At the intersection of alcoholism and recovery, Kingfisher Blues brings an unflinching eye and raw wit to one man's battle with addiction. Alternating between meditations on the natural world and gritty snapshots of the county jail, rehab center, and people who occupy these spaces with him—from strippers to soldiers—Reece ruminates on the thin line between life and death. Evocative and unfiltered, Kingfisher Blues weaves his experiences of Montana prairies, Kentucky woods...

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized worl...

A journey through American utopian communities past and present, and a meditation on what we can learn from them."Reece has a sharp eye for the contradictions of communities that condemn the capitalist economy but are sustained by vibrant commercial enterprises . . . [Utopia Drive] vividly bring[s] to life the ecological sensitivity, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism that inspired so many in early America." —Akash Kapur, The New Yorker

Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here in paperback for the very first time*"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —*Guy Davenport

Robinson Forest in eastern Kentucky is one of our most important natural landscapes—and one of the most threatened. Covering fourteen thousand acres of some of the most diverse forest region in temperate North America, it is a haven of biological richness within an ever-expanding desert created by mountaintop removal mining. Written by two people with deep knowledge of Robinson Forest, The Embattled Wilderness engagingly portrays this singular place as it persuasively appeals for ...

From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry.At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather-also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the...

A new form of strip mining has caused a state of emergency for the Appalachian wilderness and the communities that depend on it-a crisis compounded by issues of government neglect, corporate hubris, and class conflict. In this powerful call to arms, Erik Reece chronicles the year he spent witnessing the systematic decimation of a single mountain and offers a landmark defense of a national treasure threatened with extinction.

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

This may be hard to believe but it is very likely that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals, birds and trees in the eastern United States today than anywhere on the planet at any time in history. For nature lovers, this should be wonderful news -- unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, your child’s soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, coyotes are killing your pets, the neighbor’s cat has turned your bird feeder into...

An impassioned and rigorous appeal for reconnection to the land and human feeling by one of America’s most heartfelt and humble writersWhen he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork o...

This inspirational book "is a road map to reach the places in the soul which can give life meaning" (Marian Wright Edelman, New York Times –bestselling author of T he Measure of Our Success )."The most valuable aspect of religion," writes Robert Lawrence Smith, "is that it provides us with a framework for living. I have always felt that the beauty and power of Quakerism is that i...

"One of the great religious leaders of [the twentieth] century" tells his story of growing up under segregation and finding his calling as a minister ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution).Howard Thurman was a singular man—a minister, philosopher, and educator whose vitality and vision touched the lives of countless people of all races, faiths, and cultures.In his moving autobiography, Dr. Thurman tells of his lonely years growing up in a segregated town, w...