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March 21 — Virtual Walk In The Woods Fundraiser with PVAS

February 26, 2021

2021 American Conservation Film Festival

February 26, 2021

Exhibit at Berkeley Art Works Celebrates Historic African-American Cemetery

February 26, 2021

Book Review: Pop

February 26, 2021

March 5 — Virtual Concert: A Celtic Celebration

February 26, 2021

Feeling The Heartbeat Of Spring Emerging

February 26, 2021

March 9 — Speak Stories Presents Chetter Galloway

February 26, 2021

Take An Online Art Class This March At Berkeley Art Works

February 26, 2021

Connecting Solar In Jefferson County

February 24, 2021

A Look At Rural Zoning In Jefferson County

February 24, 2021

Inkwells Tavern Reopens in Charles Town

February 24, 2021

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Park Celebrates 50 Years

February 1, 2021

In Print

Book Review

The Observer showcases poetry, fiction, romance, thrillers, horror, non-fiction, memoirs and other literature about Appalachia and by Appalachian authors.

From the Dark Web to the Streets

December 22, 2019 Tagged With: book review, nonfiction, opioid epidemic

Fentanyl Inc.

Fentanyl, Inc. opens with the story of eighteen-year-olds Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt as they go on a road trip across the snowed plains of North Dakota. Henke and Schwain plan on visiting family, but they have an ulterior motive: they hope their time on the road will help them kick their addiction to fentanyl, a drug they once discovered by buying medical patches on the black market. Read the Full Story >>

The Shadow of the Land

November 18, 2019 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Timothy Dodd

Timothy Dodd

Timothy Dodd’s Fissures and Other Stories is a slim tome of 19 short stories that mostly take place in West Virginia, but whose range of themes and characters build a larger world, recognizable and yet intriguing. Read the Full Story >>

The Distance Between, by Timothy J. Hillegonds

October 10, 2019 Tagged With: book review, memoir, opioid epidemic, substance use disorder, Timothy J. Hillegonds

Timothy J. Hillegonds

As I read Timothy J. Hillegonds’ harrowing memoir of addiction and youthful rage, The Distance Between (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), I was reminded of a sentence written by one of my favorite fiction authors, Richard Lange: “We can only, all of us, run so far before what we really are and what is meant to be catch up to us.” Read the Full Story >>

A Deep-Dive Into Anger, Abuse, and Resurrection with Debut Author Timothy J. Hillegonds

October 5, 2019 Tagged With: opioid epidemic, substance use disorder, Tim Hillegonds

Tim Hillegonds

A Chicago native, author Timothy J. Hillegonds stepped foot in Shepherdstown for the first time in 2012, and found himself smitten from the start. Seven years later, he readily calls Shepherdstown his second home, and by getting to know West Virginia’s oldest town as intimately as he has, he’s also become familiar with the Mountain State’s unfortunate connection to the nationwide opioid epidemic. Read the Full Story >>

Stay and Fight, by Madeline ffitch

September 30, 2019 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Madeline ffitch

Madeline ffitch

The idea of going “back to the land” tends to evoke picturesque images of a nurturing earth and a supposed return to an uncorrupted, self-sufficient lifestyle. These beliefs are swiftly shattered for the characters of Madeline ffitch’s outstanding first novel, Stay and Fight (Farrar, Starus and Giroux, 2019). Narrated through the alternating points of view of its four protagonists, the novel introduces us to Helen, who at 31, is tired of “waiting for my life the whole time.” She decides to leave Seattle with her boyfriend Shane and, thanks to an inheritance from Helen’s deceased uncle, they buy 20 acres of land in Appalachian Ohio. Read the Full Story >>

American Overdose

August 17, 2019 Tagged With: Beth Macy, book review, Dopesick, nonfiction, opioid epidemic

The opioid epidemic has been described as “one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.” But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that pushed the U.S. into consuming more than 80 percent of the world’s opioid painkillers. Read the Full Story >>

Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic, by Sheldon Lee Compton (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019)

