Lane Summers lives in a small town in the hills of West Virginia. Looking for a more exciting direction in life, the young man latches onto a new clique of friends. He seeks companionship and salvation, but soon finds himself mesmerized by the glamour of parties and wild fun. Yet his new life takes him out of the darkness and into the light of self examination. Lanes story of love and bitterness as he struggles with social anxiety, depression and insomnia reaches a crescendo as he travels curvy roads in search of his true self.

This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

The Pastor Driven Wife is a collection of strikingly honest stories that will bring laughter, light, and hope to anyone driving the bumpy road of faith. These stories-some hilarious, some poignant, some even miraculous-will especially encourage those who are "weary in well-doing" and provide valuable insights on how to go from "trying harder" to "trusting more." Come take a ride through Honky Tonk Hymns, My Drug Bust, Divine GPS, and many more chapters in the life of The Pastor Driven Wife. Note from the Author: "As a pastor's wife, teacher, counselor, mother, and grandma, I spent years pretending to be happy on the outside while crying and dying on the inside. I was fearful, struggling with perfectionism, fear of rejection, and an inexplicably vague sense of shame-yet deep down I always believed there had to be more. If you're feeling that same longing, there's good news....there IS more! So will you join me, maybe in your robe with your morning coffee? Let's ask the Father to bring us both together at His feet...free to laugh, cry, or simply receive His love."

In The Theoretics of Love, Joe Taylor turns his fierce wit and storytelling talents to love, death and murder in the Bluegrass state. Fresh out of school, anthropoligist Dr. Clarissa Circle finds herself thrust into a mysterious forensics investigation after exposing what was thought to be a Native American burial ground as a mass grave of not-so-recently murdered bodies. Is a cult behind the killings? Were these ritual murders? Hired as a consultant to the local police department, Circle spends half of her time dusting bones and the other half knocking boots with homicide detective Willy Cox and an aging hippie who goes by the name of Methuselah. A double suicide is discovered. And the plot thickens from there as other disturbing events unfold and people of questionable character surface and collide in this kaleidoscopic murder mystery/love story that is also madcap fun. Part Hunter S. Thompson, part Woody Allen, Joe Taylor’s tilted realism and quirky humor combine in this fast-paced novel that gleefully exposes our human foibles and heart. In The Theoretics of Love the motives behind the ritual murders rocking Kentucky are obscure and difficult to identify. Intimacy and love, as it turns out, prove to be every bit as theoretical. Joe Taylor gives love and passion a workout in the Bluegrass state in this new novel, which may be his best. Charles McNair, award-winning author of Pickett’s Charge and other novels, asks "Why isn’t Joe Taylor famous? I laughed out loud three times in the first chapter of Theoretics of Love. A few chapters later, I felt my heart would break. There’s nothing theoretical about Taylor’s talent. You’ll love this love story."

“This book tells what it means to be a woman when you are poor, when you are proud, and when you are a hillbilly.” First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of nineteen women in twentieth-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence. They are wives, widows, and daughters of coal miners; factory hands, tobacco graders, cotton mill workers, and farmers; and women who value honest labor, self-esteem, and dignity. Shining a much-needed light into a misunderstood culture and identity, the stories within reflect the universally human struggle to live meaningful and dignified lives. Updated with a new introduction and material from the author.

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters. In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.

Selections from poetry and fiction describe the 20th century's major conflicts.