conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled River Of Earth about River, Earth, Earth</I with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "A tenderly written and well-sustained story."<I>New York Times</I><P>"His characters are endowed with vigor and stature. Its achievement as an artisic creation of a people and a locale is as sound as its pretensions are modest."<I>Saturday Review of Books</I><P>"the author tells of [his people's] japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. He has produced a work of art."<I>Time Magazine</I><P>"As you read you can hear the redbirds in the plum thickets and smell the pawpaws at first frost; you know, too, what it means to scrape the bottom of the meat box with a plow blade, hunting for a rind of pork amid the salt when the mines are closed."<I>Washington Post</I><P>"Mr. the author's local language is true and good."<I>Lincoln Herald Times</I><P>"There is hunger and suffering and death in this child's experience but there is also laughter, riddles and tales told from the past, and the surrounding natural landscape moving from one season to the next. The reappearance of River of Earth is a welcome literary event."<I>Wilma Dykeman, South Atlantic Bulletin</I><P>"Among best novels, we may distinguish between "greats" and smaller masterpieces... Small masterpieces are not so deep nor so grand in scope. Yet their art may be just as exquisite, for these storys render a limited human action just right. You finish them thinking you would neither change a word nor omit a scene. Willa Cather's <I>Death Comes for the Archbishop</I> is such a story; so is Hemingway's <I>The Old Man and the Sea</I>. Another work of fiction that surely ranks among America's small masterpieces is as Kentuckian as a story can be. This is the author's River of Earth... From first to last, the author's scenic art is nearabout perfect. It yields a carefully observed canvas of life of a particular place and time. Advocate-Messenger"James L. Nicholson, <I>Advocate-Messenger</I><P>"<I>River of Earth</I> is fiction. But it is far too honest, too human, too real and believable, to be considered a manufactured saga of a historically stricken region deep within our American landscape. <P><P>[...] [It] is an extremely important slice of Appalachia, a culture that has far too often been ignored or left behind by the full-speed-ahead achievements of this country over the past 100 years. Which is precisely why <I>River of Earth</I> needs to be rediscovered. Relevant as ever, it remains worthy of our attention and praise and reflection. It is genuine Americana told in a brilliant, clear, lyrical style. I want to make sure people know about it."<I>Midwest Book Review</I>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: River of Earth
  And when the mines close and the crops fail there is little complaining. They simply pack up and move again, accepting, hoping, laughing to make their misfortune bearable.
  More than twenty years before the region was labeled a "poverty pocket" and prior to the surprised reactions of experts and government officials to the problems of destitution, as though they had encountered some recent wonder, James Still had presented the heartbreaking account of what it means for a human being to live out his life hungry and cold. His is not a socioeconomist's collection of figures, causes, and possible cures, but the dramatized plight of human beings accepting poverty without accusations or judgments or rantings against outside institutions.
  Still is a writer of constricted lives, valid desperations, and victories that seem small reward for all the patience and hurt they exact; but in his most successful scenes he creates a world whose resonances echo beyond the last word to the fullness of the reader's capacity to understand. His work reflects a compassion, insight, and objectivity remindful of Katherine Anne Porter ("The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "The Downward Path to Wisdom") and of Bernard Malamud ("The Loan," "The Magic Barrel").
  An emotional response is the one quality above all for which Still works. There are no games, no literary or historical allusions, no puns, no symbolism, sentimentality, didacticism, or redundancy. He gives no motives, airs no theories, states no beliefs. He simply sets down the experiences of a few human beings during a season of change in a certain place. And the emotion is present as certainly as the leaf is in the bud. In giving order to "a handful of chaos" Still has created a new and fresh view of a range of mountains seventy million years old and of a people that promise to survive all industrial upheavals.
  THE mines on Little Carr closed in March. Winter had been mild, the snows scant and frost-thin upon the ground. Robins stayed the season through, and sapsuckers came early to drill the black birch beside our house. Though Father had worked in the mines, we did not live in the camps. He owned the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope above Blackjack. There were three of us children running barefoot over the puncheon floors, and since the year's beginning Mother carried a fourth balanced on one hip as she worked over the rusty stove in the shedroom. There were eight in the family to cook for. Two of Father's cousins, Harl and Tibb Logan, came with the closing of the mines and did not go away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about unposed.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: River of Earth
  And when the mines close and the crops fail there is little complaining. They simply pack up and move again, accepting, hoping, laughing to make their misfortune bearable. 
  More than twenty years before the region was labeled a "poverty pocket" and prior to the surprised reactions of experts and government officials to the problems of destitution, as though they had encountered some recent wonder, James Still had presented the heartbreaking account of what it means for a human being to live out his life hungry and cold. His is not a socioeconomist's collection of figures, causes, and possible cures, but the dramatized plight of human beings accepting poverty without accusations or judgments or rantings against outside institutions. 
