Reading List: Extracting Rural Narratives

This collection of recent fiction examines how dominant narratives position rural communities as emblems of national identity and authenticity. These stories reveal how outsider characters value rural places and people solely for their potential to bolster broader agendas about a nation’s character and legitimacy. By exploring the cost of this kind of appropriation, these works critique narrative extraction as not merely misrepresentation but its own form of violence—of theft, erasure, and ultimately dehumanization.

The Rural Review will be taking a brief publishing hiatus for the winter break. In the meantime, we hope this reading list inspires you to pick up a good book over the holidays. We’ll be back in 2026 with more rural-centered research, news, events, and commentary!

• Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon, 2024)

  Whale Fall begins in September 1938, with a whale washed up on the shore of a remote Welsh island, home to a dwindling fishing and farming community. Two Oxford ethnographers follow, intent on recording the islanders’ traditions and with them “a sense of true Britishness.” To the novel’s 18-year-old protagonist, Manod, these outsiders represent a passage both literal and figurative to the mainland, university, and a different life. But as she sees her community distorted through the ethnographers’ ideological lens, Manod reckons with both what she has unwittingly helped create and what has been stolen from her. Of course, as readers, we too are outsiders, and the titular whale is a tempting metaphor. But O’Connor warns us away from such facile exchanges—as Manod tells the visitors after translating a folk song, the seals are not a metaphor for dead sailors but “two separate things.”

• The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, 2025)
  A Dust Bowl epic explicitly about identity and memory, The Antidote explores the nature of official representation through the character of Cleo Allfrey, a photographer for the Resettlement Administration tasked with capturing “everyday farm life” to raise support for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Cleo’s editor (the real-life Roy Stryker) admonishes her to capture only scenes that fit within anticipated narratives of white, worthy farmers. As was his real-life practice, Stryker punctures the negatives of rejected photos, leaving gaping holes in faces, bodies, and landscapes. These images appear throughout the novel, a reminder of what is missing from public memory. Cleo’s mother distrusts photography as an act of “misremembering,” and by laying bare the excising work of mythmaking, the damaged photographs resist being subsumed into a neat narrative, exerting a disruptive power of their own.

• The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans (Riverhead Books, 2020)
  In this novella, versions of truth and identity unfold in a disquieting near-future. Cassie Jacobs, a field agent for the fictitious Institute for Public History, is tasked with correcting historical errors, big and small (“you know how much white people love their history right up until it’s true,” her friend and foil, Genevieve, observes). Dispatched to a small Wisconsin town to investigate a memorial plaque, Cassie finds herself uncovering a mystery concerning the town’s sole Black resident, assumed dead when the town’s forebears set fire to his store in 1937. The plaque goes largely unnoticed until Genevieve adds the perpetrators’ names, rejecting a national narrative that “insist[s] on victims without wrongdoers.” The investigation and devastating conclusion expose how official records can appropriate harm into narratives of progress and self-congratulation.