A collection of short stories by men and women who grew up in the soot and smoke—and now, ruins—of America’s great industrial complexes. The steel corporations were the engines, the dynamos, that set the mill towns going and kept them spinning for decades. You smelled...

The first summer and winter were taken up with the move. He was five. Packing up his things in one house and unpacking his things in another, shopping with the family for a new sofa and kitchen table at Tonnesdatter’s, then Sears, and finally at Kaufmann’s, where his...