Rural America

In 2013, Ayaz Virji left a comfortable job at an East Coast hospital and moved to a town of 1,400 in Minnesota, feeling called to address the shortage of doctors in rural America. But in 2016, this decision was tested when the reliably blue, working-class county swung for Donald Trump. Virji watched in horror as his children faced anti-Muslim remarks at school and some of his most loyal patients began questioning whether he belonged in the community. Virji wanted out. But in 2017, a local pastor invited him to speak at her church....

What is a normal life, anyway? Perfect parents, who never argued or made a mistake? Some 2.2 perfectly behaved children who magically morphed into honor students, then doctors and lawyers with no problems, or nary a regret? All this, evolving from the safety of some picket fence inside the boundaries of which never a harsh word was spoken? How far back must you go in your family before hitting grief or hurt? Steve Watkins never knew what to call it, but he knew something about growing up on a small rural farm in the 1980s felt different. Something strange and out of the ordinary.

A dying man, Hank Peyton, tells his son Jerry Peyton that, after a lifetime of evil deeds, his only gift to his son will be his extremely valuable gun called The Voice of La Paloma. When Jerry is wrongfully accused of horse thievery, a cunning sheriff blackmails Jerry into stealing the gun from his father in exchange for a clean slate, even though the sheriff has already found the real horse thief.

Uncle Sam’s Plantation is an incisive look at how government manipulates, controls, and ultimately devastates the lives of the poor—and what Americans must do to stop it. Once a hustler and welfare addict who was chewed up and spit out by the ruthless welfare system, Star Parker sheds much needed light on the bungled bureaucratic attempts to end poverty and reveals the insidious deceptions perpetrated by self-serving politicians.

Barney Dwyer is a gentle giant who has yet to find a place in the world. Capturing two notorious outlaws has made a hero of him, so much so that rancher Robert Parmelee offers him a job on his ranch to put a stop to persistent rustling. Taking the job promises an income sufficient for Barney to marry his sweetheart. But this promise for the future falls into jeopardy when the outlaws escape, determined to kill Barney.

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in America.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immigrants, educators, environmentalists, artists, public servants, librarians, businesspeople, city planners, students, and entrepreneurs to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign. The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems, but it is also crafting solutions.

From one of the most beloved Western authors comes an epic historical tale of adventure and romance in the great wilderness. Against the epic backdrop of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad across plains and deserts and through the mountains to meet up with the Southern Pacific in Utah comes a sprawling, historical tale. Warren Neale is a brilliant civil engineer who is constantly confronted with construction problems. He is sided by Larry Red King, a Texas gunfighter and friend.

Rural Church RESCUE speaks directly to churches struggling with these issues. Speaking from his experience as both a rural church pastor and firefighter, Jon Sanders presents a unique perspective on these common problems facing the rural church. Using a metaphor drawn from the world of the fire service, Sanders outlines six principles necessary for rural churches to be healthy and reclaim the vital role God has called them to in their communities.

Allison: When I left for California, I gave myself a new name and never looked back. Now my carefully crafted good-girl image is getting torn to shreds in the press thanks to my Oscar-winning A-hole of an ex-boyfriend. So I escape to the only safe haven I know and trust - my hometown - to take a breather while I plot my triumphant Hollywood comeback. However, when I arrive at my parents’ house, Jackson Burke answers the door instead. And suddenly the past comes rushing back.... Jackson: First kiss. First time. First love. Allison Murphy and I shared a lot of firsts.

First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of 19 women in 20th-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence. They are wives, widows, and daughters of coal miners; factory hands, tobacco graders, cotton mill workers, and farmers; and women who value honest labor, self-esteem, and dignity.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900 - a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world - Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America. Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies."

Una saga familiare del XX secolo in cui si rispecchiano la storia e il destino di tutto un popolo. Un grande affresco che per fascino ed emozione può ricordare al lettore, nell'ambito della letteratura sudamericana, soltanto "Cent'anni di solitudine" di García Márquez.

In a dusty town in Nebraska’s rugged sandhills, weary Sheriff’s Deputy Harley Jensen patrols the streets at night, on the lookout for something - anything - out of the ordinary. It’s July 1978, and the heat is making people ornery, restless. That and the Reddick family patriarch has decided, decades after authorities ended the search for his murdered boy’s body, to lay a headstone. Instead of bringing closure, this decision is the spark that threatens to set Pickard County ablaze.

Frozen in grief after the loss of her son at sea, Edith Baines stares across the water at a schooner, under full sail yet motionless in the winter wind and surging tide of the Northern Reach. Edith seems to be hallucinating. Or is she? Edith’s boat-watch opens The Northern Reach, set in the coastal town of Wellbridge, Maine, where townspeople squeeze a living from the perilous bay or scrape by on the largesse of the summer folk and whatever they can cobble together, salvage, or grab.

Holly Banks is on a desperate mission to have it all, but nothing in life goes according to plan. She’s quickly learning that keeping up with the Joneses is a full-time job, especially when the women of Primm, her new neighborhood, seem to have it together all the time. With her husband’s job in flux, her daughter’s difficulty with learning to read, and her mother’s new zest for dating, Holly’s life is already anything but picture perfect. Then her dog digs up an old artifact in the village center, and the mishap draws the attention of local media.

It's the 1790s, and the circus has arrived in Durham, Maine. Before weaver Will Rees is able to take in its spectacle, he spots Magistrate Hanson - the man he blames for his family's having to flee Dugard two years earlier. On his journey home he encounters Shaker brothers searching for a girl from their Zion community. Despite women not being allowed inside the circus, Leah had snuck out to visit it. They quickly come across her lifeless body beaten and thrown into a farmer's field on the road leading to the circus.