We read so many book reviews that sometimes it is hard to smile and say, “That’s a big deal.”

For what it’s worth,the New York Times reviewing  Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia is a very big and awesome deal. Allison Glock writes that McClanahan chronicles “[a] West Virginia where existence is both tedious and shocking. Where violence is something to do. The death rattle something to waltz with. He writes about this grasping, confounding place in his insistent, balletic, more-poem-than-memoir memoir, “Crapalachia.”

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