True Grit (1968) by Charles Portis

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

True Grit (1968)

by Charles Portis

Yell County, Arkansas

Arkansas: 1/8

   Arkansas has to be one of the least literary of the United States of America. True Grit is the only title out of the eight from this state I'd ever heard of before the 1,001 Novels project.  I listened to an Audiobook edition narrated by Donna Tartt, of all people.  As she explains in the afterword, True Grit is one of her favorite books, so she leapt at the chance to be the voice of Mattie Ross, the diminutive narrator and protagonist of the revenge tale best known for the movie version with John Wayne as US Marshall Rooster Cogburn.   Tartt wrote an interesting afterword where she speculates on why such a classic novel (I agree) is hardly read anymore- she places the blame at the feet of the John Wayne starring movie (there was a more recent version with Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross) for being a successful dumbing-down of the plot of the book. 

  True Grit was a real discovery for me- I raced through the Audiobook.  I thought Mattie Ross was a delightful character, and Donna Tartt fairly amazed me with her voicing of the text.  Surely the best novel from Arkansas in the 1,001 Novels project.

Finn (2007) by John Clinch

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Finn (2007)

by John Clinch

100 Center St, Hannibal, Missouri

Missouri: 8/12

    I was surprised that Jim, by Percival Everett wasn't included in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I suppose Jim wasn't published until after editor had made her picks, but it is hard to imagine a world where the audience is better served by this book, a full-ass novel about Huckleberry Finn's disolute father.  As told by Clinch, Finn is the neer do well son of the local Judge, called "The Judge" from whom he inherits a virulent racism and little else.  Finn the elder is a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic, and the entire book is punctuated by his physical need to get drunk every single day of his life.  In this telling, Finn is of mixed-race, his Mother being a run-away slave that Finn the elder "rescues" after her father is caught in the attempt to hijack a paddleboat to freedom in Illinois.  The virulent racism of The Judge is notable, even after my sweep through the deep south of Alabama and Mississippi- it's long been observed that the worst racists are people who don't have many interactions with black people, and the Judge fits that description- he is known in the book for being alone in having a white servant family instead of black slaves. 

  Finn the elder can fairly be described as a horrific monster, based on his behavior in the book. I was surprised when I listened to an author interview that ran after the Audiobook, when Clinch said that readers he talked to found themselves rooting for Finn despite his notable flaws.  Not me.

Earth 7 (2026) by Deb Olin Unferth

 Audiobook Review

Earth 7 (2026)

by Deb Olin Unferth

Daunt Publishing

  The idea of "book-tok" is not something I take seriously, probably because it favors genres like Romantasy.  The major exception to this stance is the phenomenon of Jacquelline Harpman, the Belgian author who struck Tik Tok gold a couple years back with the English language translation of I Who Have Never Known Men (1995).  I had that book recommended to me by a random woman at a dog friendly cafe in Eagle Rock, but when I searched up the title, it seemed clear I would like that book, and I did. Earth 7, which is published by Daunt Publishing, seems to mine that same literary territory: minimalist science fiction and strong feminist themes with an end of the world vibe. 

  The protagonist of Earth 7 is the lonely daughter of a single mom who happens to be a gifted scientist/programmer, working in the aftermath of "Depop" which is pretty much how it sounds- the causes being many and varied.  Dylan Stein is her name, and she is raised by her mom inside a living habitat at the bottom of the ocean.  Originally planned as a community, Dylan's mom ends up being the last hold out, which leaves Dylan, naturally, dreaming of escape.  Unferth works with a light touch as far as the genre stuff goes- there are no chapters of exposition where recent history is explained by a thoughtful professor or authority figure.   Rather, Earth 7 more or less resembles a bildungsroman as Dylan escapes her undersea mom prison for life on the dry n' dusty surface, where she works for an obscure corporation plodding forward in the wasteland. 

  Eventually she falls in love, with another woman, of course and that sets in motion the rest of the book- Dylan and her love living in obscurity in the desert until death do us part.  Stuff happens, but it is low impact plot and mostly what the reader is left with is atmosphere of the dying Earth. 

