1,001 Novels: A Library of America - Vermont

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America - Vermont

1. The Lottery and Other Stories (1948) by Shirley Jackson

2.  October Light (1976) by John Gardner

3. A Day No Pigs Would Die (1972)  by Robert Newton Peck 

4.  Songs in Ordinary Times (1995) by Mary McGary Morris

5.  Midwives (1997) by Chris Bohjalian

6.  Winter People (2014) by Jennifer McMahon

7.  Project x (2004) by Jim Shepard

      

  It's tough to make many observations about the literary state of Vermont based on a sample size of four books.  If you include Vermont in a Northern New England Three Pack with New Hampshire and Maine some themes do start to emerge, but so far as Vermont itself goes the only trend I notice was two YA titles out a total of seven titles, close to a third.  But sample size being small and all, hard to draw any conclusions from 2/7.

     Shirley Jackson is the stand out here, the only A grade canon level author in the group.  Two are YA one offs (Peck/Shepard), three are more-or-less best-seller type authors who are on the border of literature and fiction and John Gardner is an interesting non-canon author who is a kind of "what might have been" situation.   Mostly, Vermont functions in all the books as an extension of the rural parts of Maine and New Hampshire- no city people here, just towns folk and rural farmer types.  No coast to speak of, and no "summer people"- who feature in both Maine and New Hampshire in a prominent way.