Literature: Kentucky

Duet of monologues between a frontier man and woman surviving the hardships and recording the small triumphs of life in rural nineteenth-century Kentucky.

"Rafting Rise is a terrific book, the richly detailed evocation of an entire world, and an important contribution to the literature of the rural South."

Poetic narrative is a historic valuable offering . . . an eagle's-eye view into what it means to be young, Black, artistic, and male in Appalachia, as one century comes to an end and another begins

Harriette Simpson Arnow's 1949 novel Hunter's Horn, the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people, a novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children.

Nashville legend Loretta Lynn tells the story of her rise from deep poverty in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, to the top of the male-dominated country music industry.

Set in 1861, at the beginning of Kentucky's reluctant entry into the Civil War, the novel tells the story of a five-day adventure on the Green River.

A study of the hero in his archetypal struggle against death, this novel follows the Civil War in the West through the career of Confederate Rivers Allard, a Kentuckian who rides with Forrest.

Follows a woman's flight from Manhattan and her unfaithful husband to her rural ancestral home

Recounts the heroism of the Kentucky pioneer.

Personal account of his twenty years of teaching in the mountain region of Kentucky

Now in her eighties and living alone, Hannah as her way of giving thanks looks back at her life.

In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the sades of one burnished day in September 1952.

Moving from late-19th-century Ireland to contemporary America, this is the story of a family fuelled by anger, repressed passions and determined will. It is told through a series of first-person narrators.

Characters are the heartwood of their small Kentucky communities

Contemporary life in the mountains of southern Appalachia

It is the early 1900s in rural Kentucky, and young Saul Sullivan is heading up to Redbud Camp to look for work. He is wary but unafraid of the Cherokee girl there whose beauty is said to cause the death of all men who see her.

In the aftermath of a flood that washes away much of a small Tennessee town, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men. In doing so, starts to see his life anew and risks losing everything.

The story of a Kentucky farm woman whose life is changed forever by one extraordinary occurrence.

Memoir saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

Rose, a beautiful, mysterious woman comes to the home pregnant, but not unwed. She plans to give up her baby because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. But St. Elizabeth's is near a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she cannot go through with her plans, not all of them.

Sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950's.

In Creekside, dedicated archaeologist Meg Harrington guides her students in a race against time to protect the legacy of the past before bulldozers rip it to shreds.

For as long as she can remember, Gabrielle Hope has had the gift of knowing--visions that warn of things to come.

Attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she'll never get out of Kentucky, but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles.

Tough and tender novel of love, race, and justice, and a ferocious, unflinching look at the power of family

Shares the stories of struggles and triumphs to create a vivid picture of a culture as enduring as the mountains.

Provides both a narrative of Giles's life and an in-depth description of the art and commerce of American publishing in the middle years of the century.