May 9th, 2025
Home | Log in!

On Top Shelf
TemptressTemptress
Fresh Pick
THE GREEK HOUSE
THE GREEK HOUSE

New Books This Week

Reader Games


The books of May are here—fresh, fierce, and full of feels.

Slideshow image


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Wedding season includes searching for a missing bride�and a killer . . .


slideshow image
Sometimes the path forward begins with a step back.


slideshow image
One island. Three generations. A summer that changes everything.


slideshow image
A snapshot made them legends. What it didn�t show could tear them apart.


slideshow image
This life coach will give you a lift!


slideshow image
A twisty, "addictive," mystery about jealousy and bad intentions


slideshow image
Trapped by magic, haunted by muses�she must master the cards before they�re lost to darkness.


slideshow image
Masquerades, secrets, and a forbidden romance stitched into every seam.


slideshow image
A vanished manuscript. A murdered expert. A castle full of secrets�and one sharp-witted sleuth.


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Two warrior angels. First friends, now lovers. Their future? A WILD UNKNOWN.


Welcome To Utopia
Karen Valby

Notes from a small town

Spiegel & Grau
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
Featuring: Ralph; Kathy; Colter
256 pages
ISBN: 038552286X
EAN: 9780385522861
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction

Utopia, Texas: It’s either the best place on earth, or it’s no place at all.

In the twenty-first century, it’s difficult to imagine any element of American life that remains untouched by popular culture, let alone an entire community existing outside the empire of pop. But Karen Valby discovered the tiny town of Utopia tucked away in the Texas Hill Country. There are no movie theaters for sixty miles in any direction, no book or music stores. But cable television and the Internet have recently thrown wide the doors of Utopia.

Valby follows the lives of four Utopians—Ralph, the retired owner of the general store; Kathy, the waitress who waits in terror for three of her boys to return from war; Colter, the son of a cowboy with the soul of a hipster; and Kelli, an aspiring rock star and one of the only black people in town—as they reckon, on an intensely human scale, with war and race, class and culture, and the way time’s passage can change the ground beneath our feet.

Utopia is the kind of place we still think of as the “real America,” a place of cowboys and farmers and high-school sweethearts who stay together till they die. But its dramatic stories show us what happens when the old tensions of small-town life confront a new reality: that no town, no matter how small and isolated, can escape the liberating and disruptive forces of the larger world.

Welcome to Utopia is a moving elegy for a proud American way of life and a celebration of our relentless impulse toward rebirth.

Read An Excerpt

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!

© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net  all rights reserved Privacy Policy