National Network for Equitable Library Service

A magnificent 150-year saga of a musical Southern family featuring barn dances, medicine shows, the Grand Ole Opry, and the evolution of country music from hymns to rockabilly.

On a bright June day in 1965, a dozen girls -- classmates at a Blue Ridge women's college -- launch a ramshackle raft on a trip down the Mississippi. Thirty-five years later, four of the "girls" reunite to cruise the river again on a luxury steamboat and rediscover themselves.

Speed, Alabama is celebrating its sesquintennial, 150 years of proud existence--and its whimsical inhabitants will surely not let the event pass without a party. Eccentric resident Miss Iona is there to chronicle the events in her society column featured in the Messenger and to make sure the "zestful preparation" is carried out in a proper southern fashion. For gentile and dignified Miss Iona, that means no majorettes will be featured on the society page!

A gripping tale of a family's denial of its sordid past and one sibling's battle against the rest to have the truth (if it is truth) come out.

An unlikely friendship springs up between a prune, a muskrat, and a magpie.

Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork. Through births and deaths, marriages and funerals, the decades of Ivy's life are captured in a rich dialect that carries the sounds and sights of the Appalachians in each syllable.

This collection of nine stories, ranging from poignant ballads to delightfully inventive forms, will make you chuckle and leave you with a satisfying sense that no matter how unruly or warped life may seem, equilibrium can be found after all.

In 1899, ten-year-old Robbie, son of a preacher in a small Vermont town, gets himself into all kinds of trouble when he decides to give up being Christian in order to make the most of his life before the end of the world.

Crystal Spangler leaves Appalachia to attend college and follow her dreams, but something lurking in the shadow of Black Mountain is calling her back, something that will change her life forever.

A collection of short stories about Mexican American youth growing up in California's Central Valley.