Summary

2021 Colorado Book Awards Finalist, Literary Fiction

MK and Colleen get reacquainted while working at different stores in a bankrupt mall. Way back, the women went to Catholic school together and collaborated on racy letters to a soldier in Vietnam who thought they were much older than seventh graders—a ruse that typifies later shenanigans, usually brought on by red-headed Colleen, a self-proclaimed “Celtic warrior.”

After ditching Colleen’s car to collect the insurance, they drive from one unexpected event to the next in Big Blue, MK’s Buick clunker with a St. Christopher statue glued to the dash. The glow-in-the-dark icon guides them past the farm debris, mine ruins, and fracking waste of the northern brow of Appalachia. Yet their world is not a dystopia. Rather, MK and Colleen show why, amid all the desperation, there is still a community of hope, filled with people looking out for their neighbors and with survivors who offer joy, laughter, and good will.

Contents

St. Christopher on Pluto
Cara Dog
Navidad
Signed Sealed Delivered
Sweet the Sound
Yellow Tape
Less Said
Love, Masque, and Folly
Complicado
Hand against the Horn
Pixelated
Ramp
After All Danger of Frost
Damn Stitch
Liquidate
Acknowledgments

Author

Nancy McKinley is a founding fiction faculty member at Wilkes University, where she teaches at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is the author of Travels with a Nuclear Whore, which won the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, and is a recipient of the Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation.

Reviews

“St. Christopher on Pluto is good word medicine. I belly laughed and was so touched so many times, I had to keep tissues on hand. I will stock up and give this book to any friend overwhelmed by life.”
Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys

“Set amidst Pennsylvania small-town life, the linked stories in St. Christopher on Pluto tackle big subjects: war, faith, AIDS, female friendship, race, and aging. Gravitas and comedy are not an easy combination, but Nancy McKinley masterfully mixes the two in a moving, memorable, and inspiring collection.”
Steven Schwartz, author of Madagascar: New and Selected Stories

“A dazzling collection, recounted in multiple colloquial voices and acute imagery that conveys a palpable and cinematic sense of place.”
J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

“This book is the real hillbilly elegy, this tour through an Appalachia whose female warriors mess up and flounder but somehow survive. Nancy McKinley’s stories are both sad and hilarious, and punctuated by unexpected wonder.”
John Vernon, author of The Last Canyon

“Warm, generous stories.”
Kirkus

“St. Christopher on Pluto drew me in by its humor, but, like the best comic fiction, it’s constructed out of insider social observations that sting as much as they amuse. . . . It’s so entertaining to go along for the ride with MK and chatty Colleen, and, because of their wry, sometimes bumbling, suck-it-up resiliency, it’s also possible to take in these hard-luck landscapes and see some possibility amidst all the losses.”
Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

Summary

Knox Thompson thinks he’s working a hustle, but it’s a hustle that’s working him. Trying to keep his pizza shop and parents afloat, he cleans out a backroom Kentucky poker game only to be roped into dealing marijuana by the proprietor—an arrangement Knox only halfheartedly resists.

Knox’s shop makes the perfect front for a marijuana operation, but his supplier turns out to be violent and calculating, and Knox ends up under his thumb. It’s not long before more than just the pizza shop is at risk.

Author

Wesley Browne is the founder and host of Pages & Pints Reading Series at Apollo Pizza in Richmond, Kentucky. He lives with his wife and two sons in Madison County, where he practices law, co-owns and helps manage local restaurants and a music venue, and coaches sports. This is his debut book.

