Joe Clark's photographs are going into a bigger album, for many people to see and to discover in his book, Tennessee Hill Folk, a book I predict will be around for a long time to come. His book is one for libraries, schools, and people of all ages--not merely in Appalachia and Tennessee, but all over the United States.

In the first comprehensive social history of the Arkansas Ozarks from the early 19th century through the end of the 20th century, Blevins examines settlement patterns, farming, economics, class, and tourism. He also explores the development of conflicting images of the Ozarks as a timeless arcadia peopled by quaint, homespun characters or a backward region filled with hillbillies.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most prominent "folk revivals--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity. Becker uses this craft revival as a way of exploring the construction of the cultural categories "folk" and "tradition." She also addresses the consequences such labels have had on the people to whom they have been assigned. Though the revival of domestic arts in the Southern Appalachians reflected an attempt to aid the people of an impoverished region, she says, as well as a desire to recapture an important part of the nation's folk heritage, in reality the new craft production owed less to tradition than to middle-class tastes and consumer culture--forces that obscured the techniques used by mountain laborers and the conditions in which they worked.

A greedy emperor demands an impossible task from Lao Lao, a peasant woman who makes beautiful shapes from paper. Includes instructions for making traditional Chinese paper-cuts.

John Hood's new novel Mountain Folk uses elements of folklore and epic fantasy to tell the story of America's founding in a fresh and exciting way. Goran is one of the rare fairies who can live without magical protection in the Blur, the human world where the days pass twenty times faster than in fairy realms. Goran's secret missions for the Rangers Guild take him across the British colonies of North America - from far-flung mountains and rushing rivers to frontier farms and bustling towns. Along the way, Goran encounters Daniel Boone, George Washington, an improbably tall dwarf, a mysterious water maiden, and a series of terrifying monsters from European and Native American legend. But when Goran is ordered to help the other fairy nations of the New World crush the American Revolution, he must choose between a solemn duty to his own people and fierce loyalty to his human friends and the principles they hold dear."