  Still is a writer of constricted lives, valid desperations, and victories that seem small reward for all the patience and hurt they exact; but in his most successful scenes he creates a world whose resonances echo beyond the last word to the fullness of the reader's capacity to understand. His work reflects a compassion, insight, and objectivity remindful of Katherine Anne Porter ("The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "The Downward Path to Wisdom") and of Bernard Malamud ("The Loan," "The Magic Barrel"). 
  An emotional response is the one quality above all for which Still works. There are no games, no literary or historical allusions, no puns, no symbolism, sentimentality, didacticism, or redundancy. He gives no motives, airs no theories, states no beliefs. He simply sets down the experiences of a few human beings during a season of change in a certain place. And he does it in a manner that is simple and unposed and with the perception and restraint that denote an imagination as honest, as controlled, as the needle of a compass. And the emotion is present as certainly as the leaf is in the bud. In giving order to "a handful of chaos" Still has created a new and fresh view of a range of mountains seventy million years old and of a people that promise to survive all industrial upheavals. 
  THE mines on Little Carr closed in March. Winter had been mild, the snows scant and frost-thin upon the ground. Robins stayed the season through, and sapsuckers came early to drill the black birch beside our house. Though Father had worked in the mines, we did not live in the camps. He owned the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope above Blackjack. There were three of us children running barefoot over the puncheon floors, and since the year's beginning Mother carried a fourth balanced on one hip as she worked over the rusty stove in the shedroom. There were eight in the family to cook for. Two of Father's cousins, Harl and Tibb Logan, came with the closing of the mines and did not go away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' "I hain't a grain hungry," she said.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Bread smells thickened in the fireplace, and I stuck the straw into the ashhill. It came out with a sticky lump on the end. My hunger could hardly wait the slow cooking. I turned my head so Grandma couldn't see me eat the dough from the straw.
  Wind drummed the chimney. A gust caught the oak-knot smoke, blowing it into our eyes. A sift of ashes stirred on the hearth. I tried the bread again, the straw coming out slowly, though clean. I raked a bed of coals closer to the ashhill with the poker.
  Grandma balled hands on her knees, waiting until the smoke thinned and the ashes settled. "Hit was the next day the birds came a-thrashing through the hills," she said. "I was setting in my garden, guarding it agin the crows, when I heard a mighty roaring, like a tide on Troublesome. Boone was in the corn patch, so I never went inside, wanting to get a square look at the birds. I never gave a thought to me being so puny. In a spell they come o'er the ridge, flying low down, a-settling. A passel sot down in my garden and began to eat and scratch. I run up and down hollering, throwing clods and crying. Hit was like trying to scare a hailstorm. The birds worked like ants, now. I run and hollered till I couldn't, then set me on the ground, feeling sick to die.
  The bread was done. I raked it out on the hearth, blowing ashes from the crust. When it was broken the goodness of it filled my eyes and throat. "A pair o' pigeon wings would go good with this bread," I said.
  Grandma looked hard at the bread, then broke a piece for me, taking none for herself. She took the poker and shook the oak-knot fiercely. "I hain't a grain hungry," she said.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Father scoffed. "Hit's printed a feller can catch bull frogs and net butterflies for a living. All foolishness."
  Someone in the kitchen closed the door between the two rooms. Feet passed quick and small over the floors. Father went to the door and stood for a while, his hand on the knob. But he did not go in. He came back to his chair, worried and restless, crossing and uncrossing his legs. "Alpha's so puny we can't go to the burying," he told Uncle Jolly. "Tell Luce and Toll we wanted to come."
  The sleepless hours weighed upon my eyes. I dozed. On awaking, the blackness of the window was tempered with gray. Higher, along the ridgetops, light was growing. It was colder. My legs were bound with stiffness and my breath fogged. Father had tilted his chair, making talk, questioning. "What if this Sawyers girl says no?" he asked Uncle Jolly. A woolly mist curled out of his mouth.
  Uncle Jolly stumbled to the porch, smothering his joy. He clumped into the yard. Father stood again at the kitchen door, grasping the knob, waiting; then he went inside. I heard feet walking, walking. The kitchen fire was being shaken and replenished; the yeasty smell of morning bread hung on a windy draft. I closed my eyes, being near to sleep. I looked at Grandma in the dark of my head where I could see her living face. "Grandma," I spoke, "where have you gone?"
  I waked, trembling with cold, and it was morning. The coffin box had been taken away. The chairs sat empty upon the hearth. I ran outside, and there were only wagon tracks to mark where death had come into our house and gone again. They were shriveled and dim under melting frost. I turned suddenly toward the house, listening. A baby was crying in the far room.