In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent-her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a “processing error”-Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents...

"In a country as vast as the United States, place looms large. Steven Moore, a former soldier, writes about place, explicitly rural places, in a way that transcends specificity and speaks to the universal: whether the Midwest, Appalachia, or remote West, what Moore has to say about rural places speaks to anyone who has driven a lonely road at night, with nothing but darkness as a cushion between them and the emptiness that surrounds. Place and how...

The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties that bind and the gulf that separates generations, from children confronting the fallibility of their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again and again.

In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life. This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...

A bold debut novel weaves a coming-of-age story into the gritty lives and desolate beauty of Vermont's northeast kingdom.

The story of John Grant, a bonded teacher who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, plans to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney, Australia. But, as his one night stretches to five, he plunges headlong toward his own destruction. When the alcohol-induced mist lifts, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead there is a self-loathing man in a desolate wasteland, dirty, red-eyed, sitting against a tree and looking...

Inheriting her father's 7,000 acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, the author accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland, peeling back layers of the American story, the politics of food and the culture of the Great Plains.

Jane Adams focuses on the transformation of rural life in Union County, Illinois, as she explores the ways in which American farming has been experienced and understood in the twentieth century. Reconstructing the histories of seven farms, she places the details of daily life within the context of political and economic change. Adams identifies contradictions that, on a personal level, influenced relations between children and parents, men and women,...

In rural Gaotai County, two lonely, middle-aged outcasts are pushed into an arranged marriage by their families. Ma is a humble farmer with little to offer his timid and sickly wife, Cao, except for a small, abandoned house on a barren patch of land. From just a few seeds, their newly planted crops take root and flourish; similarly, an unexpected bond between them starts to blossom. As seasons pass, their dedication to each other grows stronger, but...

A young woman returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory of southern Mississippi to find the girl who may be a savior in the apocalypse.