Summary

Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, Silver Medal, Short Story Fiction

In this collection rife with humor and pathos, alienated characters struggle to subvert, contain, control, and even escape their bodies. A teenage girl grapples with pubic hair grown wild, a biologist finds herself in love with a gorilla, a prisoner yearns to escape her biological destiny.

In some stories, the bodies have surrogates: a high-school girl babysits an elderly woman’s plastic doll while negotiating her own sexual awakening, and a young man finds that he can only receive affection from his father when he is in costume. Dark humor and magical realism put in sharp relief the everyday trials of Americans in a story collection that asks, in what way are we more than the sum of our parts? 

Contents

Coming soon.

Author

Jennifer Caloyeras is the author of Strays. Her short stories have appeared in Booth, Storm Cellar, and other literary magazines. She recently served as the artist-in-residence at the Annenberg in Santa Monica and teaches writing at the the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Reviews

“A can’t-miss collection for readers who love a blend of humor, magical realism, and surrealism.”
Bustle

"Caloyeras guides us through her characters' states of mind, traversing the conscious and subconscious. Call it magical realism, or just refer to it as "weird stuff, dude." Either way, all the unbelievable-yet-somehow-believable worlds that Caloyeras creates feel easy for readers to fall into in an Alice down-the-rabbit-hole kind of way."
Alicia Eler, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Jennifer Caloyeras is an enormously talented writer with a rare combination of great imagination and heart.”
Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z

“Jennifer Caloyeras’s stories snap, crackle, and pop with animal energy. Every one of these stories is an unruly creature, wild at heart, fierce and funny, and heartbreaking.”
Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth 

“When you read Unruly Creatures, the stories stare back at you like a caged gorilla.  Haunting, revelatory, and utterly breathtaking, Caloyeras is an astonishing talent.”
Matthew J. Trafford, author of The Divinity Gene

“Riotous, off-kilter, tender, magical—this collection is utterly accomplished and madly engaging. Jennifer Caloyeras’s writing is as wild and beautiful as the unruly creatures in her stories.”
Laura Trunkey, author of Double Dutch, a 2017 ABA Indies Introduce title

Summary

2017 Mountain Heritage Literary Festival Appalachian Book of the Year, nonfiction

One day, Jesse Donaldson wakes up in Portland, Oregon, and asks his wife to uproot their life together and move to his native Kentucky. As he searches for the reason behind this sudden urge, Donaldson examines both the place where he was born and the life he’s building. 

The result is a hybrid—part memoir, part meditation on nostalgia, part catalog of Kentucky history and myth. Organized according to Kentucky geography, with one passage for each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties, On Homesickness examines whether we can ever return to the places we’ve called home.

The120.

Author

Jesse Donaldson was born in Kentucky, educated in Texas, and now lives in Oregon. He is the author of the novel The More They Disappear.

Reviews

“A wonderful prose poem, a beautiful meditation on homesickness and connection to place, and a celebration of Kentucky and that strange and undeniable connection that Kentuckians have to the state.”
Silas House, author of Clay’s Quilt, The Coal Tattoo, and Eli the Good

"On Homesickness is a masterful meditation on nostalgia, founded in the tender device of riffs on the 120 counties of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. For this Kentucky native the device is so obvious that it borders on genius, because what is genius but incarnating in art the beauty in the details everyone else has taken for granted?  My first thought on opening it was:  Why didn’t I think of that?—a sure sign the author is onto something sweet.  The riffs are lyrical, poignant, evocative—they call to mind Vladimir Nabokov, our high priest of nostalgia.  Everyone who has left home, any home, anywhere, will want to read these, for a sobering assessment of why you left—along with all those who remained, for an equally rich assessment of the price of staying put."
Fenton Johnson, author of The Man Who Loved Birds

