Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of life, from histories of LGBT life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backwards victims of circumstances. Russo shows that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.