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Latest Stories

Jefferson County Candidates – May 10 2022 Election

Building The Shepherdstown Opera House

Reeling In Big Fish & Big Tales

Take A Breath & Gain New Perspectives

Getting On The River In Jefferson County

Enjoy A Local Vacation To Shepherdstown

A Journey of Discovery in Italy

Blowing Warmer & Cooler

Solar in Jefferson County

Ambulance Proposal Raises Alarms — Inside the Fitch EMS Report

Ambulance Response Times Explained

Shepherd University Attracts Students & Funding

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In Print

May 2022

 

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: Small Town Wit and Grit

February, 2021

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

January, 2021 Tagged With: Appalachia

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

December, 2020 Tagged With: memoir, Publishing, writing

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

October, 2020 Tagged With: book review, populism

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

October, 2020 Tagged With: book review, Donald Trump, neoliberalism

Book cover for Beyond Populism. Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism.

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

September, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

Book cover for short story collection titled Fuckface by Leah Hampton.

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

August, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Ron Rash

book cover for Ron Rash's short story collection called in the valley.

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

July, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Fracking, groundwater, natural gas, water pollution

Book cover for novel called Lady Chevy by John Woods

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

April, 2020 Tagged With: book review, Donald Trump

black and white photo of Richard smock in a somber military uniform next to his smiling young son ray smock.

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

April, 2020 Tagged With: book review, memoir, substance use disorder

Book cover for the novel Kickass by Billy Manas.

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)

March, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, Appalachian noir, book review, Chris McGinley

Coal Black

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 >>

It Happened in Dogleg Bend, West Virginia

February, 2020 Tagged With: book review, C.M. Chapman

Book cover for the novel Suicidal Gods.

Short story collections can rise and fall by something as simple as the order in which its stories are presented to the reader. A punchy opening tale or an evocative closing yarn can compel the audience to read further or leave an impression that makes up for the weaker stories within its pages. The stakes are even higher when the stories are interconnected like in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a standard bearer of this subgenre, where a fictional Midwest town is the canvas upon which the characters’ lives unfold, or Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, where its main character and his drug-addled perception of the world serve as the collection’s connecting tissue. Read the Full Story >>

Author Spotlight: Cobb Publishes The Self-Loathing Project

January, 2020 Tagged With: book review, nonfiction

Book cover for The Self Loathing Project by Katherine Cobb.

After fifteen years of research and hundreds of interviews with women, author Katherine Cobb has compiled her findings into the compelling nonfiction book, The Self-Loathing Project. The majority of the book is comprised by first-person essays, which Cobb formatted from the interviews. The original questions are also included, plus a resources section and information about how the author personally overcame self-loathing. Read the Full Story >>

Appalachian Magical Realism

January, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, historical fiction, magical realism

The Winter Sisters

In Tim Westover’s novel The Winter Sisters, the hills of antebellum northern Georgia are the setting for a clash between science and magic in a story that treads nimbly between fantasy, picaresque, and historical fiction. In 1822, Savannah doctor Aubrey Waycross is invited to Lawrenceville, a remote town that, thanks to Westover’s evocative prose, seems to exist in a perpetual time warp where America is still new and tradition coexists with progress—a community that is as distant from cities as it is from the ripples of the Revolutionary War and the brewing tensions of the Civil War. Read the Full Story >>

From the Dark Web to the Streets

December, 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 >>

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