Reviews

"Hilarious, exhilarating, utterly gripping. I loved every minute of this book. Hillbilly Hustle is required reading."
Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators 

“This tour de force deftly walks the tightrope of being both a page-turner and a language-driven debut that firmly establishes a solid new voice. Cinematic, lyrical, and often very funny, Hillbilly Hustle is ripe with memorable characters and a vivid sense of place that sheds light on a whole new kind of Appalachia that’s never been seen before.”   
Silas House, author of Southernmost

“Witty, savvy storytelling at the crossroads of pizza, pot, and noir. Hillbilly Hustle is the impish spawn of that lost camping trip Rounders, Pineapple Express, and Breaking Bad took to the Kentucky outback last summer. Step aside, Avon Barksdale and Tony Montana. Burl Spoon is my new favorite drug lord. With Hillbilly Hustle, Wes Browne dishes up a smart, tasty debut delivered in an assured voice, one that is sure to create a buzz among readers who like their comedy dry and the pace of their tales brisk.”
Robert Gipe, author of Trampoline 

“Wes Browne’s Hillbilly Hustle is clever as hell, funny as hell, genuine as hell. Read it and feel alive.”
Hannah Pittard, author of Visible Empire

“A narrative rolled as expertly as Willie Nelson’s nightcap. It takes shape between breakneck page-turns and well-timed punchlines.”
David Joy, author of The Line That Held Us

"One of those literary Appalachian noir novels that, somehow, gives a nod to Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver, to Robert B. Parker and Donald Ray Pollock.”
George Singleton, author of Staff Picks

"Wes Browne writes like the smart-talking, card-shuffling, bullet-dodging, bourbon-soaked lovechild of Ron Rash, Elmore Leonard, and the Coen brothers. He's clever as hell, a swift plotter with a heart-bruised sense of character and a brilliant ear for dialogue. I loved Hillbilly Hustle, and I'd gamble you will too."
Benjamin Percy, author of Suicide Woods

“A hell of a fun read. A sort of hillbilly Inherent Vice.”
Jesse Donaldson, author of On Homesickness

“Wonder Boys meets Elmore Leonard.”
Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot 

"Holy Hell! Move over bible thumpers, Hillbilly Hustle is a religious experience to be read, taught, and talked about for years to come, piling on the conflict, the tension, and a cast of unforgettable rural Kentucky characters that are as authentic as the dialogue and the landscape that it’s rooted within. Wes Browne has written a satirical barn burner of a debut novel."
Frank Bill, author of The Savage

"With masterful pacing and brilliant dialogue, Wes Browne’s compelling debut novel Hillbilly Hustle renders the deadly terrain of Appalachian noir with humor and heart. Don’t miss this savage, tender, hilarious read."
Pamela Duncan, author of Plant Life

"If Wes Browne isn't the Richard Price of Appalachian literature he must be its John Kennedy Toole. This is Appalachia, and all its contradictions, observed with a loving precision and rendered in razor-sharp dialogue. A brilliant debut."
Mark Powell, author of Small Treasons

"A top-notch debut with a winning narrative voice and unexpectedly multidimensional characters."
Kirkus

Summary

William Hal Gorby’s study of Wheeling’s Polish community weaves together stories of immigrating, working, and creating a distinctly Polish American community, or Polonia, in the heart of the upper Ohio Valley steel industry. It addresses major topics in the history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, while shifting from urban historians’ traditional focus on large cities to a case study in a smaller Appalachian setting.

Wheeling was a center of West Virginia’s labor movement, and Polish immigrants became a crucial element within the city’s active working-class culture. Arriving at what was also the center of the state’s Roman Catholic Diocese, Poles built religious and fraternal institutions to support new arrivals and to seek solace in times of economic strain and family hardship. The city’s history of crime and organized vice also affected new immigrants, who often lived in neighborhoods targeted for selective enforcement of Prohibition.

At once a deeply textured evocation of the city’s ethnic institutions and an engagement with larger questions about belonging, change, and justice, Wheeling’s Polonia is an inspiring account of a diverse working-class culture and the immigrants who built it.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “Wheeling Might Appropriately Be Called a Polish City”: A Local Look at the Polish Migration, 1870–1915
2. “There Has Always Been a Tough Element in That Section”: Work, Culture, and Society in South Wheeling and Benwood
3. The Heart of the Community: Polish Catholics at St. Ladislaus Parish, 1890–1917
4. Finding a Good Job and a Good Union for Polonia: Polish Workers within Wheeling’s Labor Movement, 1890–1915
5. Proving Their Loyalty: Wheeling’s Polish Immigrants during World War I
6. Struggling for Economic Security: Polonia during the 1919 Steel Strike and the Roaring Twenties
7. Polonia Adapts to the “New Era” of the 1920s
8. Moonshiners and Bootleggers: New Immigrants and the Selective Enforcement of Prohibition in Wheeling
9. Polonia in the Great Depression and the Rise of the CIO at Wheeling Steel
Conclusion
Notes

