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• About the text
• Part 1. Rural life : Short stories handed down to me, Albert Coryer, by my parents and grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Julian Coryer and Mr. and Mrs. Thaddeus Langford
• Part 2. Frenchtown people and culture : Florence Bittner's interview with Albert Coryer
• Part 3. Voyageurs' world : The Julian Coryer stories
• Part 4. Beyond the natural world : Coryer's ghost stories and a conversation about faith cures.

"Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Born in 1877, he grew up in Prairie du Chien hearing tales of days gone by from his parents, grandparents, and neighbors who lived in the Frenchtown area. Because his mother's first language was English and his father's French, Albert was bilingual as well as bicultural. Throughout his life, Albert soaked up the local oral traditions, including narratives about early residents, local landmarks, interesting and funny events, ethnic customs, myths, and folklore. Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, and gave an interview to a local historian and a folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of the old fur trade town of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change. They provide a window into the ethnic community comprised of the old fur trade families, Native Americans, French Canadian farmers, and their descendants. Editors Mary Antoine and Lucy Murphy have collected these narratives into four sections: stories centering on agricultural life, tales about the more wide-ranging adventures and travels of his ancestors, a collection of ghost stories from the time, and the 1951 interview transcript. An introduction and a headnote accompanying each section offer historical background and context for Coryer's writings"--Provided by publisher.

• Foreword by Amanda Petrusich I. Eat Candy II. Thickety Time III. Go Outside and Look at the Moon IV. First, Give V. See You in My Dreams Selected Discography.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Friend, asshole, angel, mutant, " singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt "came along and made us gross and broken people seem ...I dunno, cooler, I guess." A quadriplegic who could play only simple chords on his guitar, Chesnutt recorded seventeen critically acclaimed albums before his death in 2009, including About to Choke, North Star Deserter, and At the Cut. In 2006, NPR placed him in the top five of the ten best living songwriters, along with Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen. Chesnutt's songs have also been covered by many prominent artists, including Madonna, the Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., Sparklehorse, Fugazi, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Kristin Hersh toured with Chesnutt for nearly a decade and they became close friends, bonding over a love of songwriting and mutual struggles with mental health. In Don't Suck, Don't Die, she describes many seemingly small moments they shared, their free-ranging conversations, and his tragic death. More memoir than biography, Hersh's book plumbs the sources of Chesnutt's pain and creativity more deeply than any conventional account of his life and recordings ever could. Chesnutt was difficult to understand and frequently difficult to be with, but, as Hersh reveals him, he was also wickedly funny and painfully perceptive. This intimate memoir is essential reading for anyone interested in the music or the artist.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

""I've never believed that living in one place means being one thing all the time, condemned like Minnie Pearl to wear the same hat for every performance. Life is more complicated than that." In this remarkable book of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings-home, town, countryside-of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life: church suppers, Friday night football, outdoor weddings, garden compost, family reunions, roadside memorials, camouflage clothing. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn't The Land Time Forgot but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means. From his home range in northwestern Wisconsin, Hildebrand attempts to do just that by boiling down a calendar year to its rich marrow of weather, animals, family, home-in other words, all the things that matter. "-- Provided by publisher.
"In lyrical prose, author John Hildebrand charts the seasons, landscapes, and people of the Midwest. In the same way that E.B. White's essays documented life in Maine, Hildebrand creates a unique portrait of Wisconsin by focusing on ordinary life through the seasons. The almanac style of month-by-month chapters invites readers to approach the book from any direction, entering at whatever chapter strikes their mood at time--January if that's what month it happens to be or July if one is sick of the snow and anticipating summer. Whether describing a night ski race across Chequamegon Bay, a Friday-night fish boil at his local parish, or a possum playing dead atop his backyard compost pile, Hildebrand portrays a place both familiar and fresh. As he explains, "I've never accepted the idea that being from the Midwest meant being one thing all the time, condemned like Minnie Pearl to wear the same hat for every performance. Our lives are more complicated than that. Even when I've written about what appear to be fixed traditions, like church suppers or small town football or deer hunting--they're just snapshots in time. The essays include revised Wisconsin Trails pieces (now free of their 700-word limit) and others pieces written for magazines such as Sports Illustrated, plus a few completely new essays"-- Provided by publisher.

• The shipping season begins
• Adventures in port
• Dad's first command
• I set sail
• Winter life
• Spring again
• November gales
• Our last trip
• Batchawana Bay
• Dad's last command.

• Up the famous river, again
• Julien Dubuque and the mines of Spain
• Boom town on the fever
• Stonefield on the river
• Guttenberg's misspelled honor
• A Scotsman on the river
• Diamond Jo Reynolds
• Zebulon Pike and his peak
• A most historical spot
• The button boom
• Treasure from the mud
• Effigy mounds and eternal mysteries
• When the river ran red
• Steamboats on the river
• The most terrible conflagration
• The city that named an actress
• Alma, a nineteenth-century river town
• The father of waterskiing
• And the river runs unruly
• Winona and the Maiden's Rock
• Red Wing, the shoe leather city
• Fort Snelling, outpost on the river
• A search as long as a river
• Elsewhere on the river.

"The book is neither a traveler's guide to the Mississippi River nor a linear history. Instead, it is a series of historical stories, at times humorous, about people and places linked by the Mississippi River that inform modern travelers about the Upper Mississippi and its role in our region's history. The stories cover the Upper Mississippi, roughly from Dubuque north to the river's source at Lake Itasca. While most stories focus on Wisconsin, some take place in Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota. The author, Dennis McCann, has relied on the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, as well as several seminal histories of people and places along the river, for background and research"--Provided by publisher.

In 1980, photographer Geoff Winningham and architect Cyrus Sutherland travelled extensively throughout Arkansas to locate and photograph examples of southern American vernacular architecture. They were working on a commission from the First Federal Savings and Loan of Arkansas, and after a year they had finished their project. But, with their interest piqued and enjoying their collaboration, they continued on with the project in hopes of amassing a collection of photographs of vernacular architecture from every region of the state. For two more years, Sutherland continued helping Winningham find every possible "dogtrot house, wood frame church, octagonal barn, and one-of-a-kind hog house" in the state. By 1983 Winningham had photographed over three thousand structures, and the architect and photographer put the collection aside and moved on to other projects. Three decades later, after Sutherland had died, Winningham reopened his archive of Arkansas photographs, found his interest rekindled, and decided to return to the sites of the structures he had photographed. Most of the buildings, he discovered, had disappeared due to fires, storms, or neglect. But while Winningham was unable to find many of the structures he had photographed, what he did find were local people who remembered them. The stories of these local people join the original photographs in <em>Of the Soil</em> in a remarkable fusion that shows us much about the culture of the American South.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)