A new form of strip mining has caused a state of emergency for the Appalachian wilderness and the communities that depend on it-a crisis compounded by issues of government neglect, corporate hubris, and class conflict. In this powerful call to arms, Erik Reece chronicles the year he spent witnessing the systematic decimation of a single mountain and offers a landmark defense of a national treasure threatened with extinction.

At the intersection of alcoholism and recovery, Kingfisher Blues brings an unflinching eye and raw wit to one man's battle with addiction. Alternating between meditations on the natural world and gritty snapshots of the county jail, rehab center, and people who occupy these spaces with him—from strippers to soldiers—Reece ruminates on the thin line between life and death. Evocative and unfiltered, Kingfisher Blues weaves his experiences of Montana prairies, Kentucky woods...

A journey through American utopian communities past and present, and a meditation on what we can learn from them."Reece has a sharp eye for the contradictions of communities that condemn the capitalist economy but are sustained by vibrant commercial enterprises . . . [Utopia Drive] vividly bring[s] to life the ecological sensitivity, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism that inspired so many in early America." —Akash Kapur, The New Yorker

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized worl...

Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here in paperback for the very first time*"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —*Guy Davenport

"Erik Reece is obviously a writer to be reckoned with."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of NatureIn Erik Reece's stunning collection of essays, ideas are the main characters. Written over a period of ten years, and revealing Reece's continued obsession with religion, family, and the natural world, in many ways these essays represent a sequel to his stirring memoir, An American Gospel. In that book, Reece intimitately describes his conflicted rela...

Robinson Forest in eastern Kentucky is one of our most important natural landscapes—and one of the most threatened. Covering fourteen thousand acres of some of the most diverse forest region in temperate North America, it is a haven of biological richness within an ever-expanding desert created by mountaintop removal mining. Written by two people with deep knowledge of Robinson Forest, The Embattled Wilderness engagingly portrays this singular place as it persuasively appeals for ...

From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry.At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather-also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the...

From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain comes a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry.At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece’s father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather—also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in...

For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world—or, more specifically, his country—could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises. Where did we—here, in the land of...

The first full biography of Joy Davidman brings her out from C. S. Lewis’ shadow, where she has long been hidden, to reveal a powerful writer and thinker.Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis’ memoir A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the p...

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).Drawing on her life as ...