Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two brothers are deadlocked in a furious rivalry. Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents as a gunsmith. John, determined not to repeat the crime that forced both families to flee their Kentucky homes, doggedly follows his tenacious brother west, while he watches his own family disintegrate.
Wondrously told through the wary eyes of John's ten-year-old daughter, Mattie, whose gift of premonition proves to be...
Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two br...
Set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush, Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah is a mesmerizing story that centers on the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside, an oil wildcatter's high-strung wife, and Graceful, her enigmatic black maid. Their juxtaposing storiesand those of others close to themunfold against a volatile backdrop of oil-boom opulence, fear, hatred, lynchings that climax in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, when whites burned the city's properous black community. Askew's award-winning first novel, The Mercy Seat, was praised for its astute diepiction...
Set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush, Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah is a mesmerizing story that centers on the complex rela...
A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn't leave for California
Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt.
Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds careen across the 1930s...
A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn't leave for California
Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the ...
"The strangeness of life and death play out in a fictional American small town"
Lyla Mae Muncy meets her first love at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly Summer Bible Church Campand regrets it on their awkward first date. After years of being nagged about lumpy gravy, abused wife Lois pulls out a shotgun to wrap up breakfast her way. In a tender moment, an old man speaks from beyond the grave about his wife s final goodbye at his funeral. Experience, memory, and town-consciousness bind this collection of ten stories spanning twenty-five years in fictitious Cedar, Oklahoma. From the fears and...
"The strangeness of life and death play out in a fictional American small town"
Lyla Mae Muncy meets her first love at Falls Creek Baptist Assem...
With the passing of a new state law, it becomes a felony to harbor an undocumented immigrant in Oklahoma. So when Robert John Brown, a churchgoing family man and respected community member, is caught hiding a barnful of migrant workers with no papers, he is arrested and sent to prison. Meanwhile, his ten-year-old grandson Dustin tries to help the sole escapee of the raid reunite with his family, and his granddaughter, Misty, is struggling to raise her daughter alone after her husband, an undocumented immigrant himself, has been deported. Then there's Brown's daughter Sweet, who finds her...
With the passing of a new state law, it becomes a felony to harbor an undocumented immigrant in Oklahoma. So when Robert John Brown, a churchgoing ...
For many people who have never spent time in the state, Oklahoma conjures up a series of stereotypes: rugged cowboys, tipi-dwelling American Indians, uneducated farmers. When women are pictured at all, they seem frozen in time: as the bonneted pioneer woman stoically enduring hardship or the bedraggled, gaunt-faced mother familiar from Dust Bowl photographs. In Red Dirt Women, Susan Kates challenges these one-dimensional characterizations by exploring--and celebrating--the lives of contemporary Oklahoma women whose experiences are anything but predictable. In essays both intensely...
For many people who have never spent time in the state, Oklahoma conjures up a series of stereotypes: rugged cowboys, tipi-dwelling American Indians, ...
In her first nonfiction collection, award-winning novelist Rilla Askew casts an unflinching eye on American history, both past and present. As she traverses a line between memoir and social commentary, Askew places herself--and indeed all Americans--in the role of witness to uncomfortable truths about who we are.
Through nine linked essays, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place evokes a vivid impression of the United States: police violence and gun culture, ethnic cleansing and denied history, spellbinding landscapes and brutal weather. To render these conditions...
In her first nonfiction collection, award-winning novelist Rilla Askew casts an unflinching eye on American history, both past and present. As she ...
