Joseph C. Russo’s forthcoming book, Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas, is both exquisitely written and one of the (literally) dozen-and-a-half titles published by or forthcoming from Duke University Press that we have indexed so far in 2022 at Southwest Humanities. Hard Luck and Heavy Rain is a sensitive yet penetrating portrait of everyday life in the small towns of southeast Texas “as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke.” Focusing on the hard-luck stories of the region’s residents, Russo frames these stories “as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative” that deepen our understanding of a particularly compelling slice of contemporary rural US life. Hard Luck and Heavy Rain, which will be published in December 2022, “challeng[es] classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated,” and “his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.” You can find more information about this excellent book at the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 