Homeland and Other Stories was published by Harper & Row in 1989. The twelve stories explore the same territory as Kingsolver’s novels — rural Kentucky, the urban Southwest, the lives of working-class women navigating poverty, motherhood, and the desire for something beyond the circumstances they were born into.
The title story follows a Cherokee great-grandmother’s insistence on visiting her ancestral homeland in the Tennessee mountains, now submerged beneath a TVA reservoir. “Covered Bridges” traces a woman’s return to rural Kentucky after years away. “Islands on the Moon” examines a grandmother, mother, and pregnant daughter negotiating the fraught territory of maternal expectation.
Kingsolver’s short fiction demonstrates the same ear for rural Southern dialect and the same political awareness as her novels, but in compressed form. Several stories deal with the Cherokee heritage that would become central to Pigs in Heaven, and the collection as a whole maps the emotional geography that her longer works explore.
Collecting Homeland and Other Stories
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1989): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $80–$200