Teton County Library

Farms have fences. People have boundaries. Mine began crumbling the day I knelt behind a male sheep, reached between his legs, and squeezed his testicles. This took place one blustery November day when I joined other shepherd-wannabes for a class on the basics of raising sheep. I was there with my partner Melissa, the woman I'd lived with for 12 years, because we were going to start a farm. When self-confessed "urban bookworm" Catherine Friend's partner...

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...

Norway, 1878. Twenty-year-old Ingeborg Strand is certain she is destined to be an old maid. She's had several suitors but none she deemed worthy of spending her life with. That is, until she meets a university student from Oslo, and feelings stronger than friendship begin to develop between them. But tragedy strikes, and the future begins to look bleaker than ever. Grief settles heavily over Ingeborg, and her mother suggests that she leave Norway...

"O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie makes her a wealthy landowner." "Willa Cather's second novel is imbued with the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, but it is not merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, O pioneers! also...

"Wit, emotion and undiminished boldness. . . . This is a book which celebrates life and warms the heart." -Tulsa World A timeless American classic, this beloved family saga of the heartland is "deeply felt . . . dramatic . . . constantly alive" (Harper's Magazine) On a farm in western Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break...

Award-winning Southern writer Sharyn McCrumb is a best-selling author who's won widespread critical acclaim for her Appalachian Ballad novels. In The Rosewood Casket, a farmer named Randall Stargill has fallen into a coma. As his family gathers to prepare for the inevitable, his four sons work on a handmade casket and their wives sew a quilt to line it. Complications arise, however, when clairvoyant neighbor Nora Bonesteel brings her own disturbing...

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, but for the deeply religious Mary, farming is at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of...

A successful lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with an immigrant Bohemian girl.

Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates THE TRUEST PLEASURE--the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom's father died in the war, but Ginny's father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny's was...