Books

Kentucky Church Sign

Photo by Linda Bruckheimer

Size: 4” x 6”

Item #PC-085

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

Postcard: $3.00

stories by Jan Carew

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$15.95

“This is a stunning collection. Mesmerizing. Carew’s foreshadowing is so deft, so subtle, we begin to ache before we should. We swat swamp mosquitoes as we sit around the smoke-fire with granite-faced Doorne and his sons, sensing peril. and we understand seduction before we are drawn into it. Carew’s eloquence is irresistible; his ear for retrieving language so precise, so respectful, we nod comfortably at old friends. Nuh? This experience under a full Guyanese moon is exquisite; is memory recovered. As a matter of fact, Carew transcends academics or mere creativity when he does the impossible: returns to the past with us as tagalongs.”
—Mari Evans, author of Continuum and Clarity: (A Poet’s Perspective)

a novel by Karen McElmurray

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$15.95

The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope.

poems by Brett Eugene Ralph

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$14.95

When asked about his influences, Brett Eugene Ralph points to three enduring sources: growing up Southern working class in the 1970s and 80s, playing in punk rock bands, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Not a likely combination for a poet, but one that has brought forth Black Sabbatical, a debut collection that sings with gutbucket colloquialisms, hallucinatory interludes, and the storytelling tradition of Kentucky. Riled and immediate, Ralph’s poems mark the sanctity of each given moment, however confusing or harrowing, to honor its singular beauty. A heightened lyricism, but one fraught with methamphetamine confessions, gurus disguised as donkeys and owls. The voice that booms from Black Sabbatical is of a seeker tearing the place apart, unafraid to see things for himself, to sing what he has seen, or to say what the long road that led here has cost him.

stories by Alex Taylor

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$15.95

A resonant debut from an unexpected new voice in southern fiction. This collection reveals hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields, rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky, where men take too much whiskey and women take too many men.

stories by Julie Marie Wade

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$15.95

This is a daughter’s story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question—what have you given up in order to become who you are?

poetry by Catherine Wing

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$14.95

Gin & Bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. The clarity’s either a spirited disinfectant or an immaculate intoxication. The book takes its title from a line of Cody Walker’s: “Blessed is the woman who mixes gin and bleach.” Wing’s poems are soaked in that cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. Gin & Bleach is two parts fist-shaking (at the gods, at the world, at oneself) and one part head-in-one’s-hand. It riddles for a straight answer, aiming for both play and Frost’s play for mortal stakes.

edited by John E. Branscum and Wayne Thomas

Available for sale at:
THE OLD SUGAR VALLEY COUNTRY STORE

$16.95

Red Holler takes us beyond the stock imagery of rural Appalachian communities. We travel into housing projects, forest-stripped ravines, and trailer high-rises. The anthology spans ten years and the mountain range from Mississippi to New York, Native American myth, African American urban legend, folk culture, and European ghost stories, placing fresh new voices alongside widely known and celebrated authors.