"In his ambitious and elegant long essay, Jesse Wilcox Donaldson, modern day voyager, passionately wrestles with the question of home: where is home, how is a home imagined, why do we leave, and how might we (do we want to?) return. Donaldson sets out to root himself far from his origins, and finds himself beckoned back, in surprising and unsettling ways. At turns strict and indulgent, bold and resigned, he fearlessly questions the conventional terms of nostalgia, and finds it to be both a constructed fantasy, and as sharply real as Kentucky bluegrass. Certainties emerge from such rigorous internal voyaging: love roots us in. Children root us in. Places in our past will hold out their hands in temptation and reproach, in friendship and with patience while we find our way back—if we’re lucky enough to hail from land that loves us, and that kindled our deepest longings."
Lia Purpura, author of Rough Likeness

"Donaldson’s text is a celebration of everything Kentucky. It lifts up the stories of those who settled and shaped it as an American state; it records the marks made by those who lived in and formed it before it was taken over. Jesse James is a persistent personality in the text; Donaldson drinks to him in spirit, saluting and mimicking his untamed nature. Daniel Boone and Wendell Berry are among the other Kentuckians who factor in—pointedly, with their wives, who either reluctantly or willingly made new homes there with their men."
Foreword Reviews

"On Homesickness is both an advertisement for Donaldson’s abilities as a writer and the lyric essay as a form. The short, dense bursts of intricate writing in On Homesickness make for a collection of impressions, of short stories about Daniel Boone and the fauna of Kentucky, with the overarching narrative of Donaldson’s growing love for his family threaded throughout."
The Collapsar

Praise for The More They Disappear

“Donaldson is a soulful writer.”
The New York Times

“Forget genre labels. This is a stunning novel, period.” 
Booklist (starred review)

“Delivers everything a reader could want.”
Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

120-County Tour

Kentucky native to read in all 120 counties during book tour

To mark the publication of On Homesickness, Jesse Donaldson, author of The More They Disappear and native of Lexington, will read passages from his new book in all 120 counties in Kentucky.

In On Homesickness—a book organized according to Kentucky geography, with one passage for each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties—Jesse Donaldson wonders if we can ever return to the places we’ve called home. One day he wakes up in Portland, Oregon, and asks his wife to uproot their life together and move to his native Kentucky. As he searches for the reason behind this sudden urge, Donaldson examines both the place where he was born and the life he’s building. 

His 120-county tour will begin on Sunday, October 22 in Powell County atop Natural Bridge and will continue through November 17, where he’ll read at the Kentucky Book Fair. During his tour, he’ll stop at bookstores including Brier Books, Roebling Books, Carmichael’s, Karen’s Book Barn, Poor Richard’s, The Cat’s Tale, Coffee Tree Books, Books-A-Million, and Barnes and Noble.

He’ll also read at libraries, book clubs, coffee shops, historical sites, and road stops along the way, including the original KFC, an abandoned movie theater, a house party, a haunted bar, Fort Knox, cemeteries, distilleries, caves, mountaintops, ferries, log cabins, and more.

View the 120-county tour schedule.

Download the press release.

To arrange publicity with Jesse Donaldson, including interviews, ride-alongs, or coverage of specific events, contact Abby Freeland, sales and marketing director at West Virginia University Press, 304 916-7730, abby.freeland@mail.wvu.edu. 

Summary

2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards winner
2018 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist

After Sadie’s son, Mark, is gone, she doesn’t have much use for other people, including her husband. The last person she wants to see is Tinley Greene, who shows up claiming she’s pregnant with Mark’s baby. 

Sadie knows Tinley must be lying because Mark was engaged and never would have betrayed his fiancée. So she refuses to help, and she doesn’t breathe a word about it to anybody. But in a small, southern town like Garnet, nothing stays secret for long. 

Once Sadie starts piecing together what happened to Mark, she discovers she was wrong about Tinley. And when her husband is rushed to the hospital, Sadie must hurry to undo her mistake before he runs out of time to meet their grandchild.

Learn more about Heather Bell Adams's book tour.

Contents

Coming soon.

