Download or read book The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart written by Glenn Taylor and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Trenchmouth Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and to survive the taunts of others. In the hills of southern West Virginia, a boy grows up fast. Trenchmouth sips moonshine, handles snakes, pleases women, and masters the rifle—a skill that lands him in the middle of the West Virginia coal wars. A teenaged union sniper, Trenchmouth is exiled to the back-woods of Appalachia's foothills, where he spends his years running from the past. But trouble will sniff a man down, and an outlaw will eventually run home. Here Trenchmouth Taggart's story, like the best ballads, etches its mark deep upon the memory.
Download or read book The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart written by M. Glenn Taylor and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Early 'Trenchmouth ' Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and survive the taunts of others. This is Trenchmouth Taggart's story.
Download or read book The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart written by M. Glenn Taylor and published by West Virginia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Trenchmouth Taggart, the oldest living man in West VIrginia, a man whose epic and absurd life story unfolds from the moment of his frozen-river baptism in 1903. Trenchmouth, nicknamed for his inexplicable, lifelong oral affliction, is orphaned and then raised by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to fend for himself. Trouble seems to follow Trenchmouth as he goes through his life with stints as a mine war sniper, musician, and prize-winning reporter. But Trenchmouth always finds a way to triumph, and when he enters his last stage of life, he is indeed a reporter worthy of a grand report, of telling his unthinkable tale. Yet it is in the telling itself that something truly remarkable is revealed, something even Trenchmouth could not have known.
Download or read book The Marrowbone Marble Company written by Glenn Taylor and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.
Download or read book A Hanging at Cinder Bottom written by Glenn Taylor and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart and set in the boom years of the West Virginia coalmining industry, this is an epic story of personal ambition, exile and return, and a grand heist.
Download or read book Strange as This Weather Has Been written by Ann Pancake and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2007-09-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A West Virginia family struggles amid the booms and busts of the Appalachian coal industry in this “powerful, sure-footed, and haunting” novel with echoes of John Steinbeck (New York Times Book Review). Set in present day West Virginia, this debut novel tells the story of a coal mining family—a couple and their four children—living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their hometown. As the mine turns the mountains “to slag and wastewater,” workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters. Strange as This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen–year–old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more frequently outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows—the only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong–willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.
Download or read book The Night of the Hunter written by Davis Grubb and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling, National Book Award–finalist novel that inspired Charles Laughton’s expressionist horror classic starring Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters. Two young children, Pearl and John Harper, are being raised alone by their mother in Cresap’s Landing, Ohio. Their father Ben has just been executed for killing two men in the course of an armed robbery. Ben never told anyone where he hid the ten thousand dollars he stole; not his widow Willa, not his lawyer, nor his cell-mate Henry “Preacher” Powell. But Preacher, with his long history of charming his way into widows’ hearts and lives, has an inkling that Ben's money could be within his reach. As soon as he is free, Preacher makes his way up the river to visit the Harper family where—he hopes—a little child shall lead him to the fortune that he seeks. Foreword by JULIA KELLER
Download or read book Storming Heaven A Novel written by Denise Giardina and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the miners and the union they wanted, of the people who loved them and the people who wanted to kill their dreams. Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy—land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women. Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C. J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain—when the United States Army greeted ten thousand unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. It was the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.
Download or read book The Stray Sod Country written by Patrick McCabe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey 'Teddy' O'Neill, is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with brylcream in his hair, and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Butlin's, Skegness. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map. And, as the Manchester United football team prepare to take off from Munich airport, James A Reilly sits in his hovel by the lake outside town, with his pet fox and his father's gun, feeling the weight of an insidious and inscrutable presence pressing down upon him.From the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, The Stray Sod Country is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.With echoes of Peyton Place, and Fellinni's Amarcord, and with a sinister, diabolical narrator at its heart, this is at once a story of a small town - with its secrets, fears, friendships and betrayals - and a sweeping, grand guignol of theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation.
Download or read book The Scummers written by Lee Maynard and published by Vandalia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesse heads west from West Virginia, ending up in California and then the Army and back again in the hopes of finding his home.
Download or read book How to Stop Time written by Matt Haig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library. “A quirky romcom dusted with philosophical observations….A delightfully witty…poignant novel.” —The Washington Post “She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going… I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.” Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life. Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present. How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages—and for the ages—about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Download or read book The Holy City written by Patrick McCabe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland - Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme fatale who was glamorous, transgressive and who called him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible. Although Chris, of course, was interested in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic - some even described him as excessively so - but is there anything wrong with that? Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland's most original contemporary writers.
Download or read book Crum written by Lee Maynard and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like lots of teenagers, the boy at the center of Crum doesn't know where he's going, but he knows he is leaving. This novel, named after a real-life, gritty little coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, offers a sometimes shocking, often outrageous, and always irreverent look at a young man's attempt to escape his home. In Crum, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls, and have unflattering things to say about their neighbors across the river in Kentucky. The adults are cramped and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains that loom over this tiny suffocating town. And to boys flush with the hormones of youth, this situation is full of wonder, dejection, and even possibility. Lee Maynard, a native of Crum in Wayne County, West Virginia, spins this critically acclaimed tale of a young Jesse Stone, whose rebellion against the people and the place of his childhood allows him to reject the comfort and familiarity of his home in search of his place in a larger world.
Download or read book The Rabbits Could Sing written by Amber Flora Thomas and published by University of Alaska Press. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.
Download or read book The Night Train written by Clyde Edgerton and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Rumblers, studies and rehearses Brown's Live at the Apollo album in the storage room of his father's shop in their small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black friend Larry -- aspiring to play piano like Thelonius Monk -- apprentices to a jazz musician called the Bleeder. His mother hopes music will allow him to escape the South. A dancing chicken and a mutual passion for music help Dwayne and Larry as they try to achieve their dreams and maintain their friendship, even while their world says both are impossible. In The Night Train, Edgerton's trademark humor reminds us of our divided national history and the way music has helped bring us together.
Download or read book The Birds of Opulence written by Crystal Wilkinson and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical exploration of love and loss, this book centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern Black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive. The author offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love - and love that's handed down - can conquer.
Download or read book Call Me the Breeze written by Patrick McCabe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With T. S. Eliot's words as his guide, Joey Tallon embarks on a journey toward enlightenment in the troubling psychedelic-gone-wrong atmosphere of the late 1970s. A man deranged by desire, and longing for belonging, Tallon searches for his"place of peace" -- a spiritual landscape located somewhere between his small town in Northern Ireland and Iowa ... and maybe between heaven and hell.
