Where the Line Bleeds (2008) by Jesmyn Ward

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Where the Line Bleeds (2008)

by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Mississippi: 4/18

   Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward would have to be at the very top of any serious list of American authors of literary fiction in the 21st century.  Her presence amidst the detritus of YA and chick-lit titles stands out like a beacon from a proverbial light house of literary fiction.  I checked out the Audiobook because I was wondering if I could seriously tell the difference between an Author with such widely regarded literary merit and the run of the mill titles, I've been suffering through for the past couple years.  Where the Line Bleeds was her first novel, and then she dropped Salvage the Bones four years later- that book won the National Book Award.  She won again in 2017 with Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I read during a period where I was reading all the National Book Award finalists.  It's a good book, obviously, but it didn't spur me to go back and read her other titles.

   I could tell the difference between Ward's prose and the run of the mill stuff on a couple of levels.  First, she was able to turn an otherwise prosaic landscape (the unheralded Mississippi coastline) with real grandeur.  She did this in a couple different ways.  First, she was a close observer of the physical landscape- her descriptions of crack houses and swamp parties sparkle with life.  Second, her ability to depict all five senses marks her out from the pack.   Great writers of literary fiction imbue the reader with a feeling that there is depth beneath the surface of the human activity being depicted, but they also provide a many-splendored surface, pairing stylistic flourishes with economy.   She does all these things in Where the Line Bleeds, which is sure to be my top title from Mississippi and a likely top five for the entire chapter.

Grace (2016) by Natashia Deon

1,001 Novels: A Library of America 

Grace (2016)

by Natashia Deon

Faunsdale, Alabama

Alabama: 13/18

   I probably would have enjoyed Grace more if I had read it outside of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I don't consider myself particularly sensitive to depictions of sexual violence, but it is hard to ignore the presence of sexual violence either explicitly or implied in nearly every book in this chapter.  Grace did stand out in terms of the ambition and literary merit- it is peppered with modernist techniques that make the story much more difficult to follow than your normal life during the antebellum south book.  It was also what you would call "unflinching" which made the frequent sexual violence more squirm inducing.  What is clear to me after this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that getting real about slavery in the American South is really digging into the very worst of humanity.  

  The books set in this part of America- the cotton belt of the deep south, put on display a kind of worst-of-the-worst environment because essentially all of the slaves in this part of the country were ripped out of their existing families in the upper south and sold "down the river," creating a profound double fracture. The fact that these populations were freed and essentially abandoned is one the great cruelties of American history.

  But the literary merit here is undeniable- making this book a top three title for Alabama simply on the basis of artistic ambition.  It's just that this a rough read.

Rot(2025) by Padraig X.Scanlan

 Audiobook Review

Rot (2025)

by Padraig X. Scanlan

   The reviews this week are running in January, but they actually represent the end of 2024.  I spent the entire year listening to this Audiobook with months in between (the library only had one Audiobook copy for the entire system).  I checked it out after last year's visit to Ireland, where I noted locals referring to the "Irish Potato Genocide" rather than the "Irish Potato Famine" as we were all taught in school.   I thought it would be interesting to review the scholarship in this area, and Rot does a good job of summarizing recent scholarship for a general reading audience.  

  I thought I had a good idea of where Scanlan would be headed based on similar arguments I've read in the area of Native American history and the history of the Southern United States.  Like many of the arguments that surround the post-erradication campaign attempts of the United States Government to "Kill the Indian and Save the Man," many of the Governmental policies described here as genocidal (he doesn't actually use that phrase) were extremely poorly thought out attempts to "help" the Irish.  Specifically, to help them become good capitalist members of the British Empire, by eradicating the potato, which the rural Irish used as a hedge against the vagaries of the market economy.

   As Scanlan well demonstrates, the Irish were anything BUT outliers from contemporary market economics, rather they were only two well acquainted with the most rapacious aspects of modern market capitalism courtesy of the complicated system of land rights, which had all the unpredictably of modern stock trading in terms of its impact on the rural proletariat.  The Irish peasantry was also roundly betrayed by their elites, who were all either actual British colonialists or the product of families who were long-time collaborators.  

