The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Feast of All Saints (1979)

by Anne Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 19/28

  Like Stephen King, Anne Rice hit career gold with her first published novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976) but there was an eight year gap between it and The Vampire Lestat, the first of 12(!) sequels that I didn't realize were published as late as 2018.   I imagine in the period between 1976 and 1985 Rice was trying to not be pigeonholed as a one trick pony, failed, and then spent the rest of her light pooping out crap to pay for her San Francisco mansion.  The Feast of All Saints reads like Interview but with the free people of color at the center instead of Vampires.  Like the Grandissimes, Rice is writing this book from the perspective of someone who is not herself related to any free people of color.  Her plot is confusing and hard to follow, with at least a half dozen major characters and dozens of minor characters spread out over several interrelated clans. 

  Marcel, the child of a French trader and rescued Haitian woman, yearns to leave New Orleans for the fairer environs of Paris, which lacks the entrenched racism of the nascent American order.  He falls under the spell of Christophe, a writer who has returned to New Orleans after finding literary success abroad. Each male protagonist is surrounded by a suite of females: mothers and sisters, while a ring of predatory white men rings each female character. African American men appear only as slaves.   Like all of the novels set in early 19th century New Orleans, it is impossible to ignore how deadly a place it was before medicine got a grip on yellow fever and malaria.  People died every year in the hundreds.  It was brutal.

Nonesuch (2026) by Francis Spufford

 Audiobook Review

Nonesuch (2026)

by Francis Spufford

    I really enjoyed English author Francis Spufford's last book, Cahokia Jazz, an alt-history work of detective fiction where Native Americans survived and evolved in parallel with Euro-Americans in the Midwest.  I really, really loved the alt-history part of Cahokia Jazz whereas the actual story was a pretty straightforward take on detective fiction.  Here, my preferences swung in the other direction, I wasn't wowed by the scenario, but I found the actual plot and characters interesting.   In Nonesuch, Spufford has moved back to the UK, where he finds his protagonist, Iris Hawkins, staring down the barrel of World War II.  Hawkins is a self-described "Suburban Slut," and a second generation "City" girl, where she works for a stockbroker of the Jewish persuasion and dreams of achieving financial success as a female stockbroker (literally illegal in that time and place.)   

    One night she ditches her date and finds herself at an avant-garde film party where one-reel art films are played over phonographic records.   There, she meets her romantic interest, Geoff, a technician in the nascent television department of the BBC as well as her nemesis, Lady LaLage Cunningham, a British Aristo Fascist.   The plot involves the occult, and an attempt by the British Fascist movement to travel back in time and prevent England from coming into the war against the Nazi's.   Along the way she learns about her feelings and has a decent amount of lit fic sex- Spufford must have been keeping tabs on the romantasy trend, because there was exactly zero sex in Cahokia Jazz.

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life(1880) by George Washington Cable

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)

 by George Washington Cable 

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 18/28

  I thought there would be more 19th century American literature in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America but thus far it hasn't been the case.  The Grandissimes is the only 19th century title in this entire Chapter and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single 19th century book in the prior chapter.   The preface to this edition calls The Grandissimes "the first modern southern novel," thought they can only mean that it is the first modern by novel BY rather than ABOUT the south, since Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and is certainly "about" the south.   The Grandissimes, set in the beginning of the 19th century (before New Orleans was an American city) is named after a local family with a white part and a "F.M.O.C" or "free man of color" part. Cable uses the conventions of 18th century gothic fiction- masked balls, confusing correspondence to heighten the drama of conflict between the white Grandissime and the colored one through the deployment of various proxies- a newly arrived white pharmacist, a creole voodoo priestess.  It is, to be honest, confusing and reminded me again about how fiction influenced by 18th century fiction and early 19th century fiction can feel "post-modern" when it is actually "pre-modern." 

   This is the first 19th century American novel I've read in some time, and I suppose the knock on second-tier semi-classics like this one is that they are too derivative of their inspirations.  Here, it's hard to find anything that doesn't seem directly lifted from Sir Walter Scott.

Pariah and Other Stories (1983) by Joan Williams

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Pariah and Other Stories (1983)

by Joan Williams

Arkabutla, Mississippi

Mississippi: 11/18

   I read this slim volume of short stories sitting in court in a single afternoon, waiting for my matter to be called.   Pariah is geographically distinct because it is the northwestern location within the entire chapter spanning Florida to Louisiana.  Louisiana is further west but the northern border of Louisiana is miles south of the northern border that runs through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  Thus, Arkabutla is closer to Memphis than any large population center in Mississippi. 

  Williams is best known as a protege of William Faulkner- her bare bones Wikipedia page is almost comical in its lack of biographical detail- surely Joan Williams is a candidate for a literary revival?  Perhaps though it's the perspective- like Flannery O'Connor her characters are losers and weirdos- the collection of short stories beginning with three interconnected stories about a mentally challenged person.  There is frequent and unkind use of the n-word- many of these characters can be described as poorer whites who fear and resent the incipient Civil Rights movement, a frequent subject of discussion among the characters.  

 I can see how folks might shy away from reviving stories like these, but I found the obtuseness refreshing, as well as the literary ambition.

The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Awakening (1899)

by Kate Chopin

Grand Isle, Louisiana

Louisiana: 17/28

  No re-reads!  Man, that is a sassy-ass write up below- written during my year of divorce, clearly.  I stand by the analysis, though. 

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (10/17/13)

1,001 Books to Read Before You Die
The Awakening (1899)
by Kate Chopin

  The Awakening by Kate Chopin is often called the American Madame Bovary.  That makes her the fourth and last of the national Bovaries.  Let's see- you've got the original by Flaubert, the Russian Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and the German Effi Briest.  Although The Awakening is the only book of the four to be written by an actual woman there is nothing about it that marks off the presence of a female authorial voice.  The Madame Bovary of the awakening is Edna Pontellier, a bored New Orleans house wife of a wealthy Creole stock market guy.  Edna is unhappy, but she doesn't know why, oh, it must be her husband whom she decides that she no longer loves.

 It is impossible to read any of the quartet of national Bovary novels without reflecting on my own experience.  I have heard the words of Bovary/Karenina/Briest/Pontellier from the mouth of my own wife, and I've been through the marriage therapy sessions that these women lacked, so I am intimately familiar with the thought process that leads a woman from a "happy" marriage to an "unhappy" marriage without any assistance from a disrespectful or malevolent husband.  That is something that all of these protagonist's share in common:  A husband who doesn't "do" anything to merit abandonment.

After reading all four novels I am left with the abiding conviction that all four husbands make the same mistake of treating their wives with respect.  It seems like if all four of these characters had been treated with a bit less respect, they might have stayed married.  Perhaps they would have been unhappy, but they all seem to be pretty unhappy post separation as well, so it hardly seems like an unfair swap.

Ten Seconds (1991) by Louis Edwards

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Ten Seconds (1991)

by Louis Edwards

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 16/28

   Ten Seconds is another familiar tale from the American South, albeit told with some literary ambition. Louis Edwards frames the flashback intensive format through the ten seconds it takes to run a forty-yard sprint, with the narrator reflecting on the poor choices he has made regarding his family, particularly in regard to his wife and young children.   It is well trodden territory for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I did enjoy the depiction of the narrator's commute the petro-chemical plant where he works- here in Southern California "the commute" is a huge part of everyday life, but I can't think of a single book so far- at least since the chapter on New Jersey, where commuting is even something a character does. 

