Literature from the U.S. South has long had a chokehold on my imagination. Perhaps it is because they always felt somehow familiar, having grown up in a small rural town that, in many ways, captured the ethos of the South. Stories about family, community, race, class, a sense of place, language, or the hoary ghosts of the past reaching their long fingers into the present that are so prevalent in literature from and about the U.S. South felt like the tales I heard in my own town’s local dinner. I imagine that this experience exists to some degree no matter where you come from, but for me, Southern literature captured part of my imagination and experience that I’ve never quite been able to find elsewhere.
Below are seven books that got me interested and kept me interested in literature from the U.S. South. Some are dark, many are gothic, and all are representative of the great diversity of literature coming out of this most disputed of regions.
Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite authors from the U.S. South. Dark, witty, irreverent, and, at times, horribly prescient, this short story collection provides a window into a mid-twentieth-century South haunted by religion, faux virtue, and violence.
Written from the keen perspective of a young girl named Bone, this semi-autobiographical look at South Carolina in the 1950s takes up some serious themes around girlhood, gender, sexual violence, child abuse, sexuality, and class. I first read this in college, and it has always stuck with me.
The second novel by Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, follows one working-class Black family from Mississippi who prepare for and then experience Hurricane Katrina first-hand. Dealing with themes of race, class, human-animal relationships, familial conflict, and, of course, the devastation wrought by natural disasters and political negligence, Salvage the Bones is, nearly 15 years after its initial publication, still a haunting and telling read.
The Water Dancer was a delightfully surprising read. Set in the pre-Civil War South, the main character, an enslaved mixed-race Black man, is granted a mysterious power that provides him with the tools to escape slavery. This power, triggered by memories of his late mother, argues for the importance of generational memory and ancestry. Both exceptionally grounded in the real while leaning into its surreal elements, The Water Dancer provides a new and provocative vision of a pre-Civil War South.
One of the first novels I read about my current place of habitation, Houston, Texas, that really captured the city as it is today, Lot is a heartrending and evocative illustration of place. Looking at those who live in the in-between places in Houston — the unhoused, queer, Black and Brown people, stray dogs — Lot provides insight into the tethers that tie together communities, family, friends, and even non-humans. Lot is arguably one of my favorite short story collections in the last decade.
I actually first read Truong’s work for a course I was teaching about literature from the U.S. South, and was stunned I hadn’t heard about it sooner. A coming-of-age story written in stream of consciousness from the perspective of Linda Hammerick, the novel moves forward and backward in time, revealing to readers Linda’s childhood growing up in the South, her college years, and her career as an attorney in New York City. The final section of the novel reveals to readers a key part of Linda’s identity that is, up to that point, an unspoken but integral part of her identity as someone from the South.
I recently read this after reading an interview between the Southern Review of Books’ own Jason Christian and Wascom. I was intrigued by the descriptor of the novel as “punk-rock Southern gothic” in a speculative near-future Florida. Civil War is imminent, professional gunfighting is a legit profession, a far-right politician is leading a movement to turn Florida into a white Christian Ethnostate, and the narrator, a young man named Rally, is trying to locate his own identity next to that of his cousin, a woman known as the Governor and for her artificial golden arm, who is fighting back against the ethnostate. The lore is deep here, but the novel is better for it. A wild romp of a read.
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