Summary

First published in 1918, Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries is an anthology of detective stories written by Melville Davisson Post. The popular stories within this collection were serialized in national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post in the early twentieth century.

Uncle Abner is an amateur detective in present-day Harrison County, West Virginia. Throughout his journeys around this antebellum wilderness, long before the nation had a proper police system, the honest Uncle Abner is confronted by murders and mysteries that cannot be ignored. With uncanny intuition, impressive logic, and keen observation of human actions, Uncle Abner is Melville Davisson Post’s most celebrated literary creation and is considered to be one of the most important texts in American detective and crime fiction.

This new edition contains an introduction by Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire novels.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930) was a native of Harrison County, West Virginia. He is the author of The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, the Randolph Mason series, the Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries series, the Monsieur Jonquelle series, and the Walker of the Secret Service series, as well as many articles, essays, and treatises.

Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the hit Netflix original drama. The Cold Dish won Le Prix du Polar Noir; Death Without Company, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year; and Another Man’s Moccasins, the winner of both the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award and the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year. The Dark Horse was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year, and Hell Is Empty was selected by Library Journal as the Best Mystery of the Year, as well as being a New York Times bestseller along with the next two books in the series, As The Crow Flies and A Serpent’s Tooth. Any Other Name, the tenth Longmire novel, debuted at #6 on the New York Times list. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

Reviews

Summary

International Society of Anglo-Saxonists's 2017 Best First Book Prize winner

This book discusses the considerable influence exerted by Isidore’s Etymologiae on the compilation of early medieval enigmata. Either in the form of thematic clusters or pairs, Isidorean encyclopedic patterns are observed not only in major Latin riddle collections in verse but can also be detected in the two vernacular assemblages contained in the Exeter Book. 

As with encyclopedias, the topic-centered arrangement of riddles was pursued by compilers as a strategy intended to optimize the didactic and instructional possibilities inherent in these texts and favor the readers’ assimilation of their contents. This book thus provides a thoroughgoing investigation of medieval riddling, with special attention to the Exeter Book Riddles, demonstrating that this genre constituted an important part of the school curriculum of the early Middle Ages.
 

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Mercedes Salvador-Bello is associate professor of English at the Universidad de Sevilla, where she teaches, among other subjects, Anglo-Saxon literature. Her research interests include Anglo-Saxon and Insular Latin literature with a particular focus on the Exeter Book, the Old English Riddles, and Latin enigmata. She is co-editor of SELIM, Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of English Language and Literature.

Reviews

Summary

Community leadership development programs are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. These programs fill gaps in what people know about governance and the processes of governance, especially at the local level. The work of many in this field is a response to the recognition that in smaller, rural communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or disaster areas, the skills and aptitudes needed for citizens to be successful leaders are often missing or underdeveloped.

Community Effects of Leadership Development Education presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia. 

As the first book of its kind to seek answers to the question of whether or not the millions of dollars invested each year in community leadership development programs are valuable in the real world, this book challenges researchers, community organizers, and citizens to identify improved ways of demonstrating the link from program to implementation, as well as the way in which programs are conceived and designed.

This text also explores how leadership development programs relate to civic engagement, power and empowerment, and community change, and it demonstrates that community leadership development programs really do produce community change. At the same time, the findings of this study strongly support a relational view of community leadership, as opposed to other traditional leadership models used for program design.

To complement their findings, the authors have developed CENCE, a new model for community leadership development programs, which links leadership development efforts to community development by understanding how Civic Engagement, Networks, Commitment, and Empowerment work together to produce community viability.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Kenneth Pigg has been helping community leaders become more effective change agents in their community for over forty years as a specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service in Kentucky and Missouri and has served on a number of national panels and projects dealing with community change and leadership. 

Ken Martin is Chair of the Department of Extension and Associate Director, Programs for Ohio State University Extension.  

Stephen P. Gasteyer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University. 

Godwin T. Apaliyah is the The Ohio State University Extension’s Community Development Educator, and the Director of Economic Development, Fayette County. 

Kari Keating is a Teaching Associate in Agricultural Leadership Education at the University of Illinois.

Reviews

Coming Soon.

