Sidle Creek - Paperback

by Jolene McIlwain (Author)

A NPR Book of the Year
A Library Journal Best Books of 2023
A Library Journal 2023 Best Book Covers of the Year

"Sidle Creek is one of the best story collections I've read in a long time." - Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of Serena

Set in the bruised, mined, and timbered hills of Appalachia in western Pennsylvania, Sidle Creek is a tender, truthful exploration of a small town and the people who live there, told by a brilliant new voice in fiction.

In Sidle Creek, McIlwain skillfully interrogates the myths and stereotypes of the mining, mill, and farming towns where she grew up. With stories that take place in diners and dive bars, town halls and bait shops, McIlwain's writing explores themes of class, work, health, and trauma, and the unexpected human connections of small, close-knit communities. All the while, the wild beauty of the natural world weaves its way in, a source of the town's livelihood - and vulnerable to natural resource exploitation.

With an alchemic blend of taut prose, gorgeous imagery, and deep sensitivity for all of the living beings within its pages, Sidle Creek will sit snugly on bookshelves between Annie Proulx, Joy Williams, and Louise Erdrich.

Author Biography

Jolene McIlwain's fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2019's Best Small Fictions Anthology. Her work was named finalist for 2018's Best of the Net, Glimmer Train's and River Styx's contests, and was a semifinalist in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize. She's taught literary theory/analysis at Duquesne and Chatham Universities and worked as a radiologic technologist. She was born, raised, and currently lives in a small town in the Appalachian plateau of Western Pennsylvania.