Beyond a Mountain Valley focuses on Simbu memories, performance, and conceptions over the last sixty years, particularly those relating to interactions with newcomers and other island peoples. Simbu speak of their awakening, their transitions, their heroes, and their future.

Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region’s environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

The Sunshine Mountain Valley is a lovely little crossroads community in north-central-south-western North Carolina, located near the intersection of two interstate highways, two great concrete and steel ribbons of travel and commerce, that cross and go their separate ways just out of sight, and out of mind, of the people of the valley. These are their stories, some told from the porch of the Bull Tail Tavern, so named because the owner was enamored of Mark Twain who noted that the man who takes a bull by the tail is privileged to information not available to others. People of the valley live lives and have experiences not available to others. Read this book for the simple enjoyment of the stories or as an aspiring storyteller. Each of the main stories is followed by a section discussing a potentially difficult element in the telling of that story. There are unfinished stories for the writer or storyteller to complete, and shorts about children, to remind all readers that we are all storytellers.

BEYOND THE HIGH BLUE MOUNTAINS chronicles a boy's triumph over adversity when Colin MacNeil sets out alone to reach the Oregon Territory in 1854. Brought to America by his widowed mother when her fellow Scots, believing infant Colin was cursed, drove them from their island home. Colin MacNeil began life in America on a Mississippi Riverboat. Orphaned at twelve when his abolitionist stepfather is murdered, he flees westward to escape a sheriff intent on placing him in the workhouse. Alone and vulnerable on a rural Missouri road, Colin endures a terrifying experience at the hands of a brutish teamster that scars and haunts him for life. Found near death, Colin is taken in by a family who soon consider him their son. Colin, fearing his curse causes everyone around him to die, wants no harm to befall the family. He hires on as a wagon driver for an affluent family bound for Oregon Territory. On the trail he is befriended by a canny wagon master and forms a brotherly bond with a crippled boy who, unknown to him, holds the key to Colin's future. Colin endures great hardships while coping with the Oregon Trail's dangers and a past that haunts him. Dangers like cholera. Or a sinister preacher whose intent towards him the now bitterly experienced young boy instinctively recognizes. During Colin's perilous journey a band of Crow Indians recognize his courage by making him a blood brother and tribal member. Colin is caught between two worlds. Torn between joining his newfound Crow brethren. Or, honoring his word to the wealthy employers whose wagon he drives. Doing the honorable thing, Colin soon becomes aware that fellow immigrants, mistrusting his friendship with Indians, have suddenly become the trail's most dangerous threat.

In BURRITT’S RAPIDS AND BEYOND, “whatever flows, remains.” From Winnipeg, Vancouver, Montreal, and rural Ontario, Louis Contant considers his place in the world. Fireflies, whip-poor-wills, squirrels, dragonflies, waterfalls, and the soulful notes of a sonata drift through these meditations on nature, spirituality, writing, love, family, friendship, and music. Louis’ poems inhabit sorrow and suffering yet are rich with praise, delighting in the comforts and joys of ritual and routine alongside brevity and ephemera. Whether considering the “alpine range” of Auden’s contributions to literature, the solitude of the poet, the “molded contours” of friendship, the possibility of life on other planets, or the cedar cottage sweetness of home, Louis reminds us that “what really matters is happening all the time / without us.” With humour, wit, and humbleness, Louis confronts his own mortality and celebrates human connection in an age of technology and social unrest. Playful rhymes and uncompromising narratives are accompanied by the poet’s feisty resilience and tuneful undercurrents of grace. Published posthumously, and compiled and contextualized by the poet’s wife, Wilma Brown, Burritt’s Rapids and Beyond showcases and pays tribute to the life of one wise and curious man. At its heart, this book asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it with pleasure and reverence, trying not to step on any wildflowers.

From the American West to the Siberian coast, from Hollywood to the boxing ring, here are timeless tales of war, mystery, romance, crime, and punishment as only Louis L'Amour can tell them. These stories are vintage L'Amour: • A hard-bitten cattle driver is pitted against a man trying to steal his woman, the disappearance of a thousand head of cattle, and a plot to frame him for murder. . . . • A private eye visits a remote mining town on a case involving a sexy widow, an uneasy lawman, and a fortune in gold buried in an abandoned mine shaft. . . . • A country boy with a good right hand must fight not only his vicious opponent in the ring but the ruthless gangsters who'll do anything for profit-even commit cold-blooded murder. . . . • A young woman stranded in an isolated harbor must survive the wilderness and a brutal battle of wits with a sadistic fortune hunter. . . . Here is the trademark blend of action, suspense, historical detail, and unforgettable characters that have made Louis L'Amour one of the world's most extraordinary writers.