July 21, 2019 Tagged With: book review, Sheldon Lee Compton

Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic

Over the last decade, Sheldon Lee Compton has published numerous short stories ranging from magical realism to gritty, working-class fiction—and everything in between. What connects most of them is their poetic prose and their rootedness in Appalachia—and more specifically, Eastern Kentucky, where the author hails from—even when they don’t explicitly allude to a setting.  Read the Full Story >>

To the Bones (WVU Press, 2019)

June 24, 2019 Tagged With: book review, supernatural, Valerie Nieman

To the Bones

In spite of West Virginia’s rich folklore and modern myths like the Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster, the state’s literature—or even that of Appalachia as a whole—is not typically associated with horror and the supernatural. Nevertheless, West Virginian writers have created several fine exponents of literary fantasy, ranging from Pinckney Benedict’s outstanding magical realist short stories to Ron Houchin’s young adult horror novel The Devil’s Trill, and Victor Depta’s vampire gothic House of the Moon. Read the Full Story >>

History of Local 1780 Farmhouse Inspires First-Time Author

May 1, 2019 Tagged With: book review, Frontier Cabin Story, Joseph Goss

When Joseph Goss and his wife, Lynne, purchased an old farmhouse outside of Shepherdstown, the retired engineer never dreamed the acquisition would lead to many countless, happy hours of research and, eventually, a book. Read the Full Story >>

The Howling Ages, by William Hastings

April 17, 2019 Tagged With: book review, William Hastings

Fantasy writer Harlan Ellison once said that “a continent is no thicker than a membrane when one carries the misery inside.” He was talking about the tormented life of another author, Herbert Kastle, who had moved from New York to Los Angeles in an attempt to restart his life after a failed marriage, running from ghosts that he couldn’t escape from since they were a part of himself.  Read the Full Story >>

Book Review: In the Amber Chamber

March 19, 2019 Tagged With: book review, Carrie Messenger

In the Amber Chamber (Brighthorse Books, 2018) is an eclectic short story collection by Carrie Messenger, Associate Professor of English at Shepherd University, that manages the rare feat of being consistent in quality while navigating through widely diverse genres and styles. Its stories range from speculative fiction to whimsical fables drawing from an idiosyncratic mix of fantasy and Eastern European lore all the way to historical fiction. Messenger’s skilled weaving of myth and fact brings to mind the stories of Argentinean fantasist Jorge Luis Borges and the genre-bending fiction of Kelly Link. Read the Full Story >>

Coal Wars and Rugged Beauty

January 16, 2019 Tagged With: Andrea Fekete, Appalachia, book review, coal

Andrea Fekete’s first novel Waters Run Wild was originally published in 2010. Even though it garnered rave reviews and the author’s work has been widely anthologized, the book suffered the fate of many independent press titles, and has long been out of print. Fortunately, this powerful novel of a family’s struggles during the West Virginia Mine Wars is back in an enhanced edition that introduces new readers to an outstanding voice and allows those who enjoyed its earlier version to reacquaint themselves with its elegant language and compelling characters. Read the Full Story >>

America’s Opioid Killing Fields

November 30, 2018 Tagged With: Beth Macy, book review, Dopesick, nonfiction, opioid epidemic, substance use disorder

Award-winning journalist Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America comes as a timely, in-depth look at America’s opioid crisis that tells the stories of its victims and traces the social and economic roots of the epidemic. Read the Full Story >>

Book Review: In the House of Wilderness

October 8, 2018 Tagged With: book review, Charles Dodd White

In White’s latest novel, In the House of Wilderness (Swallow Press, 2018), a mercurial drifter known as Wolf dumps a dead body in the river and then sits down to watch “the complicated patterning of water.” Read the Full Story >>

Book Review: Country Dark

August 18, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Chris Offutt

If Country Dark as a title is not enough of a harbinger of what’s in store for readers, the novel itself doesn’t take long to introduce us to a gritty rural Kentucky landscape as experienced by Tucker, a young Korean War veteran who’s returning home. Hitchhiking through the countryside and camping in the woods, his brief interlude of peace is interrupted when he sees a woman running along a dirt road. Read the Full Story >>

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