Here are 100 books that In the Valley fans have personally recommended if you like
In the Valley.
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I have a passion for the family story, and I have been blessed with a plethora of them. My mother grew up in Appalachia during the Great Depression and faced shame because her mother left the family to commit a felony. Her accounts of a childhood without and sleeping in an abandoned log cabin have been seared into my soul. My father, one of fourteen children during the Great Depression, worked on neighboring farms from the age of seven. History has two parts, the facts and details, but the telling of the story wrangles the purpose and sacrifice of those involved.
I sat on my mother’s lap as a child to hear stories of her childhood in Appalachia—no running water or electricity, and the shame brought on by her mother’s escape from that hard life. The setting and the characterizations in Book Woman of Troublesome Creek brought back some of the memories of my mother’s stories.
I came to love the character’s adaptation to the harsh environment, their want for a better life, and the difference one person’s influence can make in a community. The spirit of survival, even with the hardest of circumstances, forced me to cherish this story. It was as if my mother had written this book or perhaps read it to me.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A USA TODAY BESTSELLER A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER AN OKRA PICK The bestselling historical fiction from Kim Michele Richardson, this is a novel following Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian and her quest to bring books to the Appalachian community she loves, perfect for readers of Lee Smith and Lisa Wingate. The perfect addition to your next book club! The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything-everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter. Cussy's not only…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
For most of my life no one guessed I could fall for a dog, much less write a book about one. I associated dogs with drool on the floor and fur all over everything. One of those “just a dog” people, I thought the marriage bed should be strictly for humans. It crossed my mind that an eager dog would keep me from working into the night at the office where I ran Chatelaine, Canada’s premier magazine for women, but I chose a treadmill at the Y over rambles with a dog. At 65 I discovered my inner dog person. A ragged-eared mutt is now my joy and my muse.
When Rick Bragg shuffles home to his mother’s place in rural Alabama, spent from chemotherapy, depression, and years of hard living, he figures it’ll take a sweet old dog to lick the crankiness out of him.
There’s nothing sweet about the stray who shows up at the side of the road, “seventy-six pounds of wet hair and bad decisions.” In a willful Australian shepherd with a ruined eye and a lust for carrion, Bragg recognizes himself—his wounds, his tenacity, his devotion to family. Speck “would rather die than be clean” but he stands by his people when they need him, and Bragg is his number one human.
I loved the humor, pathos, and Southern character that elevate this story of redemption by a dog over more predictable versions.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin', the warmhearted and hilarious story of how his life was transformed by his love for a poorly behaved, half-blind stray dog.
Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the Fed Ex man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock, and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he…
I love reading stories that are a good mix of reality and fantasy, just as much as I like to write them myself. And I guess that comes from my background as a journalist. But perhaps not so, as the first stories I wrote in my teens that were published in a Dutch women’s magazine were retellings of Biblical stories. I recounted those from the point of view of women: the (future) wives of Joseph (with the ten brothers) and of Moses. I was a writer long before I became a journalist, a profession I needed to gather the knowledge I could then use to write my books, so it seems.
Amazing how a picture, published in 1948 in an American Magazine, of four children with a sign saying they were for sale can lead to a book.
I loved the way the writer used it to take me to the States of the forties and fifties with its different classes and its deep poverty. For me, being a journalist, part of the attraction of the book is that the story involves old-fashioned journalists and newspapers. And fake news of the worst kind, long before it became a daily occurrence.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A USA TODAY BESTSELLER A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER A NATIONAL INDIEBOUND BESTSELLER An unforgettable bestselling historical fiction novel by Kristina McMorris, inspired by a stunning piece of history from Depression-Era America. 2 CHILDREN FOR SALE The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices. For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family's dark past. He snaps a photograph…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I grew up on the wild island of Tasmania. I saw the Vietnam War on TV, then went to a farm my father was ‘developing.’ It felt like war. The natural beauty that I’d once played in was destroyed by machines, poisons, and fire. During agricultural college in mainland Australia, I recognized an absence of reverence for Mother Nature. Women were missing from the rural narrative that increasingly held an economics-only mindset when it came to food. I’m a co-founder of Ripple Farm Landscape Healing Hub–a 100-acre farm we’re restoring to natural beauty and producing loved meat and eggs for customers. And I’m a devoted mum, shepherd, and working dog trainer.
Divine, divine, divine! This novel taught me so much about the landscape in Appalachia. The female characters were rich and deep. Running throughout the story was the thread of women standing for farming systems that partner with nature versus male characters who want to dominate or decimate.
It was musical and mystical, and I just adored being transported to the cabin in the woods and the rich gardens of the women who knew how Mama Earth rolls. There was also a wonderful exploration of female desire. It was lush and leafy, and I’m so grateful to Barbara for writing this book
It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or…
I’ve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essential—what it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
This book is probably the most out-of-place of the five novels on this list. Where the others make their high-concept elements obvious early, the author chooses a different route in this one.
Like so many of his novels, Bret Easton Ellis opens his story with shallow and vapid characters behaving in absurd ways and uttering dialogue so outrageous I wondered if the entire enterprise was a joke. But despite the hilarious parody of substance-free celebrity and the inane repetition of idiotic phrases like “baby,” this story ultimately has more to say than, ahem, less than zero. It’s a takedown of capitalism and a bankrupt culture, so biting it would make Philip K Dick proud.
The second half of the novel, in fact, reads like PKD himself.
