American artist George Ault (1891-1948) is known for his paintings of nighttime rural settings, deceptively quaint yet mysterious depictions of barns, and desolate town corners shaped by light and shadow. The cover of Chris Offutt’s latest novel, The Killing Hills, has an Aultian character to it that aptly captures the essence of this thriller, a story of violence and blood feuds but also quiet moments of foreboding deep in the eastern Kentucky hills. Read the Full Story >>
Book Reviews
The Observer showcases poetry, fiction, romance, thrillers, horror, non-fiction, memoirs and other literature, with a focus on Appalachia, Appalachian authors, and timely themes from around the world.
Book Review: So Much to be Angry About
The upsurge of social justice movements and radicalism that characterized the Sixties had an equally dynamic correlation in the so-called “movement press”, the many independent print shops across the United States that published pamphlets and other political materials aimed at everyone from college students to blue-collar workers. In delving into this forgotten chapter of Appalachian activism, Pittsburgh artist and writer Shaun Slifer, creative director at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, has undertaken a painstaking work of historical reconstruction. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Remaking Appalachia
Stump’s ambitious and challenging work reimagines the commons – the cultural and natural assets accessible to all members of society – in innovative ways but also imbibes from previous intellectual frameworks and Appalachia’s own robust activist tradition. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Pop
A novel that threads skillfully between humor and the stark realities of an impoverished rural community, Robert Gipe’s Pop is a compulsively readable story of a motley crew of feisty misfits and a modern day generational saga of a working class family. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Small Town Wit and Grit
Like an old school country album by Billy Joe Shaver or Merle Haggard, Larry D. Thacker’s debut collection Working It Off in Labor County tells stories about small town life full of quirky characters, humor that can be folksy and innocent but also dark, and heartfelt tales of day-to-day struggle. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Pancake Revisited
A few years ago, I took a day off from work, packed some clothes, and drove from my former home in the DC area to Milton, West Virginia. I had not visited Milton (pop. 2400) before nor its surrounding areas, but I felt that some of the sights during my six-hour road trip were familiar. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Life in the Midlist
Aspiring writers may have a hard time finding responsive publishers and agents, but at least they have an entire industry that caters to them. Why then would there be a need for another book about writing fiction? Jon Sealy’s So You Want to Be a Novelist answers that question in its first few pages. Read the Full Story >>
Book Review: Hungry Dogs
Compared to national politics, it often seems that local governmental affairs involve lower stakes and mundane concerns. That outlook is just as frequently mistaken. History has shown us repeatedly that grassroots movements or social malaises can brew under the radar of the national media only to erupt on the national stage with explosive force. Read the Full Story >>
Angry Politics
Populism is typically analyzed by political scientists, who look at the ideological frameworks and political dynamics at play; historians, who delve into the roots of the different movements; and journalists, who take a more contingent approach to the parties and personalities. Beyond Populism enriches these perspectives with a primarily anthropological view of the political projects typically labeled as populist. Read the Full Story >>
Down and Out in Appalachia
When it comes to judging a book, titles can be just as deceitful as covers. With a title like F*ckface, one might expect Leah Hampton’s short story collection to be a brash set of tales rooted in hardscrabble Appalachia. Read the Full Story >>
Ron Rash’s Appalachia
Ron Rash (1953) started out as a poet and short story writer in the ‘90s before he published his first novel, One Foot in Eden (2002) and the novel that catapulted him to national literary prominence, Serena (2008), later adapted into film. In his newest work, In the Valley, Rash returns to the short story form as well as to the characters of Serena in the novella that gives name to this collection. Read the Full Story >>
Poisoned Land
The cover of John Woods’ debut novel Lady Chevy portrays a mountain landscape against an orange-hued backdrop. The colors may depict an oddly-tinted sunset or, more likely, the fiery, sulfurous sky of a land ravaged by the fracking industry, where flares emerging from giant towers light the horizon and tainted aquifers, flammable tap water, and earthquakes have become a normal occurrence. Read the Full Story >>
Bearing Witness to the Trump Presidency
I do not hate Trump. I am appalled by him. There is a difference. I see Trump as a massive and dangerous symptom of a political disease that has been festering and growing in this country for most of my adult life. Ideological extreme partisanship, now fueled by social media, is as bad for our political well-being as the forest fires in Australia were bad for the entire ecology. Read the Full Story >>
Sobriety Nuts and Bolts
Reading a book on addiction recovery is not as daunting as recovery itself, but it can be a difficult task for numerous reasons... Read the Full Story >>
Appalachian Noir – ‘Coal Black,’ by Chris McGinley (Shotgun Honey, 2019)
In one of the most searing dialogues of Chris McGinley’s debut short story collection Coal Black, an eastern Kentucky drug dealer known as Hellbender asks a sheriff who’s been pursuing him: “Why do you think people around here are so addicted to drugs?” He answers his own question: “It’s because of depression. There is a streak of fatalism in Coal Black that is not just informed by the trappings of the crime fiction genre, but by the socioeconomic devastation of its rural Kentucky setting. The survivalist outlook of the characters in these stories is its inevitable consequence. Read the Full Story >>
