About Redneck Press

Publisher

Rusty Barnes (he/him) was born in rural Appalachia and has lived near Boston for the last 30 years. He is the founder of Tough, and was the cofounder of Night Train, a prominent literary journal that ran from 2002 through 2015. Among his nine books and four chapbooks are four published novels, which he is most proud of, since it took him till he was forty to complete the first. His latest book is a collection of linked stories called Kraj the Enforcer. His story collection Half Crime will be published by this, his very own Redneck Press, in March 2024.

The novel to the left of this text is his best-known book, Ridgerunner.  Along with its sequel,  The Last Danger, Ridgerunner will be reprinted by Shotgun Honey in early 2024, along with more recently published novels Knuckledragger, Kraj: Stories.

A PublishingManifesto

The great dirty or not so-dirty secret of my past, is that I grew up in the northernmost portion of the Appalachian Regional Commission designated 'Appalachian' area, north-central Pennsylvania. The stereotype, or more properly, the archetype, of the Appalachian region centers around the Kentucky/West Virginia portions of the ARC's designated area, but the economic difficulties and many of the same issues and similarities continued into that Bradford/Tioga county area in Pennsylvania, where I spent the first 24 years of my life. I played in cricks where all the rocks shone orange with runoff, where no fish lived, though the coal industry was dead by the time I was old enough to know what it had been and how it had caused the damage, and the lumber industry gone too, fifty or seventy-five years before. What was left to me and my friends was simply growing up and finding a way out, via the armed forces, via college, via just shitting and getting, if you could, the 'brain-drain' typical of rural Appalachia. You stay and become part of the scenery, or you never go back. Case in point, my father's family has lived, with three or four exceptions, in the same three-county area for 200 years. 

I want to publish here stories and novellas about the rural life I lived for 24 years and still think of as my primary world and motivation. Thirty years later, I feel out of place in my chosen milieu, as a working-class kid who somehow taught in private colleges and edits and writes. I don't have to explain that to anybody who's made the move themselves, but trust me, it's a bitch, and you never recover from it and the subsequent questioning of self and career that inevitably accompanies the process.

I have branched out, though, from the rural, in my own work, to welcome city-fiction. I've lived in a city for the last 30 years, so I finally feel like I can write about it. I welcome the grit, as you've seen, but I would love to publish PI and other crime fiction books. You can read the kind of stories I like to publish in Redneck Press's baby TOUGH.