Biloxi (2019) by Mary Miller

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Biloxi (2019)

by Mary Miller

Willow Avenue and Volunteer Park, Biloxi, Mississippi

Mississippi: 10/18

   Louis MacDonald is a recently divorced 63-year-old man, someone who has retired early from an unspecified job/career in anticipation of a substantial inheritance from his deceased father.  As the book opens, MacDonald is at what you would call "loose ends": He adopts a dog under mysterious circumstances from a quasi-neighbor and spends time drinking full sugar Coca-Cola and ignoring warnings from his doctor about his incipient diabetes.  MacDonald is one of those adult American men who doesn't know how to care for himself- he is seemingly unable to cook for himself and mostly relies for sustenance on leftovers his sad-dad apartment compels neighbor brings home from his job cooking at a chain restaurant (are there any other kinds, here in Biloxi, Mississippi.) 

   I've hit a mini streak of his pathetic protagonists inside the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The southeastern Louisiana coast doesn't have a monopoly on the character type, but there is no denying the affinity between the bleak landscape and the bleak lives.  You could put this novel and Frederick Barthelme's Waveland back-to-back and maybe not notice the switch from one book to the next.   The third 1,001 Novels selection from this stretch of coastline is the similarly bleak Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward, which at least had the benefit of solidly depicting the landscape in a way that the protagonists in Biloxi and Waveland seem incapable of doing.  

  

Now I Surrender (2026) by Alvaro Enrique

 Audiobook Review

Now I Surrender (2026)

by Alvaro Enrique

Translated by Natsha Wimmer

 I am a big fan of Mexican author Alvaro Enrique.  I was especially excited for the English language translation of his 2016 novel, Now I Surrender, a combination of multiple novellas taking place in Apacheria.  At times, Now I Surrender reminded me of Roberto Bolaños, 2666, of the corpus of work by Teju Cole and of course, Cormac McCarthy, the forever laurearte of the North American desert Southwest.  The first strand of Now I Surrender is the McCarthy-esque bit- a 19th century Mexican army captain leading a rag-tag bunch of "troops" in search of a kidnapped Mexican woman.  This portion contains the kind of hard to stomach violence that one associates with McCarthy's border trilogy, though the characters have a distinctly Mexican point-of-view, vastly different from McCarthy's affectless Americans.

 The second strand is a writing/rewriting of the events surrounding the capture of Geronimo and the last band of wild Apache Indians.  This section is more like Enrique's other work- a poetic reimagining of very real historical events, with characters who sound like modern people.  

  The final strand is a Teju Cole Esque part about a character who sounds very much like the Author- a Spanish language writer of some repute, living in New York City and struggling with his split Mexican/Spanish identity.  Seeking clarity, he takes his wife and children on a tour of Apacheria, where he muses on the subjects in the other two stands of the book.

  At first, I was a little disappointed, but as the book moved forward, I found myself engaged.  Even though this book was published a decade ago, it still felt fresh, like it could have been published this year. Highly recommend this book and the rest of Enrique's bibliography, he is one of my favorite active writers in any language.

Waveland (2009) by Frederick Barthelme

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Waveland (2009)

by Frederick Barthelme

Waveland, Mississippi

Mississippi: 9/18

  Frederick Barthelme is the younger brother of noted American postmodernist author Donald Barthelme- who showed up in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list a couple times- enough for me to get the drift that he is a difficult writer to actually enjoy, and to be confused by his prose, which is kinda the point with his brand of postmodernism.  Frederick is a different kind of author, call him a minimalist or maybe a pointillist, in that he specializes in the minutiae of everyday life, often written from the perspective who are going through it.

   His protagonist here is a semi-retired, semi-divorced architect doing a whole lot of nothing in coastal Louisiana. Waveland's characters stood out to me because the protagonist, at least, seemed more like a familiar "coastal elite" of literary fiction than a southerner, let alone a Cajun. His ex-wife and the other characters are more southern specific.  Barthelme does a good job evoking the landscape, a combination of the acuity of his protagonist, the fact that he has plenty of time to sit around and look at stuff and the distinctiveness of the landscape itself.  For example, you know when there is a house on stilts that plays into the plot, you know you can only be in a certain region of the country.

 Unlike most of the books from this part of the country there are no horrific, traumatizing incidents involving race, gender, sexuality or some combination of the three.  Low stakes fiction, but a pleasure to read. Maybe I identified a bit too closely with his protagonist. 

Capitalism (2025) by Sven Beckert

 Book Review

Capitalism: A Global History (2025)

by Sven Beckert

  I don't care about money all that much, but I'm obsessed with Capitalism, particularly the history of capitalism.  I'm also a fan of historian Sven Beckert- I really liked his Empire of Cotton, which I read back in 2019.  I also enjoyed his anthology Slavery's Capitalism, which I read in anticipation of the release of this book.   As much as I'm interested in any single subject in world history it is the history of capitalism.  Beckert's effort is laudable and about as good as any book for a general readership which takes in this entire subject in one volume is going to get.

 Much of what Beckert seeks to establish is the global part- recognizing that capitalism is NOT just something that happened during the industrial revolution in northwest Europe.  Beckert identifies an idea of the pre-modern capitalism of "nodes" or islands, of merchant driven capitalism that extend back to the dawn of civilization, in places like Oman, India and Venice.  These were physically small places where capitalism was defined by long-distance trade, and its exponents were merchants. 

 He then moves to what is probably the most important, and least well understood chapter, the era of "War Capitalism" which lay-people know as the colonial period, where western polities (and later, Japan) expanded into the New World and Africa and established a commodity-production model of capitalism that relied heavily on clearing land of indigenous peoples and replacing them with huge, single product plantations powered by slave labor.  Historically, defenders of capitalism sought to distance it from this epoch, but Becker relies on a half-century of scholarship which places War Capitalism and slavery at the center of the world-capitalist experience. 

 The War Capitalist chapter is really the high-point, with Beckert synthesizing a lot of scholarship that may be unfamiliar to a casual reader.  After that, everything gets pretty predictable:  The initial industrial revolution, the second aka "Fordist" industrial revolution, the rise of consumer capitalism, etc.  There wasn't much after the war capitalism chapters that really held my attention but it is hard not to appreciate Beckert's ability to make a dry subject (economic history) come to life for something resembling a general audience.

Can't Quit You, Baby (1988) by Ellen Douglas

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Can't Quit You, Baby (1988)

by Ellen Douglas

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 8/18

  Ellen Douglas was a writer of southern domestic fiction (and the pen name for Josephine Haxton).  According to her 2012 New York Time obituary, her wheelhouse was domestic fiction with post-modern influences (she cited Milan Kundera as a primary influence).  In books like Can't Quit You, Baby, much of the action took place inside the home, with the characters telling each other tales from their past.   In this book, domestic servant Tweet and lady-of-the-house Cornelia, spend the entire time prepping a meal in the kitchen.  Within this framework, they both reminisce, with much of the spoke banter between the two revolving around the fact that Cornelia is both literally and figuratively deaf to Tweet's experience. 

  As the book goes on, the reader learns that Cornelia, too, has had her struggles, including escaping her mother's home to marry her Irish American beau during World War II and a son who marries a somewhat questionable mother-of-two against her wishes.  Tweet's struggles are center stage, particularly her experience with her dying guardian-Grandfather and her dissolute father, who returns only to steal her inheritance. 

The Past is Never (2018) by Tiffany Quay Tyson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Past is Never (2018)

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

Forest, Mississippi

Mississippi: 7/18

   I know when the book jacket copy references Flannery O'Connor and "Southern Gothic" that the book in question will be interesting.  The Past is Never is set in the Delta, but the story stretches to the Florida everglades, making this title a bit of a 1,001 Novels: A Library of America Mississippi/Florida cross-over. Like many of the books from this part of the United States, The Past is Never features three young siblings who are being raised in benevolent neglect in a rural part of the country.  Here, the relevant landscape feature is a forbidden abandoned quarry where the children like to swim during the hot summer.  This being a novel, tragedy strikes when the two older siblings who are the protagonists, misplace their younger sister.  Somewhat suspiciously, their money counterfeiting father disappears around the same time.