Summary

In Magnetic North an aging warrior and his best friend—perhaps his only friend—ride motorcycles to Alaska, with the ultimate goal of riding to the Arctic Circle. It is a ride that mirrors their lives, a ride that causes old stories, old trials, old darkness to come, once again, through the spinning wheels of the machines they are riding.

Morgan is a man who can't give it up. His propensity toward violence has followed him through all the days of his life, and it follows him now.

Slade has shared much of Morgan's life, and he has been the one of the rare stabilizing factors in that life. Without Slade, it is clear that Morgan has no guidance, no goals, and no potential for living much longer than his next encounter with . . . almost anything.

And so the two old friends ride out from New Mexico and Colorado—heading north.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Lee Maynard was born and raised deep in the mountains of West Virginia, a location that drives the emotion and grit of most of his writing. He says he has never had a “career.” Rather, he sought out “day jobs” while doing his real job—writing. Among several other things, he has been a criminal investigator, college president, and COO of a national experiential education organization. He now lives and writes at the edge of an Indian reservation in the high desert of New Mexico. He is the author of The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life and the Crum trilogy: Crum, Screaming with the Cannibals, and The Scummers.

Reviews

"It is part action-adventure novel, part off-road motorcycling memoir, part philosophical meditation about the nature of danger and courage, about love, both lost and found, about  friendship & trust, about aging and death, about the pure pleasure of revenge. This is a spooky, beautiful dream of a novel."
Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale and Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

"Once 'on the road,' Maynard's characters make us want to follow them as far North as their endurance will take us."
Gary Fincke, author of The Proper Words for Sin and A Room of Rain

"It is a rollicking contemporary picaresque—a tale of friendship and adventure and a personal quest for meaning. If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had been written by Edward Abbey, it would be Lee Maynard’s Magnetic North."
Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water

Summary

Cinco Becknell is the story of a homeless man with no memory. Locked in the emptiness of his mind is a secret, a past, which will either keep him alive or get him killed. 

As Cinco staggers through a dangerous journey of rediscovery, he is hunted by psychopaths who want to kill him, and he has no idea why; he is shadowed by a woman who may keep him alive—or not; and he is finally helped by another woman who can bring back to him the light he looks for—if he can stay alive. But he is running out of time, and people around him are dying, always violently. 

Gradually, he begins to understand the true, brutal, nature of himself and of the darkness of his past. But it is a past, and a present, that he may never fully understand. 

This novel, based on generations of violent, local family history, is set in the underbelly of the pseudo-glitzy streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Lee Maynard was born and raised deep in the mountains of West Virginia, a location that drives the emotion and grit of most of his writing. He says he has never had a “career.” Rather, he sought out “day jobs” while doing his real job—writing. Among several other things, he has been a criminal investigator, college president, and COO of a national experiential education organization. He now lives and writes at the edge of an Indian reservation in the high desert of New Mexico. He is the author of The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life and the Crum trilogy: Crum, Screaming with the Cannibals, and The Scummers.

Lee Maynard would like to thank Arlo Chan, editor/concept editor, for his help in developing this book.

Reviews

"A fictional mélange that's part thriller and part social commentary, set against the beautiful scenic backdrop of the southwest—and it works. Maynard begins with a timeline of 400-plus years of historical and fictional Santa Fe, New Mexico. William Becknell blazed the original ruts of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821—history. Cinco Becknell, the fifth William, is homeless on the streets of Santa Fe in current time—fiction. He wakes up in El Paso and has no memory of who he is or why he's there. He uses a bus ticket to Santa Fe from his shirt pocket to illuminate the flashbacks he's having of torture, pain and the old scars on his body. Little Jimmy befriends him on the streets and teaches the tricks of survival—how to get food, where to sleep, how to move through the city like a ghost. Jimmy names him Stick, the only name Cinco knows, and they both run from two psychopaths who need to silence Jimmy, who saw them brutally dispose of a woman in the desert night. There's also another person shadowing Cinco's movements—an elegant, mysterious, lethal black woman who calls him Pyat and is a connection to some dark pieces of a Russian memory. A lovely woman from Cinco's teenage past, Elena, sister of one of three boys whose photograph hangs in her gallery, begins to see the Cinco she knew from the photo in this beaten shadow of a stick man, and a love story sneaks into the action. Maynard is a consummate storyteller, and the thriller elements run parallel to the tough life of the homeless on the streets of The City Different."
Kirkus Reviews
 

Summary

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood, and a fire somewhat accidently set by a juvenile smoker in a school.

