Crooked River Country is a sweeping account of north central Oregon's thrilling history, primarily the years between 1800 and 1950. Bordered by intimidating natural barriers, the rough country and harsh winters produced equally hardy inhabitants. Legends include Billy Chinook, Chief Paulina, Elisha Barnes, James M. Blakely, Newt Williamson, James J. Hill, Johnnie Hudspeth, and Les Schwab. In the early 1800s, only Native Americans, fur trappers, military expeditions, and missionaries roamed the forbidding setting, but after mid-century, pioneer families discovered lush pastures nestled in the expanse between the Cascades and the Blue Mountains. The homestead boom sparked deadly Paiute raids and conflicts over grazing rights. As land became more precious, Native Americans were forced onto reservations and Vigilante ranchers terrorized settlers. Moonshiners fought back. Dishonest politicians and capitalists exploited land claim laws and stole vast amounts of timberland. Steamship and railroad lines further opened the region, and the territory gradually became less wild. Big eastern lumber companies arrived and constructed the largest pine mills in the world. The stock market collapsed, and citizens faced severe economic depression intensified by prolonged drought. New Deal programs, good rainfall, and World War II eventually spurred industrial and population growth. Crooked River Country presents the captivating and thoroughly researched saga of the region's astonishing transformation.

A pianist, arranger, and composer, William Pursell is a mainstay of the Nashville music scene. He has played jazz in Nashville’s Printer’s Alley with Chet Atkins and Harold Bradley, recorded with Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline, performed with the Nashville Symphony, and composed and arranged popular and classical music. Pursell’s career, winding like a crooked river between classical and popular genres, encompasses a striking diversity of musical experiences. A series of key choices sent him down different paths, whether it was reenrolling with the Air Force for a second tour of duty, leaving the prestigious Eastman School of Music to tour with an R&B band, or refusing to sign with the Beatles’ agent Sid Bernstein. The story of his life as a working musician is unlike any other—he is not a country musician nor a popular musician nor a classical musician but, instead, an artist who refused to be limited by traditional categories. Crooked River City is driven by a series of recollections and personal anecdotes Terry Wait Klefstad assembled over a three-year period of interviews with Pursell. His story is one not only of talent, but of dedication and hard work, and of the ins and outs of a working musician in America. This biography fills a crucial gap in Nashville music history for both scholars and music fans.

In 1948 Cleveland was America's sixth largest city; by 1969 it was the twelfth. For Easterners, Cleveland is where the Midwest begins; for Westerners, it is where the East begins. In the summer of 1948, fourteen-year-old David Zielinsky can look forward to a job at the docks. Anne O'Connor, at twelve, is the apple of her political boss father's eye. David and Anne will meet-and fall in love-four years later, and for the next twenty years this pair will be reluctant star-crossed lovers in a troubled and turbulent country. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Winegardner spins an epic tale of those twenty years, artfully weaving such real-life Clevelanders as Eliot Ness, Alan Freed, and Carl Stokes into the tapestry. His narrative gifts may bring the fiction of E. L. Doctorow to some readers' minds, but Winegardner is very much his own man, and his observations of Cleveland are laced with a loving skepticism. His masterful saga of this conflicted city is a novel that speaks a memorable truth.

"Ellen Waterston's new book is a slug of juniper air, a breath-taking view of a rough-edged land, as bracing and taut as October morningsùpart celebration, part elegy all love and the wisdom that grows from deep roots in basalt rock. Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it meansùwhat it really means -to live in the West."-Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort There is an otherness to the high desert, something momentous and sacred in the purity of the silence. In this compelling collection of personal essays, award winning poet and author Ellen Waterston illuminates the people, places, and landscapes of central Oregon's vast high desert. In Where the Crooked River Rises, Waterston reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher and town resident in a place that has been, and remains, her touchstone and crucible. The high desert is Waterston's teacher, and she describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit blush.

“A masterful debut” that follows four generations of Cherokee women across four decades—from the Plimpton Prize–winning author (Sarah Jessica Parker). It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church—a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever. Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home. In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent. “A compelling journey through the evolving terrain of multiple generations of women.” —The Washington Post

Full of emotion and suspense, Crooked River is an inventive and atmospheric story about family and friendship, good and evil, secrets and lies, grief and forgiveness Where should I start? With Mom's funeral? Or a week earlier on the Fourth of July, the day she died? Or should I skip all that stuff and get straight to the part where Ollie and I just wanted to go swimming and pretend our lives were ordinary again, but when we got down to the river we found another dead woman instead? Still grieving over the sudden death of their mother, fifteen-year-old Sam McAlister and her ten-year-old sister, Ollie, move from the comforts of Eugene to rural Oregon to live in a meadow in a teepee under the stars with Bear, their reclusive beekeeper father. But soon after they arrive in Terrebone, a young woman is found dead floating in Crooked River and the police arrest their eccentric father for the murder. He is not evil. I am not good. We are the same: broken and put back together again. Sam knows that Bear is not a killer, even though the evidence points to his guilt—including information that she and Ollie have uncovered. Filled with remorse and refusing to accept that her father could have hurt anyone, Sam embarks on a desperate hunt to save him and keep her damaged family together. They had mysteriously lost Bear once before and Sam is terrified they will lose him again. Only this time they won't ever get him back. She needs Ollie to help her, but Ollie has not spoken a word since their mother's death. I see things no one else does. I see them there and wish I didn't. I want to tell and I can't. Ollie, too, knows that Bear is innocent. The Shimmering have told her so. One followed her home from her mom's funeral and continues to hover, a spectrum of colors—pink and rose red, sky blue and honey gold. Now another, coiled and hissing, is following Sam. Both spirits warn Ollie: the real killer is out there, waiting. Somehow, she must warn her sister. But Ollie worries that if she tries to speak—even to write—the Shimmering will slip inside her, take control, and never leave. Sam and Ollie must find the truth quickly—a search that will lead them to unexpected secrets and terrible lies—because the danger is closer to them than either girl knows. Told in Sam's and Ollie's vibrant voices, Crooked River is a family story, a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, and a psychological mystery as haunting as the best Southern gothic fiction that will touch your heart and grip you until the final page.