Author

Heather Bell Adams is from Hendersonville, North Carolina, and now lives in Raleigh with her husband and son. She is the winner of the 2016 James Still Fiction Prize and her short fiction appears in the Thomas Wolfe Review, Clapboard House, Pembroke Magazine, Broad River Review, and elsewhere. This is her first novel and is the winner of the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Contest. Learn more at heatherbelladams.com.

Reviews

“It is a special pleasure to welcome this novel of kinship, loss, and love set in the mountains of North Carolina. Heather Adams is an exciting new voice in Appalachian fiction.”
Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star

"Maranatha Road is an ode to beauty and suffering, grief and hope in a small mountain town. Within its pages, Heather Bell Adams brings to vivid life two strong, Southern women, at odds yet bound by love’s saving grace. I’ll be thinking of Sadie and Tinley for a long time to come, and waiting eagerly for more to read from this gifted new writer.
Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot, Long Man, and The Nature of Fire

"Accomplished, knowing, and memorable, Marantha Road, by Heather Bell Adams, is a book to be enjoyed on many levels, not the least of which is that it is a darned good read."
Foreword Reviews

“In prose as pure and clear and resonant as a mountain ballad, Adams takes us directly into the hearts of her characters.”
Kim Church, author of Byrd

"Moving and deeply satisfying." 
Gregg Cusick, author of My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible

“Rare is the book that has the power to change our way of thinking, and ever rarer is the writer who can blow the dust off our hearts and remind us what it means to feel, to love, and to rediscover the pathways to our own humanity. You are well advised to follow what will undoubtedly be the rapid rise of this stunning new voice in the literary arena.”
Wil Mara, author of Frame 232 and The Nevada Testament

"Filled with the poetry of shattered lives, Maranatha Road is the novel of the desperado. A haunting debut."
Harriet Levin Millan, author of How Fast Can You Run

“The prose in Heather Adams's exquisite novel Maranatha Road sparkles with honesty and vitality—both poetic and musical in the way of the best southern writing. Her characters crackle with humanity and their alternating voices tell a sweeping story of love, compassion, and the timeless bonds of family.”
Mary Akers, author of Bones of an Inland Sea

Summary

From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.

These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.

Visit this book's website to preview photographs in the book, as well as to learn more about events, publicity, and contributors.

Read Stephen Kantrowitz's essay:

Contents

Contributors:
Kevin Boyle
Douglas Egerton
Scot French
Michael Honey
Stephen Kantrowitz
Ari Kelman
Gary Okihiro
Julie Reed
Christina Snyder
Clarence Taylor

Author

Alex Lichtenstein, current editor of the American Historical Review, is a professor of history at Indiana University. The author of many articles on labor, prison, and civil rights history, his previous work on photography is Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid.

Andrew Lichtenstein is a photographer, journalist, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. His first book Never Coming Home was published in 2007.

Reviews

"Andrew Lichtenstein sees history all around, even when it’s not evident at first glance. A pastoral, sun-drenched Mississippi cotton field turns out to be where Emmett Till was murdered. A tranquil suburban subdivision was the site of untold suffering in 1838, when Cherokee Indians had to endure a brutal winter as the government forced them westward on the Trail of Tears. He admits that making pictures of seemingly-ordinary places where tragedy, conflict or rebellion took place isn’t easy. But as has been seen in recent weeks, there has been a growing movement to not just remove memorials honoring Confederate generals but to make sure the counter-narrative is recognized and heard. That sentiment informs his coming book, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory, which will be published in October by the West Virginia University Press."
New York Times Lens Blog

"A remarkable and essential work of visual documentary history of interest to the scholarly and general reader alike."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A thought-provoking addition to the literature on sites of public memory, complementing titles such as Kenneth Foote’s Shadowed Ground."
Library Journal