   The first half of the book features the brother/sister duo struggling with the repercussions of their sister's abrupt and final disappearance, and then the second half has them off the Florida everglades in search of their father, who "dies" under extremely suspicious circumstances in a Florida motel room after a decade of non-contact.  Everything is fecund and you can practically hear the mosquitos buzzing throughout.  Personally, I didn't find much that was Faulknerian other than the locale, let alone any themes or stylistic writing motifs that reminded me of Flannery O'Connor- it just seems like those are the two reference points for any white southern author with any literary ambition. 

The North Water (2016) by Ian McGuire

 Audiobook Review

The North Water (2016)

by Ian McGuire

   English author Ian McGuire- I just like the work- I read The Abstainer (2020) in 2021, and when I saw he had a new book coming out (White River Crossing), I went back and checked out his 2016 novel, The North Water in Audiobook format on the theory that a novel about an ill-fated whaling journey into the great white north in the 19th century would be more entertaining to listen to than to read.  It certainly was the case for The Abstainer, which featured a panoply of Northern English accents.    McGurie's talent is that he writes historical fiction which feels modern when you read it, with characters who manage to voice philosophical musings while they are starving to death on the arctic icesheet. Compare McGuire to writers like Melville or Joseph Conrad- who express modernist themes but have characters who are moored to their time and place.  McGuire occupies that liminal space between genre and literary fiction that I really favor, and if I can get the Audiobook without waiting, so much the better.

Beasts of the Sea (2023) by Lida Turpeinen

Audiobook Review

Beasts of the Sea (2023)

by Lida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish

by David Hackston

  Beast of the Sea caught my eye simply because it is translated from the Finnish, and this is only the seventh book translated from Finnish to make to this blog (Unknown Soldiers (1954) by Vaino Linna, Crossing (2019)by Pajtim Statovci, Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Year of the Hare (1975)  by Arto Paasilinna, The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson and the The Manila Rope (1957) by Veijo Meri.  Sillanpää is an obscure Nobel Prize winner, and the rest are one-translation wonders.   

  The hook for Beast of the Sea is that it is only loosely a "novel", really more a set of connected novella's/short stories centered around the geographic area where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered and hunted to extinction within a generation of being "discovered" by the west.  So one bit is about the naturalist on the expedition where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered. Another bit is about a Finnish naturalist who came to possess one of the only skeletons of said Steller's Sea Cow after extinction. Then you've got a part with the English wife of a Russian Governor of Alaska (rough gig). Each chapter contains conventional novel stuff with more scientific stuff.   The link that runs through each chapter is just as much the place where the Sea Cow came from as the Cow itself. 

Things We Lost to the Water(2021) by Eric Nguyen

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Things We Lost to the Water (2021)

by Eric Nguyen

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 15/28

   This is the first Vietnamese American author to make it into 1,001 Novels: A Library of American since Ocean Vuong represented Hartford, Connecticut in the New England chapter.  It's hard for me to read ANY book written by a Vietnamese American author without thinking about the work- fictional and non-fictional by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Ocean Vuong though, is the more obvious comparison- so obvious that I wonder if comparing the two writers constitutes a microaggression.   As writers they have very different styles- Vuong being a poet-at-heart who deigns to write fiction and Nguyen being a more conventional type of author.

  Things We Lost to the Water is a very conventional coming-of-age story, sub-category immigrant experience, sub-category New Orleans, sub-category LGBT.  In that sense, I enjoyed the author-protagonist stand-in since he was a rare character from this part of the country that actually cares about books, literature, the life of the mind- something sorely, sorely lacking in the literature of the deep south thus far.   Unlike Nguyen, who has concentrated his gaze at the heart of the South Vietnamese government and military milleu of Southern California, both Nguyen and Vuong write from the edges- Vuong in New England and now Nguyen in the South. Unlike Vuong, who has a rock-solid working-class/underclass background, Nguyen's fictional situation is more complicated- his Dad, who stays in Vietnam is a college professor who falls afoul of the new regime and his Mom is a teacher.  In America, Mom becomes a nail tech, and her children struggle with fitting in.

  Like other Vietnamese American authors, Nguyen captures the feelings of loss, abandonment and anger that track American feelings about the Vietnamese war itself- it is an ambiguous situation, to say the least. 

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025) by Lyndal Roper

 Audiobook Review

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025)

by Lyndal Roper

    Billed as "the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation," Summe of Fire and Blood delivers on the promise, bringing the English language historiography of this poorly understood episode in early modern German history into the present.  It was also a great Audiobook snag- the kind of book I'm really looking for in the Libby app.  The problem with being interested in a subject like "Early Modern German history" is primarily that most of it is written in German.  What is written in English is always going to be heavily weighted towards the academic//specialist market.   I thought going in that this was a German language translation, but no, it is apparently true that the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation was written English.

   The use of the 'German Peasants War' (instead of German Peasants Revolt, which is what I grew up with) should tell you about the perspective of the author- it's very James Scott/David Graeber, looking at things from the bottom up and trying to tell the story of people who weren't well educated and didn't write everything down.   Roper goes hard on the origins, motives and the heady days when various bands of roving peasants were able to sack unguarded Monasteries and bully townsfolk into submission.  They were benefited from the generally chaotic political situation in German speaking areas- polities were split between conventional nobility, church-run states and independent towns. 

  The ruling authorities didn't seem to be particularly aware that such a thing as a peasant revolt on a large-scale was even possible.   Of course, gradually the nobility got their act together and when it finally came to peasant armies vs. the military of the early modern era, the peasants got crushed.  The payback was brutal- which Roper covers but doesn't really dwell upon.   Surely there is a Foucauldian take that would emphasis the payback portion over the war itself.

Strip Tease (1993) by Carl Hiaasen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Striptease (1993)

by Carl Hiaasen

Florida: 2/23

   It's hard not to compare Carl Hiaasen with Elmore Leonard- both blend crime fiction with humor and they both enjoy a Florida setting for their books. Strip Tease got a movie version with peak Demi Moore and not-peak Burt Reynolds.  It's mostly been forgotten but thanks to Rotten Tomatoes I can tell you that it has an 11/24 critics/audience split, which is just about as low as you can go for a mass-market R-rated film.   After taking a couple states off from Audiobooks, I'm back into them for Florida because of the number of crime-fiction//detective fiction titles, favorite genres for Audiobook editions.   At 15 hours (464 pages in book format), Striptease is almost unbelievably long for a work of crime-fiction.  It almost amazingly manages to stay in PG13 territory despite large parts of the book taking place inside a strip club and a plot involving several murders.

  Erin Grant is a classic "stripper with a heart of gold," working the exotic dancing gig so she can pay off her lawyer while she is battles her criminal ex for custody of their young daughter.   Besides the length, Striptease was a relief to listen to after months of downtrodden poor people living in the rural deep south. 

Glass House (1994) by Christine Wiltz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Glass House (1994)

by Christine Wiltz

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 14/28

  HALF WAY THROUGH LOUISIANA. Chug-chug that train be moving. I am deep into New Orleans.  New Orleans and environs makes up more than half of the Louisiana chapter, which sounds right to me.  Interesting literary subjects of Louisiana being 1) New Orleans: It's places and peoples and 2) Cajun/Bayou country.  The rest is just plantation country with more mixed-race people in positions of power.   Wiltz is another one of these roughly contemporary women writers that editor Susan Straight favors in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Wiltz has one best-seller, about the "last madam" of New Orleans.  She's also got a handful of genre titles (The Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery Series, 1-III).  Finally, there is Glass House, a conventional 1990's era "city novel" centered around the experience of urban living during the fraught decades between the 1970's and 2000's. Inevitably, these books are written from a white perspective, with African American's showing up in sympathetic supporting roles that are often fraught with ambiguity. 

  Here, the protagonist is a newly single woman moving back to New Orleans to inherit her spinster Aunt's rickety old mansion.  She is still coping with the experience of having her parents murdered by an African American teen inside their Mom n Pop grocery store- classic 80's/90's issue book murder right there.  She reconnects with an old flame struggling with his own set of issues, and the darkly charismatic contractor/local drug kingpin who is also the son of her deceased Aunt's housekeeper-for-life. Wiltz casts a sympathetic eye on her literary version of an inner-city drug kingpin, mostly we hear about his attempts to clean up the projects he calls home and he and his henchman do not engage in any criminal activity in the pages of this book.

   

Set in Motion by Valerie Martin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Set in Motion (1978)

by Valerie Martin

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 13/28

  Set in Motion is a debut novel by Valerie Martin, an author who has published steadily if intermittently over the decades (two novels in the 70s, one in the 80s, three in the 90s, three in the oughts, one in the '10s and two this decade.  Her career highlights in terms of sales are Mary Reilly, her rework of Frankenstein, which landed a movie version and Property- which won the Orange Prize (Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2004.  I think I actually saw the Mary Reilly movie when it was released.   

 Set in Motion felt like a predecessor of sad girl lit, or rather an originator of the genre.  Sad Girl lit (of which I am a fan) features protagonists who are young-ish, though always grappling with issues surrounding mortality, they are not married, they do not have children, they may or may not have a job, they are prone to fits of emotion triggered by unusual and/or disturbing events.  The protagonist of Set in Motion fits all these descriptors.   She works for the County Welfare office vetting applicants for food-stampes.  She has a bartender boyfriend who casually shoots drugs into his veins (Pre Aids!!!!).  She has sex with the fiancé of her friend in a manner that borders on a contemporary description of sexual assault.

What is not to love?  I also enjoyed the descriptions of New Orleans in the mid 1970's, which were a nadir for urban areas all over the United States.  The sense of urban despair was palpable in this era. Love it.

Yellow Jack (1999) by Josh Russell

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/28

    Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have  a Wikipedia page.  He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University.   I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy.  I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.

   Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio.  Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever.   Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig.  Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane.  I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting. 

The Book of I (2025) by David Greig

 Audiobook Review

The Book of I (2025)

by David Greig

   The Book of I is a fun, short novel out of Scotland set in the Middle Ages in the aftermath of a Viking raid of a British Church.  The Vikings murder everyone except a young apprentice who hides in the latrine and the wife of the blacksmith, who escapes by rendering her attacker unconscious with a glass of extremely strong mead.  So strong that his compatriots give him a half-ass burial and depart, leaving him for dead.  The remnant Viking wakes up the following day and has to figure out his next move.  It is low stakes fiction with a couple episodes of extremely brutal violence.  Very short.  I love books set in the Middle Ages that aren't historical fiction or fantasy, just literary fiction set in the past.  This is one of those books.

The Hard Blue Sky (1958) by Shirley Grau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

  I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested.  That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau.  I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990.  Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest.  I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel.  Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that. 

 I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits.  She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003.   The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter. 

  It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries.  Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's.   The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country:  No one gets rapes.  No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason.  No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan. 

1,001 Novels, A Library of America: Georgia

 1,001 Novels: Georgia

     I had high hopes for literary Georgia, particularly in the context of the other states in this chapter, but I was mostly disappointed.   As has now become a recognizable pattern, the older books were more interesting.  In fact, generally speaking the more recently a book has been published, the less likely I am to enjoy it.  That probably relates directly to the fact that almost all of the YA titles and chick-lit titles are of recent vintage and those are the two categories I enjoy the least.  Georgia is also the first state where I started limiting my exposure to Audiobooks in favor of checking out the hard copies from the library.  Again, this probably relates directly to the fact that YA and chick-lit titles published in the past 15 years are the MOST likely to have Audiobooks available in the public library.  One trend that begins in Georgia and has continued throughout the entire chapter is a lack of candor/realism about interracial relationships (besides those of masters raping slaving)- which surely must have existed throughout history.  I don't believe a single volume here could be described as an interracial love-story.

Published 4/15/25

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

by Alice Walker

Eaton, Georgia

Georgia: 1/24

   I started the next two chapters of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America at once.  Chapter 4 is Mountain Home & Hollows, Smokies & Ozarks and it contains Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.   The Third Life of Grange Copeland is the first book from Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts and it contains books from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.   My sense is that Pennsylvania would have been a better fit in either the chapter with New York/New Jersey or the last chapter next to Viriginia, Maryland and DC but I haven't found a single interesting book yet in the Pennsylvania chapter and it is really slowing me down.

   Chapter 5, on the other hand, seems very promising, and more geographically aligned with the original sweep down the Atlantic coast that the first three Chapters seemed to promise.  I think I'll abandon Chapter 4 and do Chapter 5 first, then come back to 4.  

  Anyway, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was great- very dark but really good, and the first novel by Pultizer Prize winner Alice Walker.  The writing in Grange still seems fresh today- maybe more so today than it was back then.   Alice Walker is no stranger to the pages of this blog.  I read The Temple of My Familiar (1989) back in June of 2017- a book that was in and then out of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   Of course, The Color Purple is a drop-dead banger- also read that back in 2017 as part of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   I guess maybe Walker isn't considered to be as sophisticated as Toni Morrison, or maybe she is just a victim of The Color Purple's cultural success.  

 Unlike The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar is a historical novel served straight up with little deviation from a consistent timeline and narrative perspective.  What's amazing about Grange Copeland is that it almost seems like they are living in the 19th century all the way up until voting rights activists make an appearance.  Grange Copeland was also another example of Walker's theme of a deep and absolute hatred between black and white people, which I've noticed in her other books. 

Published 4/23/25

Dear Martin (2017)

by Nic Stone

Westbrook Academy, 

401 Lewis Braselton Road, Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia: 2/24

   Dear Martin is another YA title, by far my least favorite category in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   This book is a good example of what I find so unlikeable about the whole category:  It's a book about a African-American high school student who is on scholarship at a prestigious Atlanta-area boarding school.   He has to deal with normal prep school kid stuff, then about 100 pages in, his best friend gets shot by an off-duty cop at a traffic intersection.  Then, of course, you get another hundred pages of him dealing with his emotions about the shooting.

 Despite this extremely adult subject, the rest of the book is written like the author is trying to PROTECT her audience from every other adult subject.  I.E.: Not one curse word, not one act of adult sexuality beyond holding hands and light kissing and no violence.  If you are going to write a novel about a teen being murdered in cold blood by an off-duty cop, doesn't the audience deserve the rest of adulthood?  According to the conventions of YA fiction, they do not.  Thus, it is a universe of books about rape without any sex, about murder without any violence and about complex emotions without complex characters.

Published 4/30/25

Sounder (1969)

by William H. Armstrong

Bartow County, Georgia

Georgia: 3/24

  I guess it isn't so hard to imagine at time when a book that uses the "n" word like a comma could not only be a children's book but also a prize winning children's book, is as the case with Sounder, about the son of share-cropper who is hauled off to a Georgia prison after he is accused of stealing a ham to feed his impoverished family.  Sounder is just a slip of a book, 116 pages, so it had that going for it, and also the fact that it wasn't a YA issue based novel published in the last decade, which are truly the most insufferable titles in the 1,001 Novels list. 

Published 5/5/25

The Atlas of Reds and Blues (2019)

by Devi S. Laskar

Roswell Road and Johnson Ferry Road, Marietta, Georgia

Georgia: 4/24

   The Atlas of Reds and Blues is yet another novel on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that is focused on the police shooting an innocent person for little or no reason.  I think I might be up to a half-dozen books with some variant of this plot out of the 200 novels I've read from this list.  So we are talking about 3 or 4 percent of this Library of America centering around police shootings of innocent citizens.  Here, the victim is the narrator, a Bengali-American woman living in suburban Georgia.  She is a Mom of three, she holds down a part-time "Mommy track" job at her local newspaper and her husband is away on business almost always.  The story is told in flashback perspective, which made it refreshing in a literary merit kind of way. 

  Unfortunately, her experience doesn't add much to the tapestry of American Lit this project represents.   This narrator is America, through and through, other than her complaining about the way she is treated by white people in suburban Georgia, you wouldn't even know she was Bengali-American.  The open, thoughtless racism she recounts had be checking the publication date to make sure I was reading something contemporary and not from the 1970's (though some of the racism was from the girlhood of this narrator.)

   And not specific to this book but to all of the narratives that involve people being shot by the cops.  Look, I've worked in criminal justice for my entire career. I am nothing is not empathetic to innocent victims of police brutality but what consistently amazes me about these narrative, fictional and real life, is that the victims never seem to understand what the Cops are thinking about before they shoot.   Like, don't you know it's a bad idea to make sudden movements and/or generally disregard what Cops are asking you to do, especially when they raise their voices?  People should have some awareness of how law enforcement reacts in stressful environments and try not to do those things.

Published 5/7/25

The Darkest Child (2005)

by Delores Phillips

Cassville, Georgia

Georgia 5/24

   The Darkest Child is a real cabinet of horrors, about a light-skinned African American prostitute and her brood of 10 children, written from the perspective of one of the daughters.  It is a one-off by an author who never wrote another novel, I'm assuming based on that fact, that this was a thinly veiled work of auto-fiction.  If it wasn't, it is an incredibly fucked up work of imagination, if only because large portions of the plot revolve around the Mom forcing her various, very underage daughters, including the narrator, into acts of prostitution with men from the town.  Mom is, as one would expect, both mentally ill and a substance abuser- she is frequently depicted clawing invisible bugs from her face in times of distress.

   Anyway. I thought The Darkest Child was dark, indeed.

Published 5/8/25

Crossing Ebenezer Creek (2017)

by Tanya Bolden

Ebenezer Creek, Georgia

Georgia: 6/24

  Crossing Ebenezer Creek is a YA novel based on a horrific real-life event during Sherman's March to Georgia during the Civil War.  Basically, a corps commander under General Sherman, ironically named Jefferson C. Davis, destroyed a pontoon bridge that was crossing Ebenezer Creek in Georgia, allegedly because he was concerned about Confederate soldiers.  The destruction of the bridge stranded hundreds of freed slaves who were following the Union army on the wrong side of the river, and many (tens? hundreds?) drowned, those who remained on the far bank when the Confederates arrived were either killed or re-enslaved. 

   Pretty heavy subject for a YA novel, amiright?  But basically, the horror only happens at the end, and the rest of it is just a YA book written from the perspective of a freed slave following Sherman's army to Atlanta, so it gives a good sense of that experience, and it was interesting to learn about this little known historical atrocity in Civil War era Georgia- perpetrated by the Good Guys, no less!

Published 5/9/25

Bull Mountain (2015)

by Brian Panowich

Dahlonega, Georgia

Georgia: 7/24

   Brian Panowich had the audacity to open his debut novel- a genre thriller/noir, with a quote from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  I think I actually gasped when I heard it on the very decent Audiobook.  Of course, no serious author influenced by Cormac McCarthy would open their book with a quote from a Cormac McCarthy novel- it's ridiculous.  For a genre writer to do it, on the other hand, certainly telegraphs a literary level of ambition.  I'm not a huge detective fiction/regional noir guy outside of the Coen Brothers, but in the context of the 1,001 Novels project I love the detective fiction/noir titles and seek them out in Audiobook form.  

   To the author's credit there are some genuinely shocking passages that do, indeed, evoke some of Cormac McCarthy's roughest moments.  There's also some troubling content that seems positively retro by the "trigger warning" standards of contemporary authorial license to depict trauma in the context of genre fiction.  I can't really get into it without spoiling the major plot reveal, which is the only twist on a conventional shoot em up double cross type scenario involving a rural crime family which dominates the titular Bull Mountain, where they have evolved from moonshine to weed to meth over the course of three generations.  Along the way they have made common cause with a Jacksonville motorcycle gang with a sideline on what we would today call "ghost guns."  Enter a mysterious DEA agent with a dark secret, and you've got a book that won the International Thrillers Award for best debut.

Published 5/14/25

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts(2015)

by Tiya Miles

Diamon Hill, Georgia

Georgia: 8/24

  The subtitle, A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, made it hard to take The Cherokee Rose seriously, and there is no mistake that is a work of fiction written by a historian, but I can see why editor Susan Straight would pick it because it talks about a little mentioned group: people with mixed African American and Native American lineage.  As recounted by this book (and something I knew independently before reading this book, but presumably something the "average" reader would be learning for the first time by reading this book), the Cherokee tribe had gone a long way to assimilation before they were forced off their developed lands in the southeast and forced west at gun point.

  The conventional whoa-is-me narrative surrounding the trail of tears does a particular disservice to the Cherokee nation by focusing on the least fortunate among them.  Wealthy landowners, often of mixed Cherokee/white heritage (but identifying as Cherokee) were able to relocate with their possessions, including slaves, intact.    After the removal, some African American slaves with mixed parentage were left behind for various reasons, and then the convention became to identify as wholly African American.  Finally, in the 20th century, there was a double reckoning, first among the remaining Cherokee people in Oklahoma, who had taken affirmative steps to disenfranchise those of mixed African America/Cherokee blood AND by African Americans in the Southeast who "rediscovered" their native roots in the 20th and 21st century.

  Miles awkwardly accommodates all these experiences in the context of a novel about a wealthy but frivilous African American woman from Atlanta with "mixed roots" who buys the plantation of a famous Cherokee landowner who left as part of the removal process.  There, she reconnects with a childhood friend with her own racial identity issues and a Cherokee journalist who mixed racial identity.  There is also, yes, a ghost, and an appropriately menacing white local.  Besides the very real and interesting historical perspectives, The Cherokee Rose is basically an LGBT friendly Hallmark movie plot.

Published 6/19/25

Kira-Kira (2004)

by Cynthia Kadohata

Chesterfield, Georgia

Georgia: 9/24

   Kira-Kira is a YA book about the experiences of a Japanese-immigrant family living and working in rural Georgia.  In some ways Kira-Kira is different than the vast amount of immigrant struggle narratives in the 1,001 Books project, in that the family here works hard and doesn't spend the entire book complaining about how hard it is to be an immigrant in America, which, if you take the books in this project as the sample-set, constitutes about 90% of the immigrant experience.   It is similar in that, like other books told from the perspective of a young child, the protagonist doesn't go anywhere or do anything for the most part, just sits around and thinks about her family circumstances.    The benefit of that approach in the context of this particular project is that the narrator in these situations has plenty of time to slowly meander through whatever American setting is involved.  Here, it's rural Georgia, which is on no one's list of top places to visit.   At least the racism and discrimination experienced by this Japanese immigrant family is leavened by their unfamiliarity to locals.  

Published 6/20/25

The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) 

by Honore Jeffers 

Eatonton, Georgia

Georgia 10/24

  I love a writer with some ambition, even if I don't love the book.  That's the case here with The Love Songs of WEB Dubois, a debut novel with some gusto written by author/professor Honore Jeffers.  It would be fair to call this book "over-stuffed" in that it covers multiple generations (and multiple characters within each generation) of a mixed-race but basically African-American family that has done well in 19th and 20th century Georgia without getting into any trouble.   The main protagonist is Ailey Pearl Garfield, one of three sisters and the daughter of a medical doctor and his wife.   She is pretty clearly a stand-in for the author herself, as her experiences and physical description mirror that of the author. 

 

  At 816 pages, the plot resembles something like a 19th century Russian novel written by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but the subject matter is distinctly modern, with a strong current of child-sexual abuse and its consequences running through the family from start to finish.  I thought The Love Songs of WEB Dubois wasn't perfect, but it was interesting, and it will certainly be a top 5 book from Georgia and top 10 for the Chapter (Georgia/Florida/Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi). 

Published 6/26/25

Gold Diggers (2020)
by Sanjena Sathian

1400 Dunwoody Village Pkwy SUITE #1406

 Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia 11/24

    You'd think there would be more novels written by the sons and daughters of the Indian diaspora in America but one gets the sense that writing fiction is secondary to becoming a doctor, scientist or venture capitalist. The post World War II South Asian immigrants to the United States mostly arrived as graduate students in hard-science/technical subjects- they had top degrees from elite Indian universities.  There's a much smaller subset of small-business owning immigrants who were fleeing turmoil- your NYC cabbies and gas station owners, but mostly the South Asian experience in the US has been small families: Dad, Mom and one or two kids.  Dad works as a scientist or doctor or in computers, Mom stays at home or has some kind of home business.  Kids are under intense pressure to do well.  

   In that regard, what must be mildly embarrassing for Sathian's own parents (she went to Yale for undergraduate and then went to, sigh, the Iowa Writer's Workshop), is great for readers.  Sathian's magical realist/coming of age drama is a rare depiction of the inner lives of two families of reasonably well off Indian American immigrants living in suburban Atlanta.  Sathian's protagonist is feckless male high school student who moons over his more successful neighbor-girl, also Indian American.  One night he stumbles over her neighbor's secret:  Her mom is creating a drink out of stolen gold as a way to harness the ambitions of others.   Sathian goes light on the lore- I sense the hand of the market at work, but that doesn't detract from a lively tale. 

  I could actually identify somewhat with these characters- some of the action takes place in the Bay Area and some of Sathian's high school portraits reminds me of Indian American girls who went to my own, highly selective high school in Oakland.   I was glad to get this window into a world that had always seemed opaque to me as a high school/college/law school student.

Published 8/6/25

Jubilee (1966) 

by Margaret Walker

Lee County, Georgia

Georgia: 12/24

  Almost half-way through Georgia, and it has been a bit of a slog.   This is the last Audiobook- it's all reading hard copies of books without Audio options, YA titles and coming-of-age books from here on out.  Jubilee is sure to end up in my top five for this state simply because it wasn't written in the past decade from the perspective of an adolescent. Vyry is the iconic protagonist and frequent narrator, she is born a slave, and lives through the Civil War and aftermath as she tries to forge a destiny as a newly emancipated woman.  I thought the Ante-Bellum chapters were particularly interesting, and by that I mean "savage" because I simply can't get over the cruelty of the ante-bellum slavery system.  Of course, all American slavery was an abomination, but there were better or worse situation, and the late-period, plantation based cotton growing economy of the deep south was the worst of them all.

   The chapters on reconstruction are also interesting, giving the account of a newly freed African American family of some means, relatively speaking, and their struggle to simply exist in a world where they were surrounded by white supremacy. 

Published 8/21/25

Appalache Red (1978) 

by Raymond Andrews

Muskhogean County, Georgia

Georgia (13/24)

     This is the half-way point for the Georgia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Currently I'm reading around the south of Georgia.  Muskhogean county is closer to Tallahassee, Florida than Atlanta by hundreds of miles.   This southern part of Georgia contains peach and pecan trees and swamps as well.  I enjoyed Appalache Red, the first of a four-part series about the goings-on in this part of Georgia.  It's more about the town than the eponymous Red, a Caucasian looking, African-American Entrepreneur who manages to turn a humble black-owned diner into a sprawling sin-embracing bar and casino.   I like the novels from the south that don't sugar-coat the cruelty and violence of this part of the world, and Red fits that bill, with plenty of rough talk and triggering behavior that probably explains why this book, and the author, are mostly forgotten today.  It even says that it won an award: The James Baldwin Prize, that the internet says doesn't even exist.

Published 8/25/25

Gone With the Wind (1936)

by Margaret Mitchell

Clayton County, Georgia

Georgia: 15/24

  I read Gone With the Wind back in 2015. I considered listening to an Audiobook version but decided against it. 

Published 1/30/15
Gone with the Wind (1936)
by Margaret Mitchell

   Gone with the Wind is a brick, first of all.  The hard back version I checked out from the San Diego Public Library was full 8.5 x 11 dimensions and close to a thousand pages.  A thousand pages! Gone with the Wind is both a top ten novel and film in terms of popularity for those art forms. Gone with the Wind was the first and only novel that Margaret Mitchell wrote. In 2015, more people are familiar with the 1939 film but the book has sold 30 million copies.  It's the second most popular novel behind the Bible with American audiences.

  Make no mistake- Gone with the Wind is racist as HELL.  It is UNBELIEVABLE how virulently racist Gone with the Wind is.  Annnddd.... even though Gone with the Wind is written about the 19th century, it was published in 1936 and everyone LOVED it.  I don't know that GwtW is defensible in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin- a book written during the 19th century by an ardent abolitionist.

  In terms of literary antecedents, Scarlett O'Hara most resembles Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.  The amount of literary merit one accords to GwtW is likely to tie closely to ones opinion about the literary merit of Vanity Fair.  If you haven't read Vanity Fair, you should probably read that book before you read this book.

Published 8/22/25

Silver Sparrow (2011)

by Tayari Jones

Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia: 14/24

  Tayari Jones had a breakout hit in 2018 with her novel, An American Marriage, which was an Oprah's book club selection, a sales hit and a literary prize award winner.  I read it when it was released- a good example of a book that I would only read based on the attention of people like Oprah and the Prize Committee's, i.e. not a subject matter (race based injustice in the criminal justice system in the south) that I would seek out given my day job as a criminal defense attorney.   But I did read it, and I thought it was a well-written book.   Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America did not select An American Marriage to represent Jones, but rather picked her third novel, Silver Sparrow, about the experience of two children growing up with a bigamist father.  

   I know Jones is a good writer, so I wasn't dreading Silver Sparrow the way I might have been, in light of the number of novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that stick to the viewpoint of pre-adolsecent children who are stuck in a shitty living situation and never go anywhere or do anything while getting abused by their family members.  No one gets physically or sexually abused here, but the psychic scars of both families are front and center.  

   Like many of the novels that deal exclusively with family issues, I was left wondering why people bother with having kids and relationships if it is just going to bring them misery.  I know the answer: because every human being thinks things will work out for THEM.  Here, the Mom of the side family is particularly vexing as she copes with a situation that she walked into with eyes wide open.   Girl, I wanted to scream, don't do it.  

Published 9/3/25

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) 

by Flannery O’Connor

Milledgeville, Georgia

Georgia: 16/24

   Flannery O'Connor would be one of a handful of authors from this chapter that I would group with "best American authors."  Faulkner, of course, he's the going-away number one. Elmore Leonard representing Florida.   Percy Walker from Louisiana and Flannery O'Connor in Georgia.  Really, it's only Alabama without a single top-flight writer.  I'm pretty sure I read Flannery O'Connor in an American Lit class in college.  In 2013 I watched the John Huston movie Wise Blood, based on her novel- that movie is so, so good. Really underrated/forgotten. Then in 2015 I read the novel and her other novel, and in 2016, this book.

  More so than Faulkner, O'Connor is the beating heart of "Southern Gothic."  Compared to Faulkner, she is easier to enjoy, the literary equivalent of the critic-directors of the French New Wave.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is like the last apostle of the high-modernist/modernism-for-modernism's sake of Joyce and Proust.

Published 6/12/16
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
by Flannery O'Connor

    The genre of literature known as "Southern Gothic" is essentially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.   A major difference between Southern and other iterations of literature known as Gothic is the absence of the supernatural as a major motif.  Instead, "Gothic" in the context of southern literature refers to quirky characters and dark plots.   Everything That Rises Must Converge was the last book published by O'Connor before she died of Lupus at 46.

