Redding Up: More Stories of Furnass

by Richard Snodgrass

In these stories about the fictitious mill town of Furnass, we see characters from the Books of Furnass series seeking closure or meaning from earlier events as they continue to live their lives. In counterpoint to these stories of a mill town struggling to survive without a mill, there are portfolios of photographs taken by the author of the region in the mid-seventies when the mills and valley towns were flourishing. The book concludes with a Coda, an origin story of the time before there was a town here when a chief of the fictional Onagona Indians has to choose between expediency and survival when confronted with the spiritual.

391 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2022

About the author

Richard Snodgrass is the critically acclaimed author of the “Books of Furnass” Series, an eleven-volume set of novels that explores the hopes, disappointments, relationships, and betrayals that make up life in a fictional Western Pennsylvania mill town and its surrounding farmlands from the time of the French and Indian War to modern day. The eleventh book in the series, Torn, will be released on September 17, 2025.

Snodgrass is also the author of There’s Something in the Back Yard, published in 1989 by Viking, and praised by Jack Stephens of the Washington Post Book World who wrote, “Observe this mysterious book and be changed.” Other works by Snodgrass include: An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, published in September of 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm Kitchen Recipes, published in 2013 by Skyhorse and named one of the year’s “best books to get you thinking about food” by the Associated Press.

Snodgrass’s short stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, South Dakota Review, California Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is also a master photographer who has been artist-in-residence at LightWorks (University of Syracuse) and at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Richard Snodgrass lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife Marty and two indomitable female tuxedo cats, raised from feral kittens, named Frankie and Becca.