"In his brilliant new novel, Perumal Murugan paints a bucolic yet menacing portrait of the rural lives of India's farming community through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. A farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sun set over his village one evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive....

"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....

Set on a Depression Christmas Eve in 1933, this heart-tugging story centers around the Waltons, a rural family, as they prepare to celebrate Christmas together.

One family accepts an invitation to the rural home of another they met on vacation, only to find their lives altered in unexpected, deeply horrifying ways.

Since all available men are fighting for the Allies overseas; Fannie O'Brien bears the weight of her Wisconsin family farm on her shoulders. Her mother enlists the only help she can - German Prisoners of War shipped to the Heartland from the front lines. Fannie cannot imagine working alongside men who might have been shooting at her brothers and killing her friends. Days of doing hard manual labor side by side, however, cause her to realize the gap...

Emily Brontë{u2019}s Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. "I am Heathcliff," Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine{u2019}s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker...

Relates the experiences of the Schaub family during the 1930s in Iowa, describing the challenges they faced trying to keep their farm during the Dust Bowl, Depression, and World War II.

The town of Lawrence in the Kaw River Valley in Kansas, two families the Grelliers and the Schapens have farmed the land for over one hundred and fifty years. Both families barely tolerate each other because the Schapens who belong to a fundamentalist church believes the Grelliers are godless heathens. Into this atmosphere comes Gina Haring, a Wiccan and a lesbian, who is the catalyst for a series of events that ends in tragedy and death.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish's "Little Heathens" is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the 1930s. With no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.