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.
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