The Bookslinger app has been updated with a new story!
This week’s story comes from Red Holler and is by Donald Ray Pollock, published by Sarabande Books. This collection takes us over and beyond the stock imagery of rural mountain communities. We travel into housing projects, forest-stripped ravines, and trailer parks, to explore vibrant hometown and migrant Appalachian cultures. Drawing on Appalachian literature’s roots in Native American myth, African American urban legend, and European folk culture, and embracing Appalachian urban fiction, the Southern Gothic, gritty no-holds-barred realism, and magical realism, the stories and poems of Red Holler elegantly cohere to perfectly depict what makes Appalachia so fascinating: its irreverent and outlaw challenges to mainstream notions of propriety and convention.