by Laura Long (Author)
"Literary fiction novel about generations of a family in Appalachia"--
Back Jacket
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 and people.
This innovative debut novel reveals the lives of a far-flung contemporary Appalachian family through a web of delicate turning points. A child discovers a grandmother she never knew has died. A runaway teen schemes to start a new life in Texas. A man on parole falls hopelessly in love with a shoplifter. A woman receives a letter about her husband's other wife. An old woman confronts a burglar with the help of her ghost-husband.
United by a connection to their matriarch, these characters search at home and beyond to make a fresh sense of their changing lives. As a novel in stories, Out of Peel Tree brings a new lyricism to the page and a new voice to American and Appalachian literature--a voice deeply inflected by the beauty of the natural world and by working-class grit.
Author Biography
Laura Long has received a James Michener Fellowship, James River Writers Award, Donald Barthelme Fellowship, PEN-Texas Award, Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowships, and has published in magazines including The Southern Reviewand Shenandoah. She is the author of two books of poems, Imagine a Door and The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems. She teaches at Lynchburg College in Virginia and has taught in numerous community and university settings in Austin, Houston, and far west Texas.