The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
Adult Fiction
“The Excellent Lombards” by Jane Hamilton
Mary Frances “Frankie” Lombard loves her family’s sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it.
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She is content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than to continue life undisturbed, but she remains haunted by the knowledge that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave.
Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance and college looming on the horizon threaten this dream.
As Frankie sheds her childhood fantasies and faces the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go.
Adult NonFiction
“Dimestore: A Writer’s Life” by Lee Smith
For 45 years, author Lee Smith’s fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South.
Now she writes her own story. Set deep in the mountains, the Grundy, Virginia, of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters and her daddy’s dimestore.
It was in the dimestore — listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls — that she became a storyteller.
Even when she went off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from — and it’s a place that she never left behind.
These fifteen essays chronicle the birth of a writer and a look into a way of life that has all but vanished.
DVD
“Straight Outta Compton” directed by Gary Gray
In 1987, five young men — Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, MC Ren and DJ Yella — put rhymes and hardcore beats to their frustration and anger about life in the most dangerous place in America to create the groundbreaking group, N.W.A. “Straight Outta Compton” tells the story of how these cultural rebels, armed only with their lyrics, swagger, bravado and raw talent, stood up to the authorities to form the world’s most dangerous group, N.W.A.
Their voices ignited a social revolution that still is reverberating today.
