Ten of the best small towns in books

Brad Tyer's new nonfiction book, Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape, is about restored rivers, familial disappointment, and sacrificial landscapes.

For Publishers Weekly, Tyer tagged “'10 [Small Towns in Books] That Made An Impression On Me,' whether they treat a town where I’ve lived, a town I barely recognize from the off-ramp, or a town that exists nowhere but the map of some reader’s imagination," including:

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town by Nate Blakeslee

In the late 1990s, a crooked anti-drug task force falsely arrested and convicted 47 residents of the Texas Panhandle town of Tulia, population 5,000. The evidence-free sting put a full fifth of Tulia’s small black community behind bars. Blakeslee follows this story of rogue cops and federal drug policies gone wrong to its semi-satisfying conclusion: the eventual overturning of the grossly ill-gotten sentences. Along the way, he shows a small community’s struggles with economic fate and demographic fact, and how internal divisions open the door to exploitation by unscrupulous outsiders. Also: Some people are still basically racist.

Read about another book on Tyer's list.

--Marshal Zeringue