Despite these surprising events, the narrator of each story is an ordinary person caught up in the action but preoccupied by other things, whether zombie movies, collecting unusual words, the oddity of other people’s sexual habits, or what to do in retirement. 

These shocking incidents become both central and peripheral to the narrative, as Fincke portrays the fluctuating emotions and self-protective reflections of fathers, sons, and husbands, creating a world where individuals rarely understand each other, yet still arrive at moments of compassion, tolerance, perseverance, and familial love.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Gary Fincke is the Charles Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. Winner of the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2003 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and the 2010 Stephen F. Austin Poetry Prize for recent collections. He has published twenty-seven books of short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as well as the novel How Blasphemy Sounds to God. He is the author of The Proper Words for Sin, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize.

Reviews

"A Room of Rain is a group of seamless short stories, by an old master of the form.  Gary Fincke has never hesitated to ask hard questions in his work, and these stories are determined to take the toughest situations by the horns."
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including the Haitian Revolutionary trilogy of All Soul's Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That The Builder Refused

For years, Gary Fincke has quietly built a reputation as one of the nation's finest storytellers. This glorious collection shows him at the peak of his powers--funny, gritty, provocative."
Cary Holladay, author of The Deer in the Mirror

"Gary Fincke is one of the most reliable and prolific writers out there, and A Room of Rain is clearly one of his strongest collections. In this world that seems so quick to stick labels on everything, Fincke goes around ripping off all the stickers. He convincingly blurs the line between what is taboo and what is not, refusing to allow readers to back away into safety; these stories illustrate the notion that we are all have taboo thoughts, that beneath the surface, none of us are “ordinary,” none of us “pure.” At his best, he reminds me of Richard Yates—Fincke flat out knows how to write."
Jim Daniels, author of Eight Mile High and other collections

"This collection is provocative yet subtle; gritty yet humorous. The characters are round and the short stories are complete, though often feel like the tip of an iceberg. I wanted more because of how drawn I was to the characters, not because the tales left me unsatisfied. These stories continue to stick with me long after closing the book, beautifully rendered reminders of what we each hold untold."
Genevieve Shifke Ali, Independent Publisher
 

Summary

Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s. 

As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values. 

From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own. 

Contents

Introduction

                        IMAGES

Chapter 1        No Salt

Chapter 2        Trick or Treat

Chapter 3        A Tone

Chapter 4        Give Me My Hat

Chapter 5        Big Earl’s

Chapter 6        A Brush with the Law

Chapter 7        In Mommaw’s Kitchen

                        AWAKENING

Chapter 8        What We Called Home

Chapter 9        From a Time Before

Chapter 10      Night Light

Chapter 11      Cicada Buzz

                        AWARENESS

Chapter 12      I Spy

Chapter 13      Shelter

Chapter 14      Back Home

Chapter 15      Devil Faces

Chapter 16      Something Gathers ‘Round Me

Chapter 17      House of Leaves

Chapter 18      Plunder

REACTION

Chapter 19      Alarm Clock

Chapter 20      My Civic Duty

Chapter 21      The Nervous Hospital

Chapter 22      My Kingdom for a Horse

Chapter 23      Night on Cheat Mountain I

Chapter 24      Night on Cheat Mountain II

Chapter 25      CarniVAL

Chapter 26      War

Chapter 27      The Sailor man

                        LOSS

Chapter 28      In the Cellar

Chapter 29      Reckoning

Chapter 30      Exception to the Rule

Chapter 31      Charmed

Chapter 32      I’ve Drawed up a Mite

Chapter 33      900 Degrees Celsius

Chapter 34      Twin Haloes

Chapter 35      The Phone Rings

Chapter 36      Attention K-Mart Shoppers! Do the Dead Wear Underwear?

