Scott Russell Sanders is a local Bloomington, IN novelist and essayist. He is the author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. "Stone Country: Then and Now" is his newest book. 

Quarrying, cutting, and carving limestone has provided work for thousands of people in Indiana for nearly two centuries. Along highways and backroads, the brawny machinery these workers use to finesse the stone, the humpbacked mills where they shape it, and the rails and roads where they ship it dot the landscape. In this new edition of Stone Country, Scott Russell Sanders and Jeffrey A. Wolin talk with the stone workers, explore the quarries and mills, and trample along creeks and railroad spurs uncovering the history of the industry and the people who built it. These new stories and photographs are a biography, not of a person—although it is filled with many portraits of individuals—but of a place. It is an up-close look at a singular point on the planet where the miracles of geology have yielded a special kind of stone, and where landscape, towns, and the people themselves bear its mark.