West Virginia University Press: 89 books

In the mid-1970s, Nancy L. Abrams, a young photojournalist from the Midwest, plunges into life as a small-town reporter in West Virginia. She befriends the hippies on the commune one mountaintop over, rents a cabin in beautiful Salt Lick Valley, and falls in love with a local boy, wrestling to balance...

In Crum, a gritty coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls. The adults are cramped in and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains. The weight of wonder, dejection, and even possibility loom over this tiny, suffocating town. This story is the...

In this sequel to Crum, Jesse Stone is still on the move. He finds himself in a holy-roller church in Kentucky, on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia, "screaming with the cannibals." From Kentucky he heads to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although...

Still Life with Plums is a vibrant collection of short stories that weaves together the outwardly distant lives of several strangers. With heaping doses of dark humor and magical realism, these ten stories enliven a cast of characters carefully speckled throughout the southern portion of the United...

Karen Osborn is the author of three previous novels, Patchwork (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Between Earth and Sky, and The River Road. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and teaches fiction writing at Mt. Holyoke College and Fairfield University. While growing up...

The new and selected stories in this collection, written over a period of thirty years, are firmly entrenched in the culture and people of rust belt cities and rural Appalachia. These stories are often set against large, significant events like the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Kent State shootings,...

Moving through time and space, Out of Peel Tree unfolds the patterns of an Appalachian sensibility that reverberate everywhere: a fatalism balanced by humor and flinty, hard-won hope, an appreciation for the surprises of the everyday, and a search for love and home amid strange and familiar places...

*Riding on Comets *is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s.  As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories...

Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People  Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense." In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one...

Eric Hoffer Award, 1st Runner-Up, Short Story/Anthology category The Amazing Mr. Morality features tenacious men and women whose determination to buck middle-class social convention draws them toward unforeseen challenges. A failed television producer insists upon having a woodchuck relocated...

Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.   As fate would have it, his adoptive father,...

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood,...

Coal burns underground and destroys a small town. A woman confronts police officers with her pet copperheads. A young girl drinks Drano. A man is banned from his favorite bar. Within these eleven short stories, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and poet Gary Fincke brings into focus the small...

In Magnetic North an aging warrior and his best friend—perhaps his only friend—ride motorcycles to Alaska, with the ultimate goal of riding to the Arctic Circle. It is a ride that mirrors their lives, a ride that causes old stories, old trials, old darkness to come, once again, through the spinning...