In these fourteen stories Gerald Vizenor leads his crossblood characters out of romantic thickets into a new tribal world of psychotaxidermy, laser holograms, and urban ceremonies. Dancing with tricksters, animals, and language is never dangerous in this collection. With the comic pleasures of tribal tricksters, Vizenor's fantastic characters arise from the burdens of racialism and noble savagism. Martin Bear Charme, in the title story, owns a reservation and conducts seminars on refuse meditation, pantribal fantasies, and animal languages. He restores the sublime connections between the refuse and the refusers, and earns a fortune at the same time. Almost Browne, another crossblood transformer, was born in the back seat of a hatchback, matured with computers, and projects laser demons over the reservation. Other crossbloods win a summer ice sculpture contest, own sovereign sections of interstate highways, and discover instant coffee.

"If you must read a book on Columbus," declared the Los Angeles Times in its review of The Heirs of Columbus, "this is the one." Gerald Vizenor's novel reclaims the story of Chrisopher Columbus on behalf of Native Americans by declaring the explorer himself to be a descendent of early Mayans and follows the adventures of his modern-day, mixedblood heirs as they create a fantastic tribal nation.The genetic heirs of Christopher Columbus meet annually at the Stone Tavern at the headwaters of the Mississippi to remember their "stories in the blood" and plan their tribal nation. They are inspired by the late-night talk radio discourses of Stone Columbus, a trickster healer who became rich as the captain of the sovereign bingo barge Santa Maria Casino, anchored in the international waters of the Lake of the Woods. The heirs' plan to reclaim their heritage enrages the government and inspires the tribal nations in a comic tale of mythic proportions.Vizenor is a mixedblood Chippewa who writes fiction in the trickster mode of Native American tradition, using humor to challenge received ideas and subvert the status quo. In The Heirs of Columbus he "reveals not only how Indians have staved off the tidal wave of assimilation," noted the San Francisco Chronicle, "but also how, through humor and persistence, they sometimes reverse the direction of cultural appropriation and, in the process, transform the alien values imposed on them.""Vizenor understands the wilder, irrational, half-mad parts of the Discoverer's soul as few people ever have," noted Kirkpatrick Sale in the Nation; "Columbus is appropriated here in an entirely new way, made to be an Indian in service to his Indian descendents." And the Voice Literary Supplement said "Even more rousing than Vizenor's deconstruction of Columbus, though, is his alternative vision of an American identity."

" "I don't agree with all the choices people make," says the author. "You probably won't either. My job is to let them tell their stories. " And so she does in these thirteen warm, funny, and sad short stories about people making hard decisions for themselves and for their families: · Like Iona, who accidentally accepts a marriage proposal · And Daryll, just about to graduate from high school, whose mother is eager for him to "make something" of himself. · And Lexie and Jeb, deep in debt and already struggling to feed their six children, who find out a seventh is on the way.

"The reader gets to play detective in four mysteries from Kentucky's past -- the disappearances of James Harrod and "Honest Dick" Tate, the battlefield death of Indian chief Tecumseh, and the assassination of William Goebel. James Klotter offers clues but leaves the solution to the reader. James Klotter is Kentucky State Historian and professor of History at Georgetown University and is the author of A New History of Kentucky, History Mysteries, Our Kentucky, Kentucky: Land of Tomorrow, Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, Kentucky: Decades of Discord, William Goebbel, and Faces of Kentucky.

In her historical novels about Kentucky, Janice Holt Giles has become known for the integrity with which she handles her material and for the realism with which she writes. In The Believers, first published in 1957, she continues her series about the settling of Kentucky with a moving story of love and marriage set in a Shaker community.Rebecca Fowler is only seventeen when she marries Richard Cooper. She cannot remember a time when she has not loved and trusted him and followed where he led. At first the marriage is happy; it is only after their child is stillborn that Richard shows preliminary signs of religious fanaticism in his insistence that this is God's punishment visited upon them. The Shaker missionaries newly arrived in Kentucky find him an easy convert.When Richard joins the Shaker community, Rebecca goes with him, as a dutiful wife should, hoping that her love will ultimately win him back to her and to the larger world. She becomes part of a strange world in which men and women -- even husbands and wives -- live apart, coming together only for meals and for worship. As time passes and she sees Richard's affection recede, only her stubborn honesty gives her the strength to deny lip service to a doctrine she cannot truly accept and, at the last, courage to follow the dictates of her heart.In this novel, Mrs. Giles gives us a unique picture of everyday life in a Shaker village, one of the experiments in utopian communal living that are a part of American history. Realistically but with understanding, she shows us a society animated not only by saintliness but by bigotry and ordinary human frailties.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

Originally published in 1950, The Enduring Hills was Janice Holt Giles's first novel. It is based in part on her own courtship and introduction to the Kentucky mountain country. Here, Giles introduces Hod and Mary Pierce and begins her Appalachian trilogy. Hod Pierce, a boy not unlike Henry Giles, who grows up on Piney Ridge, where generations of Pierces have made a living from the stubborn soil. Hod loves his people and the land but longs also for wider horizons, for more education, and for the freedom he imagines can be found in the outside world. It takes World War II to carry Hod away from the Ridge and out into the great world, and it is a long time before he comes back. After the war is over, Hod settles into marriage and a factory job in the city. Finally it is Mary, his city-bred wife, who sees at last that to Hod, Piney Ridge will always be home.In her preface to the second edition, Mrs. Giles wrote, "I believe [the story] is timeless and as the hands of the clock have turned and turned, people are turning back to the earth, knowing now that saving this earth is the most important work in the world, that we must all become, as Hod and Mary Pierce did, a man and woman with faith in the earth."Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

The Kentuckians of Janice Holt Giles's title were that hardy band of angels who straggled through Cumberland Gap in the 1770s and carved their farms from the wilderness of Virginia's westernmost country. In her historical novel, first published in 1953, Giles invited the reader to experience the danger and beauty of life on the American frontier.Many of the frontiersmen were hunters in search of escape from an ever-advancing civilization, seeking freedom and space. Such a man was David Cooper, who had hunted the Kentucky wilderness with Daniel Boone before the first settlers crossed the Appalachians. No love of land or home or woman had been strong enough to hold David -- until he met Bethia. It was for her that he cleared his patch of forest, planted crops, and built a cabin. Too late, he learned that the girl he had dreamed of marrying was the wife of his enemy.David and Bethia belonged to a generation that never knew or expected security, and the background of their story is one of turmoil: Outnumbered and ill-equipped, early settlers were hard put to defend their forts; and, although united in war against the British and their Indian allies, they were often at odds among themselves. Many, including Boone, held land grants from Judge Henderson's Transylvania Company. Others, like David, based their claims on the authority of Virginia. Few today realize how close the British came to winning out.In her research, Giles studied the journals of the early Kentuckians and has retold their story in their own easy-flowing, cadenced prose. Only the three central characters are fictional. All subsidiary characters and historical events are authentic, set against the background of a country the author knows and loves.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

"God knew that it would take brave and sturdy people to survive in these beautiful but rugged hills. So He sent us His very strongest men and women." So begins the heartwarming story of Verna Mae and her father, Isom B. ""Kitteneye"" Slone, an extradordinay personal family history set in the hills around Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky.

This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell’s stories a suburban retiree’s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.

John Fox Jr. published this great romantic novel of the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia in 1908, and the book quickly became one of America's favorites. It has all the elements of a good romance -- a superior but natural heroine, a hero who is an agent of progress and enlightenment, a group of supposedly benighted mountaineers to be drawn into the flow of mainstream American culture, a generous dose of social and class struggle, and a setting among the misty coves and cliffs of the blue Cumberlands. Reprinted with a foreword by John Ed Pearce, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine has all the excitement and poignance that caught and held readers' interest when the book first appeared.

Here are twenty-one tales from Kentucky's inimitable and beloved storyteller, Jesse Stuart. Full of high, rambunctious humor, quick-paced as a mountain square dance, bright as a maple tree against an October hill -- these stories are Stuart in his best form -- the form that has made him one of the most widely read authors in America. Read here about the man who coveted a steam shovel and stole it piece by piece, or about the celebrated eating contest between Sam Whiteapple and the game rooster, or about the hill farmer who wanted to clear and farm one last spot of new ground before he died. Although he has a sharp eye for human foibles and infirmities, Stuart never fails to write of his people with affection or to see that justice is done them. Originally published in 1950, Clearing in the Sky was inadvertently declared out of print after three years and never reprinted. Now for Jesse Stuart's many readers it is once more available with an appreciative foreword by Ruel Foster.

In language both spare and colorful, sure in its command of Appalachian dialect and poetic in its evocation of mountain settings, James Still's stories reveal the lives of his people -- lives of privation and struggle, lived with honesty as well as humor. With a foreword by Cleanth Brooks and an afterword by the author, The Run for the Elbertas features thirteen stories from one of America's masters of the short story. Enjoyable and enriching, Still's stories sparkle with wisdom and joy.

Originally published in 1940, Stuart's first novel introduced his reader to one of the most unforgettable characters of American literature--Boliver Tussie, the hard-drinking, happy-go-lucky squatter who works just enough to get by.

Stuart's first book of short stories remains haunting, powerful, and humorous.

Written by a beloved American author who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, these twenty-one short stories explore the daily lives and activities of Kentucky mountaineers. Life, animate existence, absorbs Jesse Stuart. Never is it more vital than when juxtaposed with death, hence the contrasting motifs of life and death permeating his work. In this book, Stuart tells the stories of the hills and the men who live there. They "curse the mountains," but love them too, he says. Existing in dimensions of real geography and elaborate imagination, Stuart moves easily between autobiography and fiction and often does not bother to distinguish one from the other. Greenup County, Kentucky blends into Greenwood County, and W-Hollow in both fiction and fact is subject to the proprietorship of the bard of Appalachia.

First published in 1940, James Still's masterful novel has become a classic. It is the story, seen through the eyes of a boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its uncertain promise of material prosperity. In his world privation, violence, and death are part of everyday life, accepted and endured. Yet it is a world of dignity, love, and humor, of natural beauty which Still evokes in sharp, poetic images. No writer has caught more effectively the vividness of mountain speech or shown more honestly the trials and joys of mountain life.