Author

William Hal Gorby is a teaching assistant professor of history and director of undergraduate advising at West Virginia University. He teaches courses on West Virginian, Appalachian, and American immigration history. He also consulted on the research and script editing for the Emmy-nominated PBS American Experience documentary The Mine Wars.

Reviews

“Wheeling’s Polonia is an important work. Gorby skillfully makes the case for why this story is significant, not just for labor and working-class history but also (by implication) for today’s electoral map. He shows a sensitivity to these workers and to the various facets of their identity as they evolved over time that many scholars and pundits often lack.”
Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, author of America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960

Summary

The West Virginia University Mountaineer is not just a mascot: it is a symbol of West Virginia history and identity embraced throughout the state. In this deeply informed but accessible study, folklorist Rosemary Hathaway explores the figure’s early history as a backwoods trickster, its deployment in emerging mass media, and finally its long and sometimes conflicted career—beginning officially in 1937—as the symbol of West Virginia University.

Alternately a rabble-rouser and a romantic embodiment of the state’s history, the Mountaineer has been subject to ongoing reinterpretation while consistently conveying the value of independence. Hathaway’s account draws on multiple sources, including archival research, personal history, and interviews with former students who have portrayed the mascot, to explore the complex forces and tensions animating the Mountaineer figure. Often serving as a focus for white, masculinist, and Appalachian identities in particular, the Mountaineer that emerges from this study is something distinct from the hillbilly. Frontiersman and rebel both, the Mountaineer figure traditionally and energetically resists attempts (even those by the university) to tame or contain it.

Contents

Introduction   
1. The Origins of the Mountaineer
2. From Slouch Hat to Coonskin Cap: The Hillbilly Mountaineer versus the Frontiersman
3. The Rifle and the Beard: The WVU Mountaineer in the 1960s
4. Policing the Student Body: “Mountain Dears” and (Sexy) Girls with Guns
5. Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Twenty-First-Century Mountaineer
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Author

Rosemary V. Hathaway is an associate professor of English at West Virginia University, where she teaches folklore, American literature, and young adult literature.

Reviews

“With her personal, familial connection to the subject and background as a folklorist, Rosemary Hathaway has written a well-crafted and thoroughly researched narrative with nuance, a strong historical foundation, and important analysis. Mountaineers Are Always Free has both relevance to the current political moment and the power to endure.”
Emily Hilliard, state folklorist and founding director of the West Virginia Folklife Program

“Folklorist Rosemary Hathaway’s well-researched and engaging book explores the evolution of the WVU ‘mascot’ the Mountaineer from its preindustrial origins to the present. Imaginatively analyzing personal, local, and national sources, Hathaway reveals how the ongoing transformations of the Mountaineer have both built upon and challenged regional and national stereotypes in ways that reflect competing conceptions of freedom and identity.”
Anthony Harkins, author of Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon

Summary

Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in college teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practical—the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice.

Kevin Gannon asks that the contemporary university’s manifold problems be approached as opportunities for critical engagement, arguing that, when done effectively, teaching is by definition emancipatory and hopeful. Considering individual pedagogical practice, the students who are the primary audience and beneficiaries of teaching, and the institutions and systems within which teaching occurs, Radical Hope surveys the field, tackling everything from impostor syndrome to cell phones in class to allegations of a campus “free speech crisis.” Throughout, Gannon translates ideals into tangible strategies and practices (including key takeaways at the conclusion of each chapter), with the goal of reclaiming teachers’ essential role in the discourse of higher education.
 

