Sidle Creek

(Paperback)

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"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 skilfully 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.

Reviews

"[an]impressive debut collection spotlights the hard-edged people who call rural western Pennsylvania home...McIlwains reverent regard for the natural world makes her a worthy successor of Annie Dillard." Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Like fictional Sidle Creek, wandering through rural western Pennsylvania, McIlwains stories wind through the same country, touching down in the lives of locals...McIlwain writes beautifully of the work that people do...illuminating human heartache..." Kirkus Reviews

"In a lesser writers hands, Jolene Mcllwains hardscrabble characters could become one-dimensional, stereotypic, but her empathy is such that we never doubt our kinship to them and their ultimate concerns. These stories are artfully constructed and the writing vivid and precise, often poetic but never pretentious. Sidle Creek is one of the best story collections Ive read in a long time." Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of Serena

She can write. Not an easy story but a deeply satisfying one.Dorothy Allison, author, Bastard Out of Carolina

Welcome to the Pennsylvania of Jolene Mcllwain, a world of strip mines, cockfights, deer hunters, Rolling Rock beer, and a cast of characters as memorable as any from Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio. Mcllwains debut story collection, Sidle Creek, shimmers with the plain-spoken, and yet luminous, portrayals of its rural characters whose lives are made up of moments of grit and grace. How does she do it How does she turn the ordinary into something magical, universal, and eternal These are stories to savor for all they have to tell us about being alive. Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever

Sidle Creek aches with the particular beauty of grief and is written with remarkable grace." Chelsea Bieker, author of GODSHOT

Jolene McIlwain is a master of the vividly imagined natural world and of complicated characters, young and old. Meals burned and letters went unanswered as I waited to find out if the baby would survive, which boy would win the fight, whether the deer had escaped in these suspenseful stories. Sidle Creek is a marvellous debut. Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field

In Sidle Creek, characters dont fall in love, they unearth it. And thats what these stories do, they unearth layer upon layer of love for life and all its hills and valleys. These are stories in which textures are beagle-soft; a creek can heal or at least make you believe it can; a calf can be a trigger to a violent memory and the cutest little thing; a person can be a quartersawn board, which is to say stable, or they can be rift-sawn, which is to say not. These stories show life in all of its beauty and its horror. Aye Papatya Bucak, author of The Trojan War Museum

Heir to the immortal ruralists of the American short storys halcyon era, Jolene McIlwain crafts fiction so close to the bone, with such an unflinching fearlessness of the souls dark night, that she will restore your faith in what the short story can achieve in the hands of a born expert. Sidle Creek is a debut worthy of alignment with the best of Dorothy Allison and Daniel Woodrell. William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark

Jolene McIlwains Sidle Creek is a debut collection of stories that reads like the work of a seasoned master. Like Chekhov, she writes about her characters with both a cold eye and a warm heart, and as a result they and their conflicts and traumas come vividly and complexly to life. And her prose is so rich with sensory imagery that it allows us to see through the words as through a window into the world she describes, and that world, the brutal and beautiful world of western Pennsylvanias Appalachian plateau, is so compelling it becomes virtually a character itself. This is a book, and an author, that should not be missed. David Jauss, author of Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories


There's a subterranean wisdom threading through the ground of these stories, creating deep links, pulling stunning parts into a still more stunning whole. Jolene McIlwain gives us the kind of truths that can only come from knowing her subjects--people, animals, and landscape alike--entirely and truly, in all their darkness and light. An extraordinary debut from a writer of rare insight and lyric power. Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

The stories in Jolene McIlwains Sidle Creek are dark and painful, atmospheric and heartbreakingly honest. Filled with characters struggling to survive in a setting as alive and rich as any Ive seen, these stories are hard to read and harder to put down. I loved it!
Kelly Braffet, author of SAVE YOURSELF


"Author Jolene McIlwain shines in this debut collection of short stories showcasing her profound vision, authenticity, and compassion. These stories and characters will sear themselves in your mind and heart forever, such is the beauty and precision of McIlwain's prose, the deftness of her storytelling chops. Like Annie Proulx, this author intimately knows the places and people of her stories. Knows their secrets, their histories, their heartaches, and all-too-human failings. McIlwain brings to vivid life the unique world of rural Appalachia with wisdom and candor and an uncanny ear for dialogue. A masterful collection,Sidle Creekis only the beginning for a stunning writer we'll be hearing much more from in years to come." Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

Author Bio

Jolene McIlwain's fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in West Branch, Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, Northern Appalachia Review, and 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 semifinalist in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize and two American Short Fiction's contests. She's received a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council grant, the Georgia Court Chautauqua faculty scholarship, and Tinker Mountain's merit scholarship. She's taught literary theory/analysis at Duquesne and Chatham Universities and she worked as a radiologic technologist before attending college (BS English, minor in sculpture, MA Literature). She was born, raised, and currently lives in a small town in the Appalachian plateau of Western Pennsylvania.