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Bestselling author, journalist, playwright, and activist Silas House has focused nearly all of his work on Appalachia. His acclaimed and diverse body of work includes the novels Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, and Southernmost. Well known for its lyrical style, diverse and sympathetic characters, and political engagement, House's work is overdue for deeper critical study. In this groundbreaking book, editor and coauthor Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt brings together established and rising scholars to discuss House and his writings through a critical lens. Various chapters address different aspects of House's fiction and nonfiction, including the ways in which he deconstructs regional stereotypes, how he explores issues of diversity, his environmental activism, and his approach to LGBTQ issues. The collection begins with a foreword by Denise Giardina and concludes with a chapter by celebrated poet Maurice Manning exploring the lyricism that distinguishes House's work. Featuring an interview with House that further illuminates his philosophy and art, this timely volume offers an important critical appraisal of his oeuvre to date and illustrates why he is one of the most significant voices in Appalachian and American literature today.

Over the past fifty years, Wendell Berry has been arguing that our most pressing ecological and cultural need is a renewed formal intelligence. Such an intelligence does not look for big, one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, it discerns and fosters patterns of health. When W. H. Auden famously declared that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he was correct that poetry, like the other arts, doesn’t coerce matter in the way that a tractor or an oil rig or a bomb does. Yet poetry is “a way of happening,” its beauty shaping readers’ imaginations to better perceive and understand formal patterns. Such formative work fosters the deep, lasting change needed to cultivate a more sustainable culture and economy. In particular, Berry’s literary forms embody and cultivate virtues of renewal. Though our contemporary culture fears and shuns death, natural ecosystems provide a model in which death feeds new life and healthy human communities follow an analogous order. Cultures maintain such a sustainable order by practicing virtues of renewal, virtues that stand in sharp contrast to the techniques of control preferred by our industrial culture. Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, this book argues that Berry’s literary forms shape his readers to desire and practice these virtues of renewal. Poetry can’t magically create a healthy economy, but Berry’s poetry, essays, and fiction cultivate the kind of imaginative, virtuous people who can, as he puts it, “practice resurrection.”