In the Appalachian Fiction Series...This book is a sequel to our Degrees of Elevation anthology. �Degrees of Elevation provides a variety of characters portrayed in their deepest and most exposed moments. You aren't likely to forget their stories�.a wonderful collection that deserves to be read, savored, and remembered.� From New York Journal of Book Review//

�Hard, brilliant, and dark as coal, this brand new and necessary volume captures Appalachia today, a place where the old bedrock verities of family, community, belief, work, and the earth itself are all in painful �Upheaval�--to use the title of Chris Holbrook's story herein. From manic to elegiac to rough, raw, beautiful, and heartbreaking, these stories will strike the reader as both absolutely true and as unforgettable, like the high pure ring of an ax on a cold winter morning, vibrating across distance, hanging in the air long afterward.� Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace
Appalachia Now is an essential and necessary collection of stories. For too many, the people of Appalachia are little more than stereotypes. Appalachia Now undoes that injustice by representing the real people of Appalachia today without forgetting that we can�t help but be shaped by our geography. Appalachia is as much a character here as are any of these diverse, complex, troubled characters. This collection is a delving�an invitation into a world often represented by pop culture, but seldom as authentically nor as skillfully as by the writers herein. Jeff Vande Zande, author of American Poet.....// �The geologic entry to the Appalachian foothills� had a foreboding quality, a warning to travelers that the world beyond was very different.� So states Chris Offutt in his story, �Back Porch.� His and other stories collected in Appalachia Now serve to hammer the point home like a coal miner�s pick or a fist to the jaw.� Christina Lovin, author of Echo: Poems