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Classrooms of Death
2. The Things We Tell Our Students
3. Cultivating Transformative Teaching
4. Teaching and Learning Inclusively
5. Making Access Mean Something
6. Encouraging Choice, Collaboration, and Agency 
7. A Syllabus Worth Reading
8. Pedagogy Is Not a Weapon
9. Platforms and Power
10. I Don’t Know . . . Yet.
Coda: Radical Hope, Even When It Seems Hopeless
Notes
Index

Author

Kevin M. Gannon is director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and professor of history at Grand View University. He writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, gives frequent talks and workshops, and appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay.

Reviews

“A full-throated defense of the humanities, a liberal education, and the power of education as a transformational force.”
Contingent Magazine

“A must-read for pedagogues and theorists alike. Gannon's explorations into history, power, and academia place students and the environments in which they learn front and center for the rest of us to consider. This work isn't about reform, but transformation, and Gannon's book pushes us in the right direction.”
José Luis Vilson, author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education

“This is the book I needed to read—it was a fresh drink of water in a time of turmoil and despair in education. Gannon grounds his calls for radical hope in the work of educational scholars like Freire, hooks, and Giroux, and offers helpful examples and recommendations based on his years of teaching experience. He tackles real issues we are facing at our institutions head-on without capitulating to clichés or trendy solutions often offered in books about higher education.”
Amy Collier, Middlebury College

“In a time of precariously employed professors, crushing student debt burdens, and cynically manufactured campus outrages, Radical Hope is a much-needed practical and principled reminder of the promise and possibility of education for liberation.”
Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Race and America's Long War and faculty director, NYU Prison Education Program

Summary

The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil’s literary giants—Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil’s most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as “the poet of the slaves”; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery.

Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure. He ends by setting up a wider literary context for his core authors by introducing a comparative study of their great literary abolitionist predecessors Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama and Joaquim Nabuco. The Black Butterfly is a revolutionary text that insists Brazilian culture has always refused a clean break between slavery and its aftermath. Brazilian slavery thus emerges as a living legacy subject to continual renegotiation and reinvention.

Contents

List of Illustrations     

Introduction   

1. Castro Alves, O Navio Negreiro, and a New Poetics of the Middle Passage        

2. Castro Alves, Voices of Africa, and the Paulo Affonso Falls: From African Monologic Propope-ia to Brazilian[[AU: chapter title does not include “Brazilian”—add there, or delete here?]] Planta-tion Anti-Pastoral

3. Obscure Agency: Machado de Assis Framing Black Servitudes    

4. “The child is father to the man”: Bad Big Daddy and the Dilemmas of Planter Patriarchy in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas        

5. Magnifying Signifying Silence: Afro-Brazilians and Slavery in Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões     

6. After-Words and After-Worlds: Freyre, Llosa, Slavery and the Cultural Inheritance of Os Sertões         

Conclusion      

Notes

Index

Author

Marcus Wood is professor of English at the University of Sussex and the author of several books, including Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America and The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. His book Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America was awarded the best book prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Reviews

“A groundbreaking interpretation of Brazilian literature in the context of transatlantic slavery and studies of race.”
Aquiles Alencar Brayner, the British Library

“The Black Butterfly is written in an accessible, engaging, and indeed sometimes almost poetic prose, which should make it a compelling read for the general public. The book also makes a significant contribution to Brazilian literary studies, and . . . comparative race studies, Black Studies, and African Diaspora Studies, as well as Comparative Literature.”
Luso-Brazilian Review

Summary

Do you have a smartphone? Billions of people on the planet now navigate their daily lives with the kind of advanced Global Positioning System capabilities once reserved for the most secretive elements of America’s military-industrial complex. But when so many people have access to the most powerful technologies humanity has ever devised for the precise determination of geographical coordinates, do we still need a specialized field of knowledge called geography?