"Brilliant and memorable."
Los Angeles Review of Books

"Marked, Unmarked, Remembered is a call to both see and recall."
Shelf Awareness

"There's an eerie silence that permeates throughout Andrew Lichtenstein's photographs taken at the sites of racial tragedies in the US. These are places where blood was spilled and unspeakable horrors inflicted, the consequences of which we are still grappling with today. Turn on the TV or listen in at any dinner table in America and you'll undoubtedly hear a slew of opinions on US race relations — but here, in these dark and melancholic pictures, the spaces are allowed to speak for themselves."
Gabriel H. Sanchez, photo essay editor, BuzzFeed News

“Marked, Unmarked, Remembered is startling and extraordinary. From its images of the past as officials wish us to remember it, to those of a past that is largely unknown to us because those with power have deemed it destabilizing, to the capturing of our past as it has been reclaimed by those invested in rescuing its lessons for the present, this book is a true gift. It both unsettles our sense of who we thought we were, and it makes us see the imperative of forging a more just future for all.”
Heather Ann Thompson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“When Jacob awoke from his dream of a heavenly ladder in the Book of Genesis, he piled stones to mark the spot. We do much the same today, recognizing certain landscapes as holy or haunted, erecting markers and memorials—piling stones—to conjure or contain their uncanny power. In this quietly moving book, Andrew and Alex Lichtenstein examine some of America’s haunted landscapes, offering a meditation on history, catastrophe, and the wages of memory and forgetting.”
James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005

“Photographer Andrew Lichtenstein has said that ‘acknowledgment is the first step towards healing.’ In his powerful work, which explores places of historic—and often forgotten—conflict and trauma, he does more than acknowledge. He testifies. He testifies to the past, to the present, to the pains that have broken us—and most of all, to the humanity that defines us. He is setting us on a badly needed path of healing.”
Sara Terry, Founder and Director, The Aftermath Project

Summary

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis’s book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.

The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called “wars of incorporation,” Lewis’s powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources. Modernizers sought to convict Eastham of murder, but juries drawn from the traditionalist population refused to comply. Although the resisters won the courtroom battle, the modernizers eventually won the war for control of the state’s timber frontier.

Contents

Acknowledgements                                                                                         

Introduction                                                                                                   

1. The Incorporation of West Virginia                                                                        

2. Modernizing the Law                                                                                             

3. Robert W. Eastham, the Early Years                                                                      

4. Eastham in West Virginia                                                                            

5. Who Were the Thompsons?                                                                                   

6. Setting the Stage for Trouble                                                                                  

7. The Struggle for Control                                                                             

8. The Shoot-Out and “Lawyers by the Dozen”                                                       

9. Jury Selection and Appeal to the High Court                                                        

10. On Trial for Murder                                                                                            

11. Epilogue: The Aftermath                                                                          

Bibliography                                                               

Index                                                                                       

Author

Ronald L. Lewis is Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair and Professor of History Emeritus at West Virginia University, where he taught for many years. He is the author of several books, including Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II (published by WVU Press) and Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920. He lives in Morgantown, WV.

Reviews

“Fascinating and informative. Lewis has crafted a thoroughly researched, well-written, and lively narrative account that uses one violent event—and all it set into motion—to show how old Civil War conflicts were rekindled, how increasingly marginalized farmer-loggers attempted to challenge corporate power, and especially how control of courts and local governance were central instruments in this epic struggle.”
Dwight Billings, University of Kentucky

“A welcome addition to the study of industrial Appalachia. Through the lives of Eastham and Thompson, Ronald L. Lewis provides a strong sense of how the ‘incorporation of America’ unfolded at the local level.”
Bruce E. Stewart, Appalachian State University

"A lively, personal, and engaging read."
Ohio Valley History

Summary

Few know the name Anna Jarvis, yet on the second Sunday in May, we mail the card, buy the flowers, place the phone call, or make the brunch reservation to honor our mothers, all because of her. 

Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908 and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization. She designed her Mother’s Day celebration around a sentimental view of motherhood and domesticity, envisioning a day venerating the daily services and sacrifices of mothers within the home.

After Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914, many organizations sought to align the holiday’s meaning with changing perceptions of modern motherhood in the twentieth century. Instead of restricting a mother’s service and influence solely to the domestic sphere, they emphasized the power of mothers both within their homes and throughout their communities. 

Jarvis refused to accept this changing interpretation, claiming both intellectual and legal ownership of Mother’s Day. Her obsession with protecting the purity of her vision sustained a war of verbal and legal assaults against rival holiday promoters, patriotic women’s organizations, charitable foundations, public health reformers, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The struggle for control of Mother’s Day ultimately threatened her livelihood, physical health, and emotional stability. 

Memorializing Motherhood explores the complicated history of Anna Jarvis’s movement to establish and control Mother’s Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.

Contents

• Introduction: The Cultural Duality of Mother’s Day
• Chapter 1: The Foremothers and Forefather of Mother’s Day
• Chapter 2: Anna Jarvis and the Mother’s Day Movement
• Chapter 3: “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”: The Rivalry of Father’s Day and
• Parents’ Day
• Chapter 4: The American War Mothers and a Memoir of Mothers’ Day
• Chapter 5: A New Mother’s Day: The Holiday Campaigns of the American Mothers
• Committee and the Maternity Center Association.
• Epilogue: Anna Jarvis’s Final Years and the Burden of the Mother’s Day Movement
• Appendix
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index

Author

Katharine Lane Antolini is assistant professor of History and Gender Studies at West Virginia Wesleyan College and serves on the Board of Trustees of the International Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia.

Reviews

Summary

The Rebel in the Red Jeep follows the personal and professional experiences of Ken Hechler, the West Virginia politician and activist who died in 2016 at the age of 102.

This biography recounts a century of accomplishments, from Hechler’s introduction of innovative teaching methods at major universities, to his work as a speechwriter and researcher for President Harry Truman, and finally to his time representing West Virginia in the United States House of Representatives and as the secretary of state.

In West Virginia, where he resisted mainstream political ideology, Hechler was the principal architect behind the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 and constantly battled big coal, strip mining, and fellow politicians alike. He and his signature red jeep remain a fixture in West Virginia. Since 2004, Hechler has campaigned against mountaintop removal mining. He was arrested for trespassing during a protest in 2009 at the age of 94. 

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1. Behind the Wrought Iron Gates

2. Big Man on Campus

3. Over There!

4. Princeton’s Professor of Politics

5. The Truman White House

6. The Road to Congress Winds Through West Virginia

7. Rouge Campaigner

8. Your Servant in Congress

9. Congressional Campaigning, Hechler Style

10. Space . . . Where Hechler Didn’t Expect To Go

11. Win Some; Lose Some

12. Marching to Selma

13. Fighting For Miners’ Lives

14. Hechler vs. Big Coal—Round Two

15. Saving the New River

16. Heckling Congress

17. The Interregnum

18. The People’s Office—The First Term

19. The People’s Office—The Rest of the Story

20. Walking With Granny D

21. From Rebel to Hell-raiser

22. Into the Sunset

23. Twilight

Notes

Index

Author

Carter Taylor Seaton is the author of Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music, and Living on the Land in West Virginia, two novels, and numerous magazine articles. A ceramic sculptor, she previously directed a rural craft cooperative and was a marketing professional for thirty years. She is the recipient of the 2014 West Virginia Library Association’s Literary Merit Award, 2015 Marshall University Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2016 Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Reviews

“A superb biography of a West Virginia icon. Carter Seaton has done a wonderful job capturing the essence of Ken Hechler.”
Jean Edward Smith, author of Bush, Eisenhower in War and Peace, and FDR

“Fascinating new insights into the personal and political aspects of the long career of one of the Mountain State’s most intriguing and maverick political leaders.”
Paul Nyden, retired Charleston Gazette labor reporter

Summary

Set within a backdrop of small towns and hard-working communities in middle America, The Whole World at Once is a collection of intense stories about the experience of loss. Pringle weaves together spellbinding tales amidst shadowed and foreboding physical and emotional landscapes where each of the characters is in motion against her surroundings, and each is as likely as the next to be traveling with a ghost. A soldier returns home from multiple tours only to begin planting landmines in the field behind his house; kids chase a ghost story up country roads only to become one themselves; one girl copes with the anniversary of her sister’s disappearance during the agricultural fair, while another girl searches for understanding after seeing the picture of a small boy washed onto a beach.