Dominion (2025) by Adie E. Citchens

 Audiobook Review

Dominion (2025)

by Adie E. Citchens

 I listened to this entire Audiobook thinking it was one of the picks for the Mississippi chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project but lo and behold, came to learn it was not.  It should be- Dominion is a very geographically specific novel about the family of a wealthy and successful small town African American Baptist minister.  There are two narrators, the wife of the minister and the girlfriend of the youngest son of the family, a star football player and secret monster.

  I thought Citchens did a great job of imagining this world- far better than many of the authors on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.  This book would definitely make any revised list I put together.

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Cane River (2001)

by Lalita Tademy

Cane River, Louisiana

Louisiana: 6/28

  Cane River is, geographically speaking, the westernmost title in this entire Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Louisiana is culturally distinct from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi because of greater diversity among the population, notably an enfranchised, property owning and even slave holding elite that co-existed with whites throughout the 18th and 19th century.  "Elite" of course, is a relative term.  At one end of the spectrum there were the cosmopolitans of New Orleans. At the other end there are the families of Cane River, mixed race families with some limited advantages over the local white settlers, but without the protections of big city life.  Tademy lovingly depicts this precarious existence over several generations.

 I checked out this Audiobook because this book actually sounded interesting and it was, but it was still hard to take at times because of the wanton sexual violence that every African American seemingly experience in antebellum America and finds its way into any serious literary account of the time and place.

How the Word is Passed (2022) by Clint Smith

 Audiobook Review

How the Word is Passed (2022)

by Clint Smith

  I highly recommend the Monuments exhibit at MOCA-Geffen in Los Angeles- one of the best museums exhibits I've seen in the past decade.   This exhibit features several "decommissioned" Confederate War memorials (mostly from Baltimore) with companion pieces by contemporary artists.  While we were there, my partner mentioned this book, which I strangely was only barely aware of, despite immersing myself in the literature of the deep south for the past six months.  Smith's method is that of an essayist, each chapter takes him to a different location in the South where he takes a tour, talks to the people who work there and other tourists, and contrasts the opinions of those people with his own and gives it the perspective of his own research as a scholar of the period.

   Every chapter is interesting for different reasons.  Smith is an excellent writer and the entire experience reminded me of a Southern-US focused Teju Cole.  After seeing the exhibit and listening to the book, it's impossible to not see the connection between the two.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if  How the Word is Passed didn't directly inspire Monuments.  The basic thesis of both works is that southern whites have systematically perpetuated ideas that seek obscure and diminish the truths of the experience of slavery.  I love Monuments, and I loved this book, but at the same time it is hard to ignore (as Smith does) the fact that he himself embraces and embodies an academic tradition synonymous with "cultural relativism." 

  Throughout How the Word is Passed Smith performs an interesting double move that saturates the entire book and indeed many of the novels I've read as part of the 1,001 Novels Project which can be best described this way:

1.  Until the Civil Rights movement there was only a limited critique of the Antebellum South AND contemporary conditions in the south.

2.  The Civil Rights movement forced the abandonment/revision of overt, legally sanctioned racisms by the Governments of the South.

3.  The emergence of cultural relativism in American universities allowed scholar to go back and properly diagnose the earlier period and create a comprehensive critique of the Antebellum South and its universe of horrors.

  However, this third point can hardly be said to have penetrated into the hearts and minds of everyday people living in the south, and the idea that Smith can waltz into these places, and act surprised that educated and non-educated Southerners have different ideas is frequently risible.  It's preaching to the converted, is what I'm saying.  But as one of the converted, I found it this book very illuminating.

The Captive (2025) by Kit Burgoyne

 Audiobook Review

The Captive (2025)

by Kit Burgoyne

  Kit Burgoyne is the horror nom de plume for science fiction author Ned Beauman.  I read Beauman's 2022 novel, Venomous Lumpsucker back in 2023 and it inspired a pretty thorough review. Beauman remained in my mind as a solid example of a genre writer with literary fiction reach, so I was interested when I read that he'd launched a horror alter ego for his new novel, The Captive, which  has been described as, "A Rosemay's Baby for the late capitalism period."   In other words, he wrote an A24 movie.  So be it! I'll take an update on Rosemary's Baby any day of the week.  Within the horror genre, I am particularly interested in the detailed depiction of the craft and practice of horror-genre devil worshippers. Devil worship is such an interesting inversion of conventional religious practices, and I like to see how different authors depict the practices of the various versions.  

