Her entry begins:I’m reading a book recommended to me by my father, The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (of True Grit fame), published in 1979. I make a point of reading every book my dad suggests because he’s the most avid reader I know and has never steered me wrong even though half the books he recommends aren’t ones I’d think to pick up on my own. What I love most about Portis’s underappreciated “redneck quest novel” is the utterly ludicrous but...[read on]About Rurally Screwed, from the publisher:
Jessie Knadler was a New York City girl, through and through. An editor for a splashy women's magazine, she splurged on Miu Miu, partied hard, lived for Kundalini yoga, and dated a man-boy whose complexion was creamier than her own. Circling the drain both personally and professionally, Jessie definitely wouldn't have described herself as "happy"; more like caustically content. Then one day, she was assigned a story about an annual rodeo in the badlands of Eastern Montana.Learn more about the book and author at Jessie Knadler's website.
There, she met a twenty-five-year-old bull rider named Jake. He voted Republican and read Truck Trader. He listened to Garth Brooks. He owned guns. And Jessie suddenly found herself blindsided by something with which she was painfully unfamiliar: a genuinely lovabledisposition. In fact, Jake radiated such optimism and old-school gentlemanliness that Jessie impulsively ditched Manhattan for an authentic existence, and an authentic man. Almost overnight, she was canning and sewing, making jerky, chopping firewood, and raising chickens. And all the while one question was ringing in the back of her head: "What the !#*$ have I done with my life?"
A hilarious true-life love story, Rurally Screwed reveals what happens to a woman who gives up everything she's ever known and wanted-job security, money, her professional network, access to decent Thai food-to live off the grid with her one true love (and dogs and horses and chickens), and asks, is it worth it? The answer comes amid war, Bible clubs, and moonshine.
Writers Read: Jessie Knadler.
--Marshal Zeringue
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