Audiobook: Civilizations (2021) by Laurent Binet

 Audiobook: 

Civilizations (2021)

 by Laurent Binet

  I'm really warming up to the Spotify feature of having every Audiobook for free.  My hunch is that this is mostly new releases and classics, but I wait FOREVER to check out new release Audiobooks in the Libby library app, so this Spotify feature is welcome.  Right now, I'm going through and looking for Audiobooks of books I've already read.  The first one I picked out was The Kindly Ones, Civilizations, by Laurent Binet was second because I bought the English translation in hardback, read it, and thought that I would have been better off with the Audiobook because of Binet's textually based approach to the plot.  Part I is a faux-Viking saga, Part II is written in the style of Early-Modern/Middle Ages prose, etc. 

  I was really excited when this book was published- in the original French.  I thought for sure it would prove a sensation, but such was not the case.  It seems like a natural for a tv version and the rights were published but there have been no updates since then. 

Winter's Bone (2006) by Daniel Woodrell

     Map of the Ozarks

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Winter's Bone (2006)

by Daniel Woodrell

Ozark Hills, Missouri

Missouri:  3/11

    I associate the Ozark mountains with Arkansas, but as the map above clearly demonstrates, most of the Ozarks are in Missouri, as in Winter's Bone, which is just about as Ozarks a book as you can get.  The movie version is mostly remembered for introducing Jennifer Lawrence to audiences, and it was hard not to listen to the Audiobook without picturing her as the narrator, a high school student trying to locate her meth-cook Dad after he skips out on a court date, and the bond attached to that court date, comes due.

  Ree Dolly, of the Ozark Dollies, is forced on her own Odyssey, in the dead of the Missouri winter, taking her from valley to valley, with little help from anyone.  Along the way she is exposed to plenty of bad behavior, though the proceedings can be described as PG 13 for violence, swearing and drug-use. God knows there are moments in the book where a darker turn seems in the card, but Woodrell keeps an element of nobility among his backcountry meth cooks and welfare frauds that is charming to this hardened criminal defense lawyer.

Audiobook Review:The Kindly Ones (2006) by Jonathan Littrell

 Audiobook Review:

The Kindly Ones (2006) 

by Jonathan Littell

   I noticed that Spotify now has unlimited streaming for Audiobooks for premium members. The project of this blog has been linked to new technologies for reading/watching/listening to novels, other books and movies, going back to watching Criterion Collection titles on Hulu plus back in the day.  Self-recording was critical to the entire music projects- all the artists I worked with started recording themselves on Macintosh computers.  I saw that the Audiobook of The Kindly Ones, one of my favorite books ever, was freely available on Spotify so I thought I would give it a listen.  I really love the novel, and I also love the fact that it was a huge critical and commercial hit in France, and when it was translated into English and published in the US, the critical reaction was along the lines of "What is WRONG with the French."  It makes sense if you remember critical attitudes of the period. 

  It's been eight years since I read The Kindly Ones, but I still remembered most of the plot points.  In preparing this post I noticed I've mentioned it seven times in other posts about different books, which has to be close to a record.  The Audiobook narrator, Grover Gardner, is a stone-cold pro, and it is easy to lose yourself for hours in the "pleasures" of the prose.  The most shocking chapters remain shocking, and I was better able to follow the more tedious conversations about the intellectual roots of anti semitism in the third reich.  It was also easier to keep track of his schizophrenic episodes near the end of the book.  At forty hours, it is a time commitment, but much easier than the thousand page length of the book version.

Published 10/14/18
The Kindly Ones (2006)
by Jonathan Littell

Replaces:  Adjunct by Peter Manson (UNREAD)

   It's curious how The Kindly Ones, published in French in 2006 but not in English until 2009, made it into the first revision of the 1001 Books list.  That first revision was published in 2008, after the French language publication but before the English translation published in 2009, meaning the inclusion was based on reading the French original.   The stay on the 1001 Books list was brief, The Kindly Ones was dumped in favor of a new Paul Auster novel in 2010.

  The book it replaces, Adjunct by Peter Manson, is the most unreadable book in the original 1001 Books list, and also wholly unavailable in the United States- lacking even a listing on Amazon.  It's one thing for a book to be out of print on Amazon, quite another for Amazon to never have heard of said book, particularly one that was published as recently as 2009.  It seems like unattainability should be a disqualifier for a book that is judged to be a reading "must," and excluding Adjunct from the first revision on this basis seems entirely fair to me.

  The Kindly Ones, on the other hand, makes sense, it's a Prix Goncort (French Pulitzer, basically) winner, written by an American author in the French language.  It is about that favorite subject of early 21st century European fiction, the Nazi's, specifically, the perspective of Nazi's themselves. Maxmillien Aue, the well educated, literate narrator- writer, really, of The Kindly Ones, is reflecting on his experience in World War II as a member of the SS.  As he writes the book, we know that he has survived World War II and lived out a life as a Belgian silkmaker.