The New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero delivers a gripping and brilliant dissection of our celebrity obsessed culture. • “Arguably the novel of the 1990’s…Should establish Ellis as the most ambitious and fearless writer of his generation…a must read.” —The Seattle Times
Set in 90s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another on the eve of opening the trendiest…
I’m the descendant of three generations of visual artists, a gene I thought had skipped me. However, art popped up in many of my stories when I started writing fiction. In 2012, I published The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob, and to promote it, I launched a street art campaign that included putting plaster blobs on the streets of Washington, D.C. This blossomed into several other street art projects and earned attention from The Washington Postand several D.C. TV news stations. My next two books centered around Frida Kahlo and Edvard Munch.
At the beginning of this book, I recognized the ingredients that make up popular erotic novels. The main character, Edie, a Black woman and struggling artist, is beginning a relationship with an older, wealthy, successful white man in an open marriage. There’s a power imbalance. To a certain extent, this excites Edie, and in this way, the book fits neatly into the parameters of the genre.
However, the relationship becomes messy, and Edie’s life, both with and away from Eric, is fraught with bad decisions. Race, wealth, and gender intersect with sex in a complex and uncomfortable milieu. Through all of this, and with the guidance of Eric’s wife, Edie begins to make progressive, less destructive choices, and as she does, her art progresses.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, Boston Globe, and many more!
"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or…
As an American, a Jew, and a novelist—though not necessarily in that order—I’ve always been interested in Jewish-American literature, and the Jewish-American experience in general. What was it like for the first Jews in America? What accounted for their success? What were the costs of assimilation? And where are they—we—headed? These books are a great starting point for anyone looking for answers to these questions. But be warned: in keeping with the Jewish tradition, they often answer those questions with more questions. Not, to quote the Jewish sage Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.
If you’ve read all 783 pages of World of Our Fathers and are still looking for more about early Jewish-American life in New York—or just something more immediate—this is the book for you.
An autobiographical fever-dream of a novel, Jews Without Money is a vivid, violent, look at the life of the Jewish slum kids whose parents emigrated to America. A lifelong communist, Gold only wrote one novel, but it anticipates the hallucinatory fiction of writers like Denis Johnson by half a century.
At once entirely Jewish and entirely American, Jews Without Money gives an unvarnished first-person glimpse into the surreal world of turn-of-the-century New York.
As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for more than three decades. Beginning in the 1920s his was a powerful journalistic voice for social change and human rights, and Jews Without Money--the author's only novel--is a passionate record of the times. First published in 1930, this fictionalized autobiography offered an unusually candid look at the thieves, gangsters, and ordinary citizens who struggled against brutal odds in lower East Side Manhattan. Like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Abraham Cahan's The Rise and Fall of David Levinsky, Jews…
I’ve been passionate about absurdist literature since my early youth when we read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in school. Later in life, friends recommended Irving, Vonnegut, Bellow, and Boyle to me. I discovered Murakami, Mendoza, and Niven. Films like Common Wealth or The Last Circus by Spanish filmmaker Alex De La Iglesia, which are equally entertaining and thought-provoking, gave me the spark to start writing myself. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
I loved the book because it made me laugh a lot and gave me a whole different take on religion. Pop stars had become a thing, and even though I didn’t enjoy them, the story of God’s son entering the contest amazed me.
I can’t recommend the book enough, as it reflects certain aspects of modern life that are truly absurd.
God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and 'fucking Christians everywhere'. There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back.
JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: Be Nice! His best chance to win hearts and minds is to…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Margaret Thatcher famously argued that “there is no alternative;” this book is the ultimate rebuttal.
I read this for the first time as an undergrad, and it forever changed me. What’s so powerful about it is that Schweickart lays out a simple but powerful model for a fundamentally different kind of society–a democratic socialist society based on economic democracy. He then carefully demonstrates that this alternative is not only feasible but that it would work far better than capitalism in pretty well every regard.
For anyone who has been searching for a clear and coherent alternative–this book is for you.
Since first published in 2002, After Capitalism has offered students and political activists alike a coherent vision of a viable and desirable alternative to capitalism. David Schweickart calls this system Economic Democracy, a successor-system to capitalism which preserves the efficiency strengths of a market economy while extending democracy to the workplace and to the structures of investment finance. In the second edition, Schweickart recognizes that increased globalization of companies has created greater than ever interdependent economies and the debate about the desirability of entrepreneurship is escalating. The new edition includes a new preface, completely updated data, reorganized chapters, and new…
I’m a Canadian political economist working in Australia as an Associate Professor in International Relations and Political Economy at the University of Wollongong, just south of Sydney. I’ve been fascinated by the history of capitalism and money since post-graduate school. Eventually I had some time to do a deep dive into the existing scholarly literature on money and have so far written two books on the topic and multiple articles. I hope you enjoy my book recommendations as much as I enjoyed reading them.
Desan’s work filled multiple gaps in my knowledge regarding the historical circumstances that contributed to modern money.
In my view, it is the best and most comprehensive book for anyone who wants to know how we arrived at current monetary arrangements. The research and writing are masterful, comprehensive, and there are many ‘oh my, I didn’t know that’ moments.
A real eye-opener and an essential read for anyone interested in money, finance, and the emergence of capitalism.
Easily the best and most authoritative book since Dickson’s The Financial Revolution In England – a must-read!
Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange - a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself - along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government…
