"Without love, there is only a great empty space that we fill with whatever's handy."Fierce, endearing, and powerful. Serious southern literary-fiction along a converging vein of: Harper Lee, Hemingway, and Eudora Welty - except within the gritty parameters of hardscrabble Appalachia in the early...
The author's first person style is immediately powerful, tugging, dragging you (sometimes by the scruff of the neck and despite tired eyes) into the story of the hard life of a strange family in Depression era rural Kentucky. Each character is as finely crafted as a sculpture rich in texture and...
I go outside to study the sky. Bitsy comes too.I recall how, on Saturdays during those post-fire years, I’d help Auntie with the baking. It was the strangest thing—rolling out pastries, or when I iced a cake, I seemed to stand on higher ground. Uncle loved it. I made coconut cream pies that were ...
I choose six tins of raisins and one of figs, a barrel of flour because it’s what I can afford, another of sugar, three bolts of calico, for spring will be here if we live long enough, and four bottles of vanilla. I need coffee beans and brown sugar, cream of tartar, and rubbed sage. I choose a j...