  The Kindly Ones is his memoirs as a kind of Nazi SS Forest Gump- present at all the hits of the German atrocities of World War II in his status as first as a direct participant in the messy, early stages of Jewish elimination in the Ukraine, and then as an analyst in the Ukraine, a survivor of the decisive battle of Stalingrad, where he is shot clean through the head and survives, then as a special advisor on the problem of using Jewish labor for economic purposes instead of just killing them all.

  Aue has a personal life as "interesting" as his professional life- specifically a still-dedicated sister fucker- his twin no less, a vast, poorly understood hatred for his Mother, and a non-existent relationship with his proto-Nazi father, who disappeared before Maxmillien had a chance to form a relationship.   It won't surprise anyone to learn that Aue is also an active pursuer of being the receiving partner in anal sex, with boys he seeks out on the streets and bars of pre-war Berlin.   All of these elements twist and turn over the almost 1000 (992) page, and I felt like my choice of the nearly 40 hour Audiobook was a solid selection over the actual book or an Ebook (impossible!) edition.

   Littell spares no detail in the underlying research, which, inserted into the narrative, forms a non-fiction narrative about the events and motivations of major participants in the anti-Jewish extermination process by the Germans, from the perspective of the actors.  Aue, despite his misgivings about the choice of extermination, believes it to be a "done deal," and thus beyond his pay grade to question.  He is also a committed National Socialist, in the sense that he also despises the Prussian aristocracy which dominates German society in the early 20th century.

  It is worth pointing out that much of the contents of The Kindly Ones are terribly disturbing.  Littell does not shy away from describing the mechanics of massacring a village of Jews with hand guns, and his febrile dream sequences are replete with enough coprophagia and anal sex to make the Marquise de Sade blush.   It also is worth pointing out fictional narratives about genocide from the perspective of the perpetrator have their value in the sense that they add to the diversity of narratives about important historical events and thus add to the chance that the memory of such events will remain alive in the memory of the descendants.

1,001 Novels A Library of America Collected: Louisiana

 1,001 Novels A Library of America

 Collected: Louisiana

     Louisiana is a formidable literary topic, mostly but not entirely because of New Orleans, an inquisitive reader also has to take into account the Delta- both cotton and sugar plantations, as well as the Bayou and the Cajuns.  Within New Orleans you've got historical fiction- the only place in this entire chapter (Apologies to Gone With the Wind in Georgia) where historical fiction makes sense.   Then you've got a body of post-Katrina lit and everything that came before it in that department and an element of noir/police fiction as well. It's a satisfying mix, such that editor Susan Straight wasn't able to include a YA title in Louisiana's 30 titles.  It's funny when a specific state has ONE writer that represents them on the national literary map.  Starting with Stephen King in Maine, then you come all the way down here and get John Grisham in Mississippi followed by Anne Rice (and her son, even) in Louisiana. 

Published 2/16/24

The Moviegoer (1961)

by Walker Percy

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 1/30

 I'm not sure where I read about The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's 1962 National Book Award Winner, but I found an Audiobook copy in the Libby Library act and I couldn't resist:  A National Book Award Winning author I've never heard of is irresistible.   I've noticed that Major Literary Prizes don't do a great job of picking titles that endure- most (all?) major literary prizes are decided by a committee so you are talking about horse-trading and compromise in the quest to pick a winner for any particular year.  Back in 1962, the National Book Award named nine finalists and one winner.  The Moviegoer beat Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was eligible to be nominated but did not make the list of finalists.  We Have Always Lived in the Castle was published in the eligibility period but didn't make the list of finalists.

   Is The Moviegoer better than any of those other books?  No.  But here you have it, the 1962 National Book Award.   An additional grounds to doubt the worthiness of this book as a prize winner is the fact that Percy never got close again, even though he continued to publish.   There is nothing wrong with winning a major literary prize with your first novel, but if you don't come close to doing it again it calls into question your literary legacy.   This leaves a contemporary reader asking the question, "Why?"

 I think, in this case, the answer is that was doing a regional variation on a theme that was still in vogue in 1961-62:  The existentialist anti-hero.  Percy's Moviegoer is a classic existentialist hero, like someone you might find in an early Jean Luc Godard film.  He is a college graduate, a returned Vietnam Vet and a stock broker in New Orleans.  It's worth observing that while Percy didn't make the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die List, this book is on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, representing New Orleans.