Chapter 37      We Shall Gather

Chapter 38      Riding on Comets

Chapter 39      Night on Cheat Mountain III

Chapter 40      Fall

                        STRENGTH

Chapter 41      Liminal

Chapter 42      Dragon’s Tale

Epilogue          
 

Author

Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and she is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans. 

Reviews

“In voice, in person, on the radio, on the page, Cat Pleska has for years been one of my favorite writers. I carry the rhythms of her honeyed voice inside me. I have felt the reassurance of her grandmother’s lap on the night-porch, listening to the thump of maternal heartbeats that made Cat feel safe then and forever, and I’ve been gripped by her father’s hands, less reliable but just as beloved, driving like crazy down Cheat Mountain. Cat herself stands fearless wherever she is among the grownups, the way only a greatly loved child can stand, alone on the front seat of the truck, curious to see roosters fighting while her grandpa goes inside at the bootlegger’s. I’ve tagged along after her mother (who made her bed tight enough to bounce a dime off) and her aunt as they circle the old family homestead, remembering their own childhoods. Never patronizing or pathologizing, always with compassion, knowing that her amazing, enduring, flawed family gave her the gift of unconditional belonging, Cat Pleska tells the story of her people with steady awareness of their hardships and foibles, their greatness of heart, and the smoking or alcohol that killed some of them, cut off in the midst of their stories while their inheritor, Cat, listens and faithfully records their voices for herself, for them, and for us. I could read this writer’s words forever, and still want more."
Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America

"The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.Cat Pleska writes masterfully and movingly about herself, her West Virginia home, and her colorful kin. But the greatest pleasure in reading Riding on Comets is that Pleska’s prose refuses to stay on the page. Rather, it insists on being read aloud and filling the room with its rich rhythms, resonances, syntax, and family diction. Cat Pleska is a natural, graceful, spellbinding storyteller."
Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

“Cat Pleska’s memoir of a childhood lived among the ‘giants’ of her West Virginia family is by turns humorous, touching, and achingly beautiful. This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”
Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.

“Riding on Comets is not only a personal memoir, it is the story of a family embedded in West Virginia for many generations. . . .Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”
Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon

“This compelling memoir illumines a challenging childhood rooted in the town and countryside of West Virginia. It is an identifiably Appalachian life insightfully revealing a broader view of the region than stereotypes portray. It is, as well, pervaded with a razor-sharp honesty that brings heartfelt empathy to both the sweet and the wicked. I could not stop cheering for this spunky little girl who becomes a spirited and resourceful woman, a woman who never gives up on herself or those she loves.”
Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and children’s book author

“Cat Pleska is a natural storyteller, a storied child. Growing up in West Virginia in the ‘50s and ‘60s, her life was steeped in family stories, and she was the one entrusted to retell them. Her own memories and experiences of small-town Appalachia deepen this candid and compelling coming-of-age memoir, and she captures our hearts in the process.”
Laura Treacy Bentley, author of The Silver Tattoo and Lake Effect

“Image by image, each unquestionably whole and mysterious. . . . Those images—her grandmother offering a ‘slice of apple from the edge of her knife,’ the ‘curing tobacco leaves hanging in bunches from the ceilings wooden beams’ in a long abandoned house, or her ‘Dad leaning over [her] mother's pristine, white enamel kitchen sink and throwing up blood’—tenderly sear themselves into both Cat’s heart and the reader’s.  All these images reflect, compound, and resonate with one another until they carry us forward like a leaf swirling in the October wind.”
Chris Green, Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College 

“Cat Pleska’s memoir seamlessly moves through moments in time to discover that her story is her family’s story of struggle and forgiveness against the backdrop of her native West Virginia mountains. Like stars that become constellations if we know how to look at them, this fine and engaging book shows us how to find and read the stories of our lives.”
Rob Merritt, author of The Language of Longing

“Sometimes comedic, sometimes heart wrenching . . . Cat Pleska writes with the graceful succinctness of a poet—whether she’s describing a bike ride home ‘pedaling fast against the dark’ or just listening to the peepers ‘calling out for someone to love them.’”
Cheryl Ware, author of Flea Circus Summer, Catty-Cornered, Venola in Love, Venola the Vegetarian, and Robert Price Has Head Lice