Hard Luck and Heavy Rain

“Joseph C. Russo takes us to a world of composing and decomposing characters felt in the air, an ecology of stories ringing out in the suspension of an impasse. We pass over a threshold into a strange time of egrets, refineries, pool tables, flatlands, epiphanies, and cancer. Queer rurality accrues in morning coffee in a circle of lawn chairs at the trailer park. Politics is atmospheric. Texture has a life of its own. Life itself is a material trance.” - Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of The Hundreds

“In this beautiful, funny, abject, brilliant book, Joseph C. Russo delves into Trump’s America from an ethnographic perspective, approaching worlds through granular attention to throwaway moments, embedded voicings, little stories, infusions of ruin and delusion, ways of performing what cannot be said, and how politics get braided into intimacy. Its characters are riveting, and Russo’s ethnographic ear is devastating and haunting. We need more work like this, work that enters into and tracks along in the intensities of a world that is both marginalized and at the center of America.” - Susan Lepselter, author of The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny

"Overall, Hard Luck and Heavy Rain is a compelling book that offers a unique perspective on a region often dismissed as hopeless. Russo walks a delicate line throughout, inviting his readers to take a more nuanced and compassionate view of the residents of Southeast Texas while not presenting them as faultless or their views as harmless. . . . In the end, while Russo deliberately avoids a conclusion and specific recommendations, he succeeds in enhancing our understanding of the United States’ contemporary economic challenges—something we need to find a way forward." - Sara Beth Becker, Economic Anthropology

"An eye-opening, brave work of scholarship." - Robert Cochran, Arkansas Historical Quarterly