  New Orleans is in Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts, which includes all the states from Florida to Louisiana.  Louisiana has 30 titles on the list, 13 of those are from the city of New Orleans.  

My sense is that while the existential hero AND southern literature were in style when he won, both trends have dropped in prominence over the past half century.   Percy also wrote The Moviegoer right before the 1960's revolution in culture, which means that it is going to get crowded out by books written after and books written before it was published.

  Is there any question that of the books mentioned in this post, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the most canonical title and that Catch-22, Revolutionary Road and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are better picks than this one.

Published: 5/16/25

The Long-Legged Fly (1992)

by James Sallis

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana 2/30

   I have adjusted my approach to completing the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to reflect the fact that I am now driving less than I have been over the past decade.  I have less time to listen to Audiobooks in the car, and that makes me more selective about the titles I choose.  No more YA fiction or struggle narratives in Audiobook format, it's quicker and easier to just glide through the print copy since that category of book rarely takes more than an hour to read, but multiple hours to listen.  SO, while I read at one end of this chapter, Georgia, I'm listening at the other end: Louisiana.  And by Louisiana I'm mostly talking about New Orleans, which boasts 13 of the 28 titles in this subchapter.  Also I'd be willing to wager that many of the other Louisiana books set somewhere else on the map have significant action inside New Orleans.

   New Orleans is not a first-tier American literary city but it is certainly in the group after the first tier- I'd put in the same group as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.  It's an interesting place, and it has historically drawn writing talent attracted to the anarchy of New Orleans.  The Long-Legged Fly, by underrated author James Sallis, is a great way to kick off the festivities.  Sallis is best known today as the author of Drive-which was made into the Ryan Gosling movie.  The Long-Legged Fly was his first novel, about African-American detective Lew Griffin.  Fly is anything but a conventional detective novel, taking place across the decades to give a fuller portrait of the detective.  This is a great example of how good the 1,001 Novels project can get- because I'd never heard of Sallis before reading this book, and now I think I'll go on and check out his other books. 

Published: 5/21/25

Orleans (2013)

by Sherri L. Smith

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 3/30

   This is a YA post-apocalyptic title, set in a New Orleans which has been disenfranchised from the rest of the country after a series of horrific hurricanes and the consequent emergence of a fever which infected all the remaining residents.  I could not believe that this book- which is almost entirely about tribes divided by blood types and the raids that go back and forth as people try to steal blood from one another.  The narration is split between a local teen and an outsider, Daniel a scientist with the military who is researching a cure for the fever.

   Again, I was startled that a book marketed to teens would contain so many scenes of cringe-inducing blood theft and minors being raped as a matter of course, but what do I know.

Published: 5/23/25

Purple Cane Road (2000)

by James Lee Burke

New Iberia Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 4/30

    Purple Cane Road is one of 24 volumes in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series- about a Louisiana sheriff's deputy who isn't afraid to use investigatory techniques that should probably get him fired.  This being Louisiana, he does, not, apparently get fired in this or any other book.  He is also obsessed with the solving the mystery of who murdered his Mom (aren't we all?)  This book weaves what can only be described as a familiar mix of police procedural and criminal deviousness, with a well-mannered hit man and a loose-cannon sidekick filling in the cast.  I listened to the Audiobook- which- like some other parts of the country, I like because the narrators do accents that I could not do in my head.

Published: 7/28/25

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) 

by Ernest J. Gaines 

Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 5/30

  It's true my progress on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has stalled out on two fronts- Pennsylvania, where Philly and the suburbs broke my heart with banality, and the deep south, where a lack of Audiobook options has sent me clambering back and forth between Georgia and Louisiana.  Compounding the situation is a general lack of interest in some of editor Susan Straight's favorite genres: sad coming-of-age stories and domestic fiction, generally.  Both genre's make a good fit for the criteria of the project, which seemingly dictates that a specific work be tied to a specific place- neither neglected/abused children in poverty nor housewives facing the same challenges go many places.   By the standards of the 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America, Miss Jane Pittman, the subject and narrator of her Autobiography, is well travelled.  Originally published in 1971, the Audiobook wasn't created for 25 years.  It was also hard not to think about the success of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, which was published in 1989.  Surely Allan Gurganus, the author of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All was aware of this book when he wrote his book.

