Quintessential Southern Lit.
Discover the best quintessential Southern literature in our curated book list, featuring iconic works like Cold Mountain, A Parchment of Leaves, and Ava's Man. From powerful fiction by Silas House and Larry Brown to unforgettable memoirs by Rick Bragg and Janisse Ray, explore the heart of the American South through these essential reads.
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A Parchment of Leaves
by Silas House
"In 1917, a Cherokee woman who leaves her community to marry a white man finds herself isolated and discriminated against as she tries to settle in to her new life. By the author of Clay's Quilt"--NoveList.
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Clay's Quilt
by Silas House
From a new voice in Southern literature comes a heart-stirring story of one man's search for family and the people who join him as he shapes a life of his own.
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All Over but the Shoutin'
by Rick Bragg
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times. It is also the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most. But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives—and the country that shaped and nourished them—with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.
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Ava's Man
by Rick Bragg
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm. In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava’s Man is unforgettable.
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The Half-mammals of Dixie
by George Singleton
Presents a collection of short stories that captures the lives of such characters as a boy whose reputation is ruined forever after he stars in a documentary on diagnosing head lice and a lovelorn father who woos his child's third-grade teacher.
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Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
by Janisse Ray
A memoir of a childhood, spend in an isolated Georgia community of Crackers, that grew into a passion to save the vanishing longleaf pine ecocystem in which she was raised.
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Father and Son
by Larry Brown
A classic story of good and evil set in the rural American South of 1968.
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Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Inman, an injured and disillusioned Confederate soldier, embarks on a harrowing journey home to his sweetheart, Ada, who herself is struggling to run the farm left her at her father's sudden death.