  Everything That Rises Must Converge is a group of short stories, nine in total, six of which were published in various publications prior to their collection.  The characters and themes are familiar: racist mother's, religious fanatics, disappointing sons, class and race conflict.  The pairing of a disaffected, failed, intellectual son and an elderly, widowed mother reoccurs in multiple stories.  This is also a frequent dynamic in the work of William Faulkner, and it is a combination that foreshadows the dynamic between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring for decades to come.

  Flannery O'Connor was herself no hipster, she was a practicing Catholic and remained so until her untimely death.  Her appeal to hipsters is a combination of a little bit of the dead-before-their-time rock-star, a little bit of the consanguinity between her concerns and the concerns of 1960's youth culture and a little bit of the darkness and weirdness of her vision, which spread so far, particularly in the worlds of film and tv to the point where her influence isn't cited.   Whether cited or not, her influence on the artistic concept of "weird small town America" can be traced back to her work.  For example, it's hard to imagine David Lynch or Tom Waits without Flannery O'Connor.

  

Published 9/11/25

The Member of the Wedding (1946)

by Carson McCullers

Columbus, Georgia

Georgia 18/24

  Mildly surprised that this is Carson McCullers first appearance on this blog.  I would have thought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would have been something I'd read at one point or another.  Alas, here we are.  I was unaware until after I read her Wikipedia page just now that McCullers was closeted lgbt during her life- she got married, unhappily, and suffered from many of the classic symptoms of mid-century American closeted queendom.   It's impossible to read McCullers without thinking of O'Connor- on the actual, literal 1,001 Novels map they are about 120 miles apart from one another.  If you wanted to map Southern Gothic, I think it would encompass the north-central parts of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Move too far north, and it's Appalachian goth, too far south and it's either N'awlins or the swamps of Florida- both with gothic aspects in those right but not *real* Southern Gothic.

   If you look at her Amazon product page, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the clearly canonical pick, making this an selection of editor Susan Straight making an "insider" pick for a well-known writer.  This will probably be enough impetus to get me to track down a library Audiobook of Hunter, since, in my heart I know I am a southern Gothic gentleman. 

Published 9/16/25

Baby of the Family (1989)

by Tina McElroy Ansa

Macon, Georgia

Georgia: 19/24

  I guess this would be a minor classic/candidate for revival type pick by African American author Tina McElroy Ansa, it has many of the conventions the reader associates with the magical realist, African American writers of the south.  This plot involves a little girl who can talk to ghosts.  At least this particular southern African American family isn't desperately poor and riddled with ptsd and trauma.  The ghosts the little girl speaks with certainly are though.

Published 10/22/25

The Wind Done Gone (2001)

by Alice Randall

Clayton County, Georgia

Georgia: 20/24

   I'm looking forward to closing out Georgia and the other states in this chapter- so much poverty, racism and abuse between family members. The more titles I read from this portion of the United States, the more aware I am of the role sexual violence very explicitly played in the social development of this state. One theme that recurs so frequently in this chapter that it has become repetitive is the ability of a white man to force a black woman to have sex with him without her consent.  There is also a less frequent but just as strongly expressed principle that any proof of sex between a white woman and a black man is certain to result in the extra-judicial torture and murder of SOME perceived offender- not necessarily the right person.

  The Wind Done Gone is a riff on Gone With the Wind- a narrative told from the perspective of Scarlett O'Hara's mixed-race sister.   Much of it takes place in the heady atmosphere of Reconstruction Washington DC, a period when the white political class was disenfranchised and a temporary political class, including African American and mixed-race people, replaced them in the national government.

   It is described as a parody/satire, but if that is the case, I didn't get it.  To me it read as a comic novel about the nuances of racial identity in reconstruction era America. 

Published 10/28/25

Welcome to Braggsville (2015)

by T. Geronimo Johnson

Braggsville, Georgia

Georgia: 21/24

   It took me 3 attempts to complete Welcome to Braggsville, which is putatively a satire/comic novel about the misadventures of four Berkely undergraduates who return to the small southern town where one of them (white) was raised to stage a performative protest at the yearly Confederate Day's Re-Enactment festival.  First, I checked out the Audiobook, which was insufferable.   Then, I checked out the E-book, which I didn't even attempt.  Finally, I got the hardback version from the library.   I found the entire novel insufferable, although I do see why it got the National Book Award longlist and won some minor awards.  I'd have to include Johnson in a literary cohort with other African American/satirical/funny authors like Paul Beatty and Percival Everett- both of whom have won major literary awards in the past decade. 

  I am in favor of African American authors who have moved beyond the poverty-porn, childhood abuse drama that publishers continue to favor- any attempt to move beyond that milieu is interesting to me.  Here, however, I found the characters flat.  Johnson's main character is a white southerner- he has some good quips but generally is an uninteresting guy, as are his friends.  It's a difficult book to describe without wrecking the plot but I will say I did not laugh a single time reading this comic novel.

Published 10/30/25

Strange Fruit (1944)

by Lillian Smith

Clayton, Georgia

Georgia: 22/24

   Lillian Smith was an interesting lady, and 100% the type of author I like to learn about through projects like 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Smith was a southerner who stayed, a liberal and a closeted lesbian.  She was better known as a writer of non-fiction and someone who was focused on social issues, but Strange Fruit about a doomed (is there any other kind?) interracial relationship in the South, was a best-seller at the time.   Seems like this book, like other works of Southern literature from this time period, have suffered from its frequent use of the n-word.   Tracy Deen, the white male protagonist, belongs to the suffering white scion department- a man-child who can't break away from his family, come terms with its legacy or generally do anything.   It's a character type that I associate with Percy Walker's The Moviegoer, call him the southern proto existentialist. 

   Tracy doesn't get up too much of anything, except boning Nonnie, an African American woman from a high-achieving local black family who has been to college and returned with the goal of living down to her family history.   Despite being a college graduate, she is excited about her unexpected pregnancy.  On almost every page, I expected Nonnie to have more insight into her situation, but alas.  Nonnie's book length fantasy about quietly having her mixed-race child and having her white partner stand by her and acknowledging the birth is more fantastical than if the characters had flown to the moon together.  Surely, surely this woman was aware of the tragedy she would provoke.  No, she is not.

  

Published 11/12/25

The Twelve-Mile Straight (2017)

 by Eleanor Henderson

Ben Hill County, Georgia

Georgia: 23/24

    All things being equal I'll always prefer a historical novel or whatever merit to a contemporary work of fiction within the precincts of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Even if I don't care for the novel, I frequently learn about the history, particularly in the rural and neglected (from a literary perspective) portions of the country.  In rural Georgia I'm reading about the intertwined system of turpentine camps and liquor stills- first, an area will be a turpentine camp and then, after the environment is degraded, you use the same area for a liquor still.  The Twelve-Mile Straight, set in the 1930's, revolves around the life of a rural producer of still liquor and his daughter, a whore.  When the daughter is impregnated by the grandson of the local bigwig, Dad takes the opportunity to conceal the paternity of the child of his African American servant (him.)

  This leads to a series of very unfortunate events that involves murder, small-town sensationalism and of course, race.  I listened to the Audiobook, it took forever.

Published xxx

The Wonder Book of the Air

Cynthia Shearer

Ice (2026) by Jacek Dukaj

 Book Review

Ice (2026)

Jacek Dukaj

  Ice, arrives as a bit of a Polish-language literary sensation, and English language audiences have been waiting for the translation since 2017, when London based published Head of Zeus acquired the rights.  The translation, by Ursula Phillips finally dropped in January and of course I had to purchase this 1200 page alternate history fantasia as soon as I learned it existed.   Ice is hard to describe properly for a number of reasons.  I've seen it described as a cross between science fiction and alternate history and steam-punk lit, but we all know that steampunk isn't a literary thing and alternate history is, in fact, a sub-genre of science fiction.  

