Under Miss Emily’s tutelage, Icy learns about life’s struggles and rewards, survives her first comical and heartbreaking misadventure with romance, discovers the healing power of her voice when she sings, and ultimately—takes her first steps back into the world. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s Icy Sparks is a fresh, original, and completely redeeming novel about learning to overcome others’ ignorance and celebrate the differences that make each of us unique.

Icy Sparks

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#hardcover #history #nonfiction #appalachia 

Pennsylvania

The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland

"Award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us on a journey into the secret history of coal mining in the American heartland. Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy." "Reckoning at Eagle Creek digs deep into the tangled roots of the coal industry beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, chronicling the removal of Native Americans and the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln. It uncovers a century of regulatory negligence, vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety, and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining."--BOOK JACKET.

Reckoning at Eagle Creek

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For it’s age, the book is in great condition. I read this years ago as a child and I have sweet memories of being lost in its pages.

Where the Lilies Bloom

West Virginia

A stunningly written investigation of the murder of two young women--showing how a violent crime casts a shadow over an entire community. In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas-turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America-its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.

#Kentucky #sociology #environment #coalmining #unemployment #poverty #destitution #history #Appalachia #Cumberland 

Night Comes to Cumberlands

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Minnesota

Song Hawkins is a beautiful, tough, but lonely New York City businesswoman who thinks she's met the man of her dreams in Cable Jordan, the superintendent of a West Virginia coal mine. But soon after they impulsively marry, Song realizes they're in big trouble. She can't imagine life outside of New York, and Cable has no intention of leaving his beloved town of Highcoal.

Song's visit to the little mining community only makes things worse. It looks like the marriage is over. But in a shocking turn of events, Song realizes it's up to her to put on the red helmet of the new coal miner and descend into the deep darkness. There she faces her greatest challenge with choices and courage that will forever impact the life of Cable and the entire town.

Red Helmet

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#paperback #socialscience #nonfiction #best-selling #America #Appalachia 

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Hillbilly Elegy

North Carolina

Book 1 in the Velva Jean Series

The New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places—soon to be a Netflix film starring Elle Fanning—presents a coming-of-age debut about ill-fated love during the Great Depression—and what it means to be a woman with ambition. Velva Jean’s mother urged her to “live out there in the great wide world,” and growing up in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean dreams of becoming a big-time singer in Nashville. Then she falls in love with Harley Bright, a handsome juvenile delinquent turned revival preacher. As their tumultuous love story unfolds, Velva Jean must choose between keeping her hard-won home and pursuing her dream of singing in the Grand Ole Opry. Like All the Bright Places, hailed as a “charming love story about [an] unlikely and endearing pair” (New York Times Book Review), Jennifer Niven’s debut novel is a big-hearted story about the struggle to find happiness.

Velva Jean Learns to Drive

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The Story of Appalachia's Disastrous Flood on Memorial Day 2004 #paperback #Christian #Appalachia

Tennessee

And the Rain Came

#rural #appalachia #family #crime #Southerngothic #Southern #mystery #thriller #veteran #noir 

Critically acclaimed author David Joy, whose debut Where All Light Tends to Go was hailed as "a savagely moving novel that will likely become an important addition to the great body of southern literature" (The Huffington Post), returns to the mountains of North Carolina with a powerful story about the inescapable weight of the past. A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it.

The Weight of This World

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#hardcover #fiction #novel #barbarakingsolver #family #Appalachia #love #connection

This work weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the mountains and small farms of southern Appalachia. It portrays various people who find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.

Folksinger Lark McCourry is haunted by the memory of a song. As a child she heard it from her relatives in the North Carolina mountains, and she knows that the song has been in her family since 1759, when her ancestor, nine-year-old Malcolm MacQuarry, kidnapped from the Scottish island of Islay, learned it aboard an English ship. The song accompanied young Malcolm when he made his way to Morristown, New Jersey, where he apprenticed with an attorney, became a lawyer himself, and fought in the American Revolution. The song went with Malcolm in 1790, when he left his family and traveled the Wilderness Road to homestead in western North Carolina, where he remarried and raised a second family. The song, passed down through the generations, carries Malcolm's descendants through the settling of the frontier, the Civil War, the coming of the railroads, and into modern times, providing both solace in the present and a link to the past. Over the years, though, the memory of the old song has dimmed and Lark McCourry's only hope of preserving her family legacy lies in mountain wisewoman Nora Bonesteel, who talks to both the living and the dead.

The Songcatcher

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Obsessed with a nineteenth-century murder in which a young woman was hanged for the crime, Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood suspects that an innocent man is about to die for killing a young couple hiking the Appalachian Trail. 85,000 first printing. Mystery Guild Main, Lit Guild Feat Alt, & Doubleday Alt. Tour.

The Ballad of Frankie Silver

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The Story of a Marriage

During their first year of marriage, Julie and Hank move to Gap Creek, South Carolina, where a flood that nearly kills them tests the endurance of their relationship.

Gap Creek

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#paperback #fiction #nonfiction #appalachia #crime #crimefiction #familydrama #signed

Signed

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

J. D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy (First Edition)

Ashley Blooms

Every Bone a Prayer

Sharyn McCrumb

The Rosewood Casket

Irene B. Brand; Gina Fields; JoAnn A. Grote; Catherine Runyon

Appalachia

Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer

Ashley Blooms

Every Bone a Prayer (ARC)

Jesse Stuart

Come Back to the Farm

Emma Copley Eisenberg

The Third Rainbow Girl

Linda Anderson (Illustrator)

On Top of Old Smoky

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

Icy Sparks

Jeff Biggers

Reckoning at Eagle Creek

Vera and Bill Cleaver

Where the Lilies Bloom

Emma Copley Eisenberg

The Third Rainbow Girl

Harry M. Caudill

Night Comes to Cumberlands

Homer H. Hickam

Red Helmet

J. D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy

Jennifer Niven

Velva Jean Learns to Drive

Sue Sword

And the Rain Came

David Joy

The Weight of This World

Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer

Sharyn McCrumb

The Songcatcher

Sharyn McCrumb

The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Robert Morgan

Gap Creek

David Joy

Where All Light Tends to Go