Kirjahaku

In 1861, the Civil War severs Michael Morkan from everything he loves and all that defines him-from his son, Leighton; from his love, Cora Slade; and from the quarry he owns in downtown Springfield. Forced to give his black powder to the Missouri State Guard, he finds himself indelibly labeled a rebel traitor and imprisoned in St. Louis. Back in the Ozarks, Leighton joins the Federal Home Guards in hopes of paroling his father. When Leighton finally frees him, the two are pitched in a last gambit for their quarry and for the legacy of the name Morkan.

As the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry, The Teeth of the Souls tells the story of a marriage betrayed, a lifelong and secret love, and an Ozarks city riven by an Easter lynching. The story begins just after the Civil War when Leighton Shea Morkan, son of Irish immigrants, marries Patricia Grünhaagen Weitzer, daughter of a German banking family. Yet he can’t let go of his childhood love and wartime confidante, the house hand and former slave, Judith. Both unions produce children, one a shrouded secret, and one the heir to the Morkan legacy: the limestone quarries of Springfield, Missouri, and the bloody past, what Judith calls “The Teeth of the Souls.”Grounded in broad historical research and spanning Missouri’s reconstruction, vigilantism, and fall from grace, The Teeth of the Souls chronicles the violent melding of immigrant strains—Irish, German, Scots-Irish, and African American—into the fabric of the Ozarks.

The last thing Sandy Coker needs is love. In the 1990s, she's one of very few women tapped by the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to be a lead inspector in the lonesome, cutthroat world of heavy construction. Contractors she minds are transforming the rugged Ozarks and driving new interstate through mountains, treacherous and wild. She holds the key to millions of dollars in compensation for work that can cost not only livelihoods but lives. When she meets dirt foreman Wayne Sheridan of Missouri, stars collide and, for both of them, the timing could not be worse. With prose that evokes the sweeping landscape of the Ozarks and the simple beauty of a country music song, Sandy and Wayne is the story of two lost hearts, clashing ambitions, and possibilities that seem forbidden. Chosen by New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff for the inaugural Knickerbocker Prize and honored by novelist Lisa Zeidner as a finalist for the Faulkner / Wisdom Prize, Sandy and Wayne: A Novella was originally edited by Heather Jacobs and published in the letter-press journal Big Fiction. It was later published again as a standalone book by Dock Street Press in Seattle.

The Legend of the Albino Farm is a horror story turned inside out. What if a thriving family were saddled with an unshakable spook tale? And what if that lore cursed them with an unending whirlwind of destruction from thrill seekers, partiers, bikers, and Goths? Hettienne Sheehy is about to inherit this devouring legacy. Last child to bear a once golden name, she is heiress to a sprawling farm in the Missouri Ozarks. During summer, childhood idylls in the late 1940s, Hettienne has foreseen all this apocalyptic fury in frightening, mystifying visions. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a property that seems to doom all who would dare own it, in the end, Hettienne will risk everything to save the family she truly loves. The Legend of the Albino Farm has haunted two generations of Sheehys and marred all memory of the family's glory days. Worse, this spooky lore now draws revelers, druggies, motorcycle gangs, hippies, and later Goths to trample the land, set bonfires, and vandalize its structures, all while Hettienne's aged aunts cling to privacy, sanity, and a rapidly deteriorating thirteen-room mansion. From her youth, throughout her marriage and her rearing of her children, the Legend of the Albino Farm and the curse of the Sheehys drag at her and her family like a vortex. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a relentlessly judgmental Ozarks city, in the end, Hettienne believes she must make decisions that might compromise her family's financial security but will severe them from an ever more dangerous legacy.

Casey, Tyndall, and Devon-kids from Southern Hollow subdivision-have been falling in and out of love with each other, and always at the wrong time. It's a Thursday night in September 2019, their senior year. Anything seems possible. And Casey's band, New Wave Vultures, packs them in on teen night at the Cedar Shake, a club on the square in downtown Springfield, Missouri. While all three feel trapped in the Ozarks, the coming pandemic is about to show them the grinding limits of true confinement and the power of music, love, friendship, and courage.

Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.

Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.