  The idea here is that Miss Jane Pittman lives a life that spans slavery to Civil War, born a slave, ending by marching for her rights in rural Louisiana.  In between, she lives a relatively privileged life, emerging out of the chaos of the Civil War to marry, survive her husband and settle down as a domestic servant who lives in the big house.  Along the way she sees plenty- mostly cruelty with some kindness sprinkled in.  Autobiography takes a hard right turn in the last third of the book to detail a doomed relationship between the white scion of the plantation and an "octoroon" schoolteacher from New Orleans before concluding during the Civil Rights era. 

  It makes for a great Audiobook because of the oral history format- Pittman recounting to an unseen scribe.

Published 11/21/25

Louisiana Lucky (2020)

by Julie Pennell

445 East Main Street, New Iberia, Louisiana

Louisiana: 6/30

  A definite low point in my recent 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, I checked out the E-book from the library on vacation because it seemed like an easy job and indeed, I finished Louisiana Lucky in about an hour, mostly because I didn't read it very closely.  I try not to be a snob about my reading habits- this entire project is testament to my good intentions, but there is no denying that the three lottery winning sisters from this novel are some of the least interesting American's I've come across, and Julie Pennell is writing for an audience of suburban housewives- and not the interesting kind.

 The three sisters win a substantial lottery jackpot, rescuing them from lives among the lower bourgeois of this part of the world.  One sister spends the entire book upgrading her wedding from a ramshackle DIY affair to something worthy of a bridezilla episode.  Another sends her two kids to a snooty private school and suffers from a cold welcome.  The third- a respected local print (lol) journalist, takes advantage of her found fame to move to television journalism, which is a hard transition.   Louisiana Lucky is certain to be a bottom three title in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

Published: 12/30/25

Cane River (2001)

by Lalita Tademy

Cane River, Louisiana

Louisiana: 7/30

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

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

Published 1/15/26

The Next Step in the Dance (1998)

by Tim Gautreaux

Morgan City, Louisiana

Louisiana: 8/30

    It is rare that I actually really enjoy reading a book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Part of that derives from the fact that I've read, essentially, all of the "classics" that Susan Straight has included in the project- we are talking about canon level titles from 19th, 20th and 21st century American literature here, and let's face it, the list isn't that long.  Part of it comes from the fact that Straight needs to rely heavily on chick-lit and genre fiction to actually populate large swathes of the American literary map.  And I guess the last part of it is the lack of thematic variety within each particular state- I really should be going through and doing one book at a time from each state instead of staying within a single region/chapter of the project to avoid that particular phenomenon. 

  Which is all a preamble for saying that I actually enjoyed reading The Next Step in the Dance on its own merit, and Tim Gautreaux is an author who I would be interested in reading outside of a project-based title.  I know for sure the reason I liked this book is that the main character was blue collar (a Cajun machinist) and part of the book actually deals with his work life and the things he has to do as part of that life.  It's an issue that extends well beyond the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to all precincts of American literature and most of American fiction- which is that books are written by authors, and most authors- particularly writers of literary fiction- haven't done shit in their lives except write fiction.  This means they can't believably write about work, let alone make a whole novel about it, which means that all fiction is inevitably domestic fiction, family fiction, and that world gets boring as hell year after year.

  I would love to read a work of fiction about a farmer where the author actually knew something about the business and practice of farming, and writes about that,  instead of one of fifty novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where the events take PLACE on a farm but are ABOUT the abuse a young girl suffers at the hands of her father or family trauma generally. 

  

Published 2/10/26

A Hall of Mirrors (1967)

by Robert Stone

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 9/30

  I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out.  A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974.  Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway.  I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly.  Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy. 

  No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s.  Cool.

Published: 2/25/26

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020)

by Stephanie Soileau

Bayou d’Inde Drive, Sulphur, Louisiana

Louisiana: 10/30

   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.

Published 2/27/26

Band of Angels (1955)

by Robert Penn Warren

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/30

   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.

Published 3/2/26

Louisiana Power & Light (1994)

 by John Dufresne

Monroe, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/30

   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.

Published 3/5/26

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 13/30

  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. 

Published 3/9/26

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 14/30

    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. 

Published 3/11/26

Set in Motion (1978)

by Valerie Martin

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 15/30

  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.

Published 3/13/26

Glass House (1994)

by Christine Wiltz

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 16/30

  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.

   Published 3/18/26

Things We Lost to the Water (2021)

by Eric Nguyen

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 17/30

   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. 

Published 4/1/26

Ten Seconds (1991)

by Louis Edