The Hollow Ground
The Hollow Ground

Author: Natalie S. Harnett

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-05-13

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1466839198

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We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet. Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.

Sundown Towns
Sundown Towns

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1620974541

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"Powerful and important . . . an instant classic." —The Washington Post Book World The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America. In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face "second-generation sundown town issues," such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.

Black Sun
Black Sun

Author: Geoffrey Wolff

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2012-04-18

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 159017559X

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Includes an afterword by the author. Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby’s pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself. Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff’s subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.

Critical Storytelling from Behind Invisible Bars
Critical Storytelling from Behind Invisible Bars

Author: Carmella J. Braniger

Publisher: Critical Storytelling

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9789004441637

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"Critical stories are narratives that recount the writer's experiences, situating those experiences in broader cultural contexts. In this volume of Critical Storytelling, marginalized, excluded, and oppressed peoples share insights from their liminality to help readers learn from their perspectives on living from behind invisible bars. Female inmates at Decatur's Correctional Center and the undergraduate Millikin University students who worked with them come together to give voice to their specific histories of living from behind invisibile bars and pose important questions to the reader about inciting change for the future. Specifically, the voices in this volume seek to expose, analyze, and challenge deeply-entrenched narratives and characterizations of incarcerated women, whose histories are often marked by sexual abuse, domestic violence, poverty, PTSD, a lack of education, housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance addiction. These silenced female inmate voices need to be heard and contextualized within the larger metanarrative of prison literature. Through telling critical stories, these writers attempt to: sustain recovery from trauma, make positive changes and informed decisions, create a real sense of empowerment, strengthen their capacity to exercise personal agency, and inspire audiences to create change far outside the reaches of physical and metaphorical bars. Contributors are: Anonymous, Soren Belle, Megan Batty, Dwight G. Brown, Jr., Sandra Brown, Kathryn Coffey, Kelly Cunningham, Paiten Hamilton, Kathlyn J. Housh, Rebekah Icenesse, Kala Keller, Jelisa Lovette, Bric Martin, Amanda Minetti, Laura Nearing, Angie Oaks, Claire Prendergast, Cara Quiett, J. M. Spence, Noah Villarreal and Alisha Walker"--

The Blue Bistro
The Blue Bistro

Author: Elin Hilderbrand

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1429905492

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Elin Hilderbrand, author of the enchanting Summer People and The Beach Club, invites you to experience the perfect getaway with her sparkling novel, The Blue Bistro. Adrienne Dealey has spent the past six years working for hotels in exotic resort towns. This summer she has decided to make Nantucket home. Left flat broke by her ex-boyfriend, she is desperate to earn some fast money. When the desirable Thatcher Smith, owner of Nantucket's hottest restaurant, is the only one to offer her a job, she wonders if she can get by with no restaurant experience. Thatcher gives Adrienne a crash course in the business...and they share an instant attraction. But there is a mystery about their situation: what is it about Fiona, the Blue Bistro's chef, that captures Thatcher's attention again and again? And why does such a successful restaurant seem to be in its final season before closing its doors for good? Despite her uncertainty, Adrienne must decide whether to open her heart for the first time, or move on, as she always does. Infused with intimate Nantucket detail and filled with the warmth of passion and the breeze of doubt, The Blue Bistro is perfect summer reading.

Winter Run
Winter Run

Author: Robert Ashcom

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2002-10-14

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1565129121

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There are certain special—and rare— books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place—rural Virginia of the late 1940s. Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven. But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"—as old Professor James puts it—are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more—they love him. Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity.

Saluki Marooned
Saluki Marooned

Author: Robert Rickman

Publisher: Litres

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 5041646309

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”Marooned in his unresolved past, the nervous person cannot set a course for the future.”Robert Von Reichmann MD.Peter Federson's life was littered with divorces, lost jobs, and failure in college, which led to a miserable tour of Vietnam, and a checkered life in the 21st century. One day Pete realized that it was his own doing.”Please God, let me start over again!”24-hours later, fate threw Pete backward forty years. Now he has the chance to earn a passing grade for the 20th century and promotion to the 21st.'But a dark shadow follows him through the decades and sabotages his efforts, so Spring 1971 threatens to be a morbid echo of itself.58-year-old Peter Federson married the wrong girl and rejected his true love. He flunked out of college, which led to a failed army enlistment, failed jobs, and failed relationships. One day, Pete took a handful of pills and washed them down with vodka in his trashy trailer in suburban Chicago.In a haze, Peter took a train to Carbondale, Illinois, and passed out at Southern Illinois University, where he awakened in 1971.Peter Federson is in college again.Now Pete can marry his true love, Catherine, pass algebra—the course that got him thrown out of college the first time and finally earn his degree.But a malevolent algebra instructor tries to flunk him, his wife-to-be won't let him go, a riot shakes the campus, and something within Pete doesn't want to change.SIU's colors are maroon and white, and the Saluki is its mascot, but maroon has a more sinister meaning in this story, for Peter Federson is marooned in 1971—a Saluki Marooned.