In language that is at once both stark and rich, we enter the lives of the characters deliberately, in slow scenes—time enough for a bird to sing as a man and a girl, strangers, fall to their knees—that are inevitable yet laced with the unpredictable. Dark, strange beauties, all of the stories in The Whole World at Once follow the lives of people grappling with what it means to live in a world with death.

Contents

Acknowledgments

How the Sun Burns among Hills of Rock and Pebble

The Boy Who Walks

The Boy in the Red Shirt

When the Frost Comes

This Bomb My Heart

The Fish

The Lightning Tree

The Missing Time

The Wandering House 

Reading and Discussion Questions

About the Author

Author

Erin Pringle is the author of The Floating Order. Her work has been selected as a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading, shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship, and a finalist for contests such as the Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award. She was awarded a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, which she used to write and revise many of these stories. Learn more at erinpringle.com.

Reviews

"Ms. Pringle casts a somber gaze at the formative traumas that beset blue-collar America. In "The Wandering House," a young woman is disfigured in a meth-lab explosion. The subtly disquieting tale "The Boy Who Walks" depicts a child's personality change after he nearly freezes to death while wandering through the snow. "After that day, the boy's different. Like his own ghost thinks he died, though he didn't, but now tags him everywhere he goes." You can feel that Ms. Pringle has labored over her sentences, giving them the strength of tempered steel. She has a knack for the cinematic image as well."
Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Erin Pringle’s stories leave you no choice. They sing so gorgeously, break your heart so perfectly, that you’re forced to revise your understanding of loss, luck, and love.”
Tom Noyes, author of Come by Here: A Novella and Stories

“Readers willing to immerse themselves in sorrow, and sometimes in narratives that twist and shimmer before taking definite shape, will find reflected in these stories the unsteady path of coming back to life—or not—after loss.”
Kirkus Reviews

“In these restless and relentless fictions, the unstoppable storyteller Erin Pringle is at it again. “It” being the most American of dramas—the endless conflict between mobility and stability. In these patently patient, transparently transparent, overly understated stories, the characters constantly fidget and fret in low frequency worries all the while their vital signs are sighing and simmering. These are pristine and persistent visions of hobble-hearted people going nowhere fast.  Her writing, word after word, will stop you in your tracks, will ease you over the edgiest of edges. Don’t blink!”
Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

“There’s no writer working today who excites me more than Erin Pringle. Her stories stretch like planks off a cliff, past solid ground, offering breath-stealing views of grief, love, and mystery. I love this collection.”
Owen Egerton, author of The Book of Harold and writer and director of the thriller Follow

“A strikingly original collection. This book is poetic, yet has a deep sense of storytelling.”
Laura Long, author of Out of Peel Tree and editor of Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia

Summary

The pepperoni roll, a soft bread roll with pepperoni baked in the middle, originated in the coal mining areas of north central West Virginia when Italian immigrants invented a food that could be eaten easily underground. This spicy snack soon found its way out of the mines and into bakeries, bread companies, restaurants, and event venues around the state, often with additional ingredients like cheese, red sauce, or peppers added to this humble food staple. As the pepperoni roll’s reputation moves beyond the borders of West Virginia, this food continues to embody the culinary culture of its home state. It is now found at the center of bake offs, eating contests, festivals, as a gourmet item on local menus, and even on a bill in the state’s legislature. The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll is a comprehensive history of the unofficial state food of West Virginia. With over 100 photographs and countless recipes and recollections, it tells the story of the immigrants, business owners, laborers, and citizens who have developed and devoured this simple yet practical food since its invention.  Learn about upcoming events with Candace Nelson.