These thirteen stories reflect different dimensions of the human spirit. Hugh in “The Moonshiner,” Maggie in “The Fight,” and George in “The Drunkard” show remarkable courage when facing physical danger. Myra Lu in “Dyin’ on Time” and John in “The Lost Summer” reveal admirable endurance when facing adversity. In “Talking to the Dead” and “The Strange Requests,” the Reverends Calahan and Hester struggle against superstition and disbelief. Zack in “The Chicken Thieves” discovers that crime doesn’t pay. And characters in “Grandma Excie’s Exit,” “Summer Porch Talk,” “The Prayers” and other stories confront life’s complexities of sadness, joy, humor, pain and death. The setting for these stories: southeastern North Carolina. The time: the depression decade of the thirties.

If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel! Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner’s Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family’s past . . . Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser’s daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she’s concerned, moonshine caused her mother’s death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth—one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school’s gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the “monster” inside Jessie. Resenting her father’s insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie’s loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths—and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for.

"Lewis R. Redmond was an archetypal moonshiner. On March 1, 1876, the twenty-one-year-old North Carolinian shot and killed a U.S. deputy marshal who tried to arrest him on charges of illicit distilling. He then fled to Pickens County, South Carolina, where, within three years, he gained national notoriety as the "King of the Moonshiners." More than any other individual moonshiner in southern Appalachia, Redmond captured the imagination of middle-class Americans. Then, as now, media coverage had a lot to do with his reputation.".

The definitive biography of Appalachian moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, filled with color photography, exclusive interviews, historical background, and extensive accounts of his life and times.

Homemade liquor has played a prominent role in the Appalachian economy for nearly two centuries. The region endured profound transformations during the extreme prohibition movements of the nineteenth century, when the manufacturing and sale of alcohol -- an integral part of daily life for many Appalachians -- was banned. In Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia, Bruce E. Stewart chronicles the social tensions that accompanied the region's early transition from a rural to an urban-industrial economy. Stewart analyzes the dynamic relationship of the bootleggers and opponents of liquor sales in western North Carolina, as well as conflict driven by social and economic development that manifested in political discord. Stewart also explores the life of the moonshiner and the many myths that developed around hillbilly stereotypes. A welcome addition to the New Directions in Southern History series, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists addresses major economic, social, and cultural questions that are essential to the understanding of Appalachian history.

In Canadian, Texas, in 1927, not long after his father's death, Riley and his fiddle-playing grandfather must find a way to save the family ranch from a group of moonshiners and the men behind their operation.

Moonshiner's Daughter is the early life story of a young girl raised in the some of the most remote, backwoods parts of Haywood County, North Carolina, deep in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Mary Judith Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper near Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to live with her older sister who had run away from a forced marriage. The memoir Moonshiner's Daughter is told through the eyes and words of a barely educated child and teenager yet their meaning and descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. She changed the names of most people and places to protect her still living family members. Authors Robert Morgan & Ron Rash give recommendations.