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 aft...
Lark said. “I’m afraid we won’t make it afore dusty dark.” We squatted down in the road and rested on the edge of a clay rut. Lark set his poke on the crust of a nag’s track, and I lifted the saddle-bags off my shoulder. The leather was damp underneath. “We ought ne’er thought to be scholars,” La...
They owned gifts of the earth—land, cattle—and had money in the bank. They were not grasping, not asking for more. They had come by it hard, yet it had not hardened them. Many thought the Winterses were strange, not easy to know. The womenfolk did not “hang on the telephone,” which meant they had...