Just as big data and artificial intelligence promise to automate occupations ranging from customer service and truck driving to stock trading and financial analysis, our age of algorithmic efficiency seems to eliminate the need for humans who call themselves geographers—at the precise moment when engaging with information about the peoples, places, and environments of a diverse world is more popular than ever before. How did we get here? This book traces the recent history of geography, information, and technology through the biography of Edward A. Ackerman, an important but forgotten figure in geography’s “quantitative revolution.” It argues that Ackerman’s work helped encode the hidden logics of a distorted philosophical heritage—a dangerous, cybernetic form of thought known as militant neo-Kantianism—into the network architectures of today’s pervasive worlds of surveillance capitalism.

Contents

Preface           

Acknowledgments     

1. Ackerman’s Frontier          

2. The Ackerman Sample      

3. Contradictions of “Mental Structuring”    

4. Militant Neo-Kantianism   

5. The New Evolution of Geographic Thought?        

6. Notes on Desk        

Notes 

Index

Author

Elvin Wyly is a professor of geography and chair of the Urban Studies Coordinating Committee at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and former editor in chief of the journal Urban Geography.

Reviews

“Full of revelatory answers to how, why, when, and where human geography evolved and came into its own during and after World War II. . . . Highly recommended.”
CHOICE

“Wyly’s approach is sweeping in scope yet detailed in its discussion of the archival evidence. He places great store in sociopolitical and disciplinary context, and makes strong linkages between the past and the present intellectual contexts. The scholarship is meticulous. The writing is fluid and lively.”
Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University

“An excellent, concise, critical study.”
Joel Wainwright, coauthor of Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future

Summary

Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.

The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called “the switch.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.

Contents

Acknowledgments     

Introduction / Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti         

Part I: Mapping Energy Culture

1          Oil on Water / Ernst Logar     

2          Trespassage / Mél Hogan      

3          The Ocean and the Cloud: Material Metaphors of Hidden Infrastructure / Jayne Wilkinson          

4          Walking Matters: A Peripatetic Rethinking of Energy Culture / Mary Elizabeth Luka          

5          Several Documents Pertaining to the Cascade Energy (transition) Park Corporation Corporation (CORPCORP) / Marissa Benedict, Cameron Hu, Christopher Malcolm, and David Rueter

6          Sustaining Petrocultures: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Oil Sands Reclamation / Jordan Kinder           

Part II: Figuring Energy Culture

7          Capitalism in the Corpse of a Whale / Ackroyd and Harvey 

8          Tilting at Windfarms: Towards a Political Ecology of Energy Humanism and the Literary Aesthetic / David Thomas        

9          Embodied Actants, Fossil Narratives / Maria Michails, Interviewed by Andrea Zeffiro

10        The Energy Apparatus / Am Johal     

11        Aeolian Survey / Hannah Imlach and Thomas Butler

12        Anecdotal Encounters on Driveways: The Aesthetics of Oil in Northern Alberta and Newfoundland / Megan Green       

13        Energy Meets Telepathy Aesthetics and Materialist Consciousness / Jacquelene Drinkall 

Part III: The Politics of Energy Culture

14        Rejecting Solar Capitalism / Jenni Matchett 

15        The Switch / Keller Easterling

16        Beyond Carbon Democracy: Energy, Infrastructure, and Sabotage / Darin Barney  0

17        Strike / Antonio Negri

18        Energized Antagonisms: Thinking Beyond “Energy Culture” / Matthew Huber       

19        Vortex of Light (Ice Memoriam) / Maya Weeks        

Contributors

Index

Author

Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. His recent books include On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (WVU Press), After Oil (WVU Press), Energy Humanities: An Anthology, and Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment.

Jeff Diamanti teaches literary and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the editor of Contemporary Marxist Theory, Materialism and the Critique of Energy, and The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, as well as a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory on energy humanities and a double issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities on climate realism.

Reviews

“An exemplary multidisciplinary approach to entangled questions of energy, politics, and aesthetics. Energy Culture should excite and inspire an interdisciplinary community of scholars, artists, and activists; it not only points to possible ways forward for thinking and acting, but also offers tangible, provocative examples of what our creative and critical practices might do.”
Thomas S. Davis, author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life