Let Us Build Us a City — Donald Harington

This work brilliantly fuses travel narrative with history and cultural studies -- yet reads like a novel. It's also a love story that is in no way fictional. A fan letter to the author from a woman named Kim starts a correspondence which details research she's conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas.

In the years of rural decline many of these towns dwindled to church, post office, general store, gas station, and a few rundown houses -- but every house has a porch, every porch a rocker, and every rocker an old man or woman with a story.

Kim and Don agree to collaborate on a book -- this one -- creating a unique and enchanting work about towns that will never again be their old selves and towns that never fulfilled the brave dreams of their founders. And at the end of the adventure the author and Kim meet, having learned something of expectation and hope -- and love. With photos and maps.