Washoe County Library System

"Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle's girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It's Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who's been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals--encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening....

Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson
A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 
In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.
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In this timeless, mythical tale of unforgiving justice and elusive grace, rural Mississippi townsfolk shoulder the pain of generations as something dangerous lurks in the enigmatic kudzu of the woods. The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself -- when confronted by a strange family of drifters,...

"An unforgettable portrait of the tectonic shifts happening in rural China--told through the microcosm of one small town. After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration,...

An orphan comes to live with a foster family in a Canadian mining village, and becomes a part of the comical foibles and heartbreaks of a small French-Canadian town.

Emma Saylor doesn't remember a lot about her mother, who died when Emma was twelve. But she does remember the stories her mom told her about the big lake that went on forever, with cold, clear water and mossy trees at the edges. Now it's just Emma and her dad, and life is good, if a little predictableuntil Emma is unexpectedly sent to spend the summer with her mother's family which she hasn't seen since she was a little girl. When Emma arrives at...

Presents a collection of short stories, poetry, graphic short stories, and personal essays about the complexity and diversity of rural America and its inhabitants.

Mining people mine for coal, oil, minerals, and metals. These are used for energy and as raw products to make things. In various parts of North America there are huge areas rich in one or more of these natural resources. Gillette, in Wyoming, is the coal-mining capital of the USA. Nearby is the small community of Moorcroft. The community developed from an old wild west cattle-ranching center and is now largely based on oil and coal-mining.

In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life. This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...