Collects into a single volume every story by the Kentuckian author best known for his novel River of Earth, including tales that were originally featured in The Atlantic, The Saturday Evening Post and the O. Henry Memorial Award Stories and Best American Short Stories collections.

Bert is a young girl growing up in the hills of Kentucky in the 1930s. With a coalminer father and a midwife mother life was never boring or easy, but with the love of her family anything is possible. When the family falls victim to injuries, illness, and a family death that all falls apart. She goes from having a poor happy family to a well off miserable family almost overnight. She starts to feel more like a slave than a daughter, never really fitting in to her new life. All she wants is a place to belong, but does she have to run away from home to fine it?

The historical novelist recalls her childhood and struggle with rheumatoid arthritis that made her unable to walk as a child and describes the family and friends who encouraged her to become a writer

Something is stirring beneath Dubh Linn. When an ancient and forbidden power is unleashed, Izzy, who is still coming to terms with her newfound powers, must prevent a war from engulfing Dublin and the fae realm of Dubh Linn. But by refusing to sacrifice Jinx – fae warrior and her 'not-really-ex' – Izzy sets in motion a chain of events which will see them hunted across the city and into the hills where she'll face the greatest challenge of all. In the deepest and darkest Hollow, an angel of death is waiting ... and the price he asks for his help might be too high ... 'an excellent fantasy, with strange but memorable characters set in believable settings. The storyline all through is tense and exciting with a somewhat surprise ending.' Irish Examiner on A Crack in Everything 'Delicious and wonderfully romantic...Lyrical prose, along with highly imaginative and descriptive phrasing, makes the forest setting–and its creatures and people–immediately present and sparked with magic.' Booklist on The Treachery of Beautiful Things

Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader. Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content. Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis. Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and many more. Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.

To many antebellum Americans, Appalachia was a frightening wilderness of lawlessness, peril, robbers, and hidden dangers. The extensive media coverage of horse stealing and scalping raids profiled the regionÕs residents as intrinsically violent. After the Civil War, this characterization continued to permeate perceptions of the area and news of the conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys, as well as the bloodshed associated with the coal labor strikes, cemented AppalachiaÕs violent reputation. Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia provides an in-depth historical analysis of hostility in the region from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Editor Bruce E. Stewart discusses aspects of the Appalachian violence culture, examining skirmishes with the native population, conflicts resulting from the regionÕs rapid modernization, and violence as a function of social control. The contributors also address geographical isolation and ethnicity, kinship, gender, class, and race with the purpose of shedding light on an often-stereotyped regional past. Blood in the Hills does not attempt to apologize for the region but uses detailed research and analysis to explain it, delving into the social and political factors that have defined Appalachia throughout its violent history.