  Here, Burgoyne/Beauman links the devil to the UK equivalent of the GEO/Wackenhut group- a privately owned corporation that runs quasi-public institutions like prisons, jails and mental hospitals. As someone who visits privately run prisons on the regular, including immigration facilities, I can testify that Beauman's take is a little hysterical.  His merry band of anarchist-terrorists who put the plot into motion seem to have extremely fuzzy ideologies but are firmly committed to putting the plot into motion by concerted criminal action. 

  The Captive was a fun audiobook; I'd recommend it as a good format here.

  I'm thinking Jenny Ortega as the lead.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987) by Fannie Flagg

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)

by Fannie Flagg

Whistle Stop, Alabama (Mobile area)

Alabama: 12/18

   The last geographic cluster of Alabama books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America map is around Mobile- on the Gulf coast in the south of the state.  It's another area I have never visited.  Nor, for that matter, do I have any idea that I ever might be there.  The same can't be said for northern Alabama, easily reachable from Nashville (a place I've been and could go again).   Mobile doesn't have the historic heft of the Birmingham and its important role in the Civil Rights movement.   I didn't get much of a feel for real world Birmingham, since Fried Green Tomatoes is close to being a fantasy novel about some semi-idealized version of the south where decent people actually exist.

  Fried Green Tomatoes mostly reminded me of The Oldest Living Confederate War Widow Tells All, which uses a similar narrative convention (death bed flashbacks from one of the protagonists with an interlocutor trying to figure out confused events of the past.  Widow was published in 1984, which makes me think author Fannie Flagg must have read it.  Unlike Widow, Tomatoes is not 800 pages long.  The central themes, which treat both racial and LGBTQ issues in a sympathetic light, made me laugh, because the attitudes in this book are unlike any in the other 50 plus titles in this chapter.  Here, we've got a small-town Alabama sheriff who is protective of his African American community, and an LGBTQ business owner who isn't afraid to stand up to racists and suffer no consequences from her actions.  That is not the Deep South I've read about up to this point- where the characters in this book would have all been murdered for their behavior.  Maybe it has something to do with Mobile. 

The Pretender (2025) by Jo Harkin

 Audiobook Review

The Pretender (2025)

by Jo Harkin

   The Pretender is a rare 2025 Audiobook listen, written by English author Jo Harkin, one of the cover quotes describes it as "Glorious Exploits meets Wolf Hall" and I agree. Specifically, I agree with the comparison to Glorious Exploits which brought some contemporary characterization into a historical milieu while still keeping things from getting anachronistic.  There's a pot of gold for any writer of literary or historical fiction who can pull off this trick- see the endless attempts by the film industry to recharacterize and repurpose novels from the early 19th century.  Clever stuff, recommended. 

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977) by Mildred D. Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977)

by Mildred D. Taylor

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

  Ran out of Audiobooks in Alabama about one Audiobook in, so it is on to Mississippi and Louisiana, where the pickings are almost but not quite as slim. The rule with Audiobooks in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is no chick lit and no YA titles- everything else, including actual children's books, of which this is one.  This is a good children's book, written before kids were wimps and parents were insane.  Back in the 1970's an African American author could use the n word in a children's book and win Awards, nowadays some libraries won't even carry this title for the same reason.

  Roll of Thunder was a genuinely effective children's book, like something out of the nineteenth century and filled with the unmitigated terror of the "Night Riders" on a community of African Americans in rural Mississippi.  The protagonists is the youngest daughter of a rare family of African American property owners- with the land now in the second generation of the family.  That already makes Mississippi different than Alabama, where some of the book's detail how it was impossible for African American families to even rent, let alone own land in swathes of Alabama.   

  Many times as I listened to this Audiobook I thought about the horror movies of Jordan Peele and the idea that the African American experience in much of America is, in fact, a real-life horror film.  You look at the central family in this book: Property owning farmers, no bad habits and their very existence is an affront to their white neighbors.  These people are literally not allowed to live.  It is a deeply Unamerican environment and I think there is a strong argument that it simply is not.