OCTOBER 2026 READING

Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Apppalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

published 2026, Simon & Schuster

309 pp,

ISBN 978-1668018057

Book Club Meeting:

October 27, 2026, 7:00 pm

Hosted by: Donna West

Snack provided by: Donna West

Wine provided by: Donna West/Val Ross

Book selected by: Ann Manzano

Accessibility

Finger Lakes Library System

Large Print

Finger Lakes Library System

E-book

Finger Lakes Library System
NY Public Library
Amazon (Kindle)

E-audio book

Finger Lakes Library System
Amazon (Audible)
NY Public Library

About the Author: Stephen Starring Grant

"Stephen Starring Grant is the author of MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home, a memoir that chronicles his year as a rural letter carrier after losing his marketing job during the pandemic.

Steve Grant has spent over twenty-five years as a marketing consultant and behavioral economist, working with Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Prudential, Jaguar Cars, and Burger King. He ran the Applied Behavioral Science Lab at Prudential and received a Gold Lion from Cannes for his brand strategy work.

He served as an industry expert in financial security at the Aspen Institute and led the rebranding effort that transformed the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in Poetry and Fiction, Grant was part of the film collective that created the 1998 indie film THE DELICATE ART OF THE RIFLE.

He lectured as an Adjunct Professor of innovation and consumer behavior for the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.

Born in New Orleans and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he is an Eagle Scout who returned to his hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia, where he lives with his family. He is an avid fly fisherman - and controversially believes that the New River may be the greatest Smallmouth Bass water on the planet."

SOURCE

Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

Kirkus Reviews
"A charming book that's guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS."

"A marketing whiz, waylaid by the pandemic, becomes a rural mailman in this winning memoir.

'I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long,' writes Grant early in his memoir. That route snakes out from Blacksburg, Virginia, one of the most technologically sophisticated cities in the nation; by its end, on unmaintained roads past sad trailer parks and weathered farmhouses, it’s a different world.

Indeed, one of his first customers takes delivery of a sword paid for with his second pandemic check, a replica of 'the blade that smote Sauron.'

Another stop on his route leaves coffee in the mailbox for him in the freezing Appalachian winter, while Grant slugs down Gatorade in the boiling summer and advises cutting it in half with water, 'because it’s actually too salty right out of the bottle.'

That’s not the only bit of wisdom Grant dispenses: 'If you think your letter carrier isn’t keeping a list of who’s naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.' Grant also observes the reality that few delivery people last long in the job: where the average on-the-job annual injury rate is 2.8 for every 100 employees, it’s 7 for postal workers, thanks to dogs, bees, weather, and off-kilter people.

But, Grant adds, there are pleasures to the job, too, from seeing beautiful countryside to doing a public service: 'When I carried the mail I was never just me, but something much larger.'

Along the way, Grant muses about rural poverty, fractious politics, violence, drug abuse, and other issues, but he peppers his prose with funny aperçus: 'It’s always the small dogs that start shit….When the universe arrives at its heat death, there will be nothing left but unread issues of the Economist….Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.'

A charming book that’s guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS."