When William Gay died suddenly in 2012, he left behind a considerable amount of unpublished work that has been slowly making its way into print. The final posthumous release, due in July, is Stories from the Attic, a collection of short stories, essays, and fragments from works-in-progress.
Banjo player Bob Black’s Mandolin Man: The Bluegrass Life of Roland White is the story of a master musician who always put the music first.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing.
“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.
In Another Appalachia, Neema Avashia explores what it is like to grow up both gay and the daughter of immigrants, making sense of life as both insider and outsider.
In the 19th century, large numbers of Appalachians supported themselves by harvesting herbs, roots, and other botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands. These “sang diggers,” as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance in the medicinal botanical trade are the focus of Luke Manget’s Ginseng Diggers.