  The catalyst is that the object that crashed into the Earth and caused the Tunguska event in June 1908, transformed the landscape in some poorly understood way, causing a novel kind of ice to shoot out from the epicenter and spread across the world.  Presumably as a result of the consequences of this event, there was no World War I and no Russian Revolution, meaning that the alternate history of the book is essentially a world where the 20th century didn't happen in Europe but the industrial revolution of the 19th century did.  The protagonist is a Polish national (Poland is/was part of the Russian Empire), who is set a task by the Czar's secret police:  Locate his long-missing father who is rumored to be an agent for "the ice." 

  They then put him on the trans-Siberian express- a journey which consumes at least half of the 1200 pages of the book, and he is then buffeted by mysterious forces, some who support the ice and some who want it gone forever.  The supporting cast includes real life scientist Nikolai Tesla, here an agent of the Czar sent to defeat the ice.  The train is hundreds of pages of philosophical debates which is surely meant to remind the reader of 19th century Russian author-philosophers, while at other times the tone is decidedly Pynchonian minus the songs and laughs.

  By far the most challenging aspect of Ice is the fact that Polish allows authors to write in a kind of second person singular style where the narrator is the protagonist, but the author is not using personal pronouns.  I've had the same experience reading other Polish authors- most recently Olga Tokarczuk, but here it was particularly hard to follow.   Not hard to follow- hard to appreciate, I guess you could say.

Louisiana Power & Light (1994) by John Dufresne

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Louisiana Power & Light (1994)

 by John Dufresne

Monroe, Louisiana

Louisiana: 10/28

   One fact I've learned about the geography of the South from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The top of Louisiana is not in line with the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  That particular line runs through the middle of Arkansas and Louisiana doesn't start until about the middle of Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi.  Likewise, the vast major of the population of Louisiana lives south of the southern borders of those states- some of it lines up with the Florida panhandle, but most of the important part of Louisiana (New Orleans and environs) lines up with north-central Florida. 

   I mention this because the northern half of Louisiana only has three titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and Louisiana Power & Light are one of those books.  That makes Northern Louisiana one of the great underrepresented regions of America in this project, alongside Northern Alabama and Northern New York/Vermont/New Hampshire.  This novel is about the last of a line of inbred swamp dwellers who is orphaned by his criminally insane father and half-wit thirteen-year-old mother and raised to become a priest, only to abandon that goal when he meets the first in a series of women.

 I had low expectations for Louisiana Power & Light, but I was pleasantly surprised by the story.

Band of Angels (1955) by Robert Penn Warren

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Band of Angels (1955)

by Robert Penn Warren

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

   Robert Penn Warren is an American author who is perpetually present on my "soft" list- like, I definitely know who he is and would say I "want to" read All the Kings Men, his big hit, but I haven't actually read it, or anything else by him.  I think Warren and other prize-winning authors from the 1950's and 60's in the South have suffered because the wave of African American authors, especially women authors, that emerged in the 1970's and 80's, culminating with Toni Morrison getting the Nobel Prize in 1993.  I'd wager that every time Morrison got added to a 20th century literature syllabus Warren or his ilk got dropped. 

  Reading Band of Angeles- about an Oberlin educated woman who is surprised when her father dies, and she is sold into slavery to settle his debts- I was struck by the stylistic similarities between Warren and Cormac McCarthy- and learned they shared a publisher!

  In many ways Band of Angeles is as daring as anything written about this subject from this time period- in that he deals frankly with the sexual aspects of slavery in a way that authors shied from prior to the aforementioned African American authorial revolution in the 1970's.  But it also pulls its literary punch by having the protagonist's purchaser be a total gentleman... at least to her.

  Band of Angels also goes on for far too long- carrying the protagonist into reconstruction and emancipation and pairing her off with a well-meaning white husband who turns out to be a total dud.  After the fall of the Confederacy, my interest level took a precipitous dip, but this is still a top five title from Louisiana.

Capitalism and Its Critics (2025) by John Cassidy

Audiobook Review

 Capitalism and Its Critics: A History:

 From the Industrial Revolution to AI (2025)

by John Cassidy

    I read about Capitalism and Its Critics in the New York Times, where Jennifer Szalai wrote an excellent review.  Cassidy is best known as a writer on economic topics for the New Yorker.  Both the review and Cassidy's pedigree gave me the idea that this would make a great Audiobook and sure enough, nine months later, I was able to check out a copy of the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  And reader, I was rewarded.  Capitalism and Its Critics is as accesible as it is interesting, and while Cassidy treads no new territory, he does an excellent job of summarizing centuries of economic thought while sparing the reader/listener from reading any of these often-obtuse authors.  More then once while listening to Capitalism and Its Critics I was struck by the thought that it is the eternal fate of the most famous economists to see their work mis-understood and applied by people who haven't read their work.  I'd wager most readers would associate criticism of capitalism with the "Left" as defined by a line of thinkers following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, but Cassidy reveals just as many critics from the "Right." The major difference is that most of the critics from the left, at least up until the time of Keynes, were persecuted, whereas critics from the right tended to end up in power or see their acolytes in power.

  Two themes that Cassidy hammers home are:

1)  Capitalism lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

2)  The idea of a Capitalism existing outside of a State made legal framework is ridiculous.

   Thus, his major criticism of critics from the right is that they live in a fantasy of the free market that is nothing short of fantastic, while at the same time allowing Dictators and Authoritarian strongmen into their tent under the guise of limiting state action in the economy (see Chile).  Meanwhile, he accurately points out that critics from the left have simply been wrong in that they start from a premise that the contradictions inherent in capitalist activity will inevitably lead to the collapse of capitalism.

   He also breathes life into figures I would have considered minor players before reading this book- Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson to name two and he also develops time periods that don't get much attention in the west- specifically the period of Russian economic thought between the Russian Revolution and the ascension of Stalin.   Even if, like me, you are largely familiar with the history of capitalism without being a specialist or expert, you will find the writing engaging.

    

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020) by Stephanie Soileau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020)

by Stephanie Soileau

Bayou d’Inde Drive, Sulphur, Louisiana

Louisiana: 9/28

   The Gulf coastline between New Orleans and Houston is a bit of a petro-chemical nightmare, filled with petroleum processing plants and related businesses and supervised by state governments that are hostile to business regulations.  It's also a region that is very exposed to the consequences of climate change, particularly the increased number and intensity of hurricane's making landfall from the Gulf.  This double whammy of environmental degradation makes it entirely possible that whole communities will simply cease to exist, and soon.

  This, I presume is what the title of this book references. Another layer is the weakening of the traditional Cajun community- French speaking Acadians who came down from Newfoundland after the French lost control and the English took over.  From the perspective of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Soileau rates as a minor find.  Certainly, a book of interconnected short-stories about folks on the margins of life in such an interesting area rate higher than YA titles and chick-lit.   Beyond that, however, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, continues to explore the lives of the losers in American society, by far the most frequent subject of titles that aren't YA or chick-lit.   Where are the folks in this book going? Nowhere.  What are they doing? Nothing.

  The first story, about a teen mom who is bummed about the consequences of her actions and not that into being a Mom, really sets the tone.

Medicine River (2025) by Mary Annete Pember

 Audiobook Review

Medicine River:  A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools (2025)

by Mary Annete Pember

    I listened to this Audiobook because I am interested in the subject of Indian Boarding Schools.  Basically, for decades American authorities took Native American children away from their families and put them in boarding schools where they were taught to deny their heritage, speak English and frequently were subject to abuse and ill-health.  After returning home they frequently suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a perpetual feeling of estrangement from their community.

   Pember blends some of this history with her personal experience as the daughter of a woman who went to an Indian Boarding School.  Spoiler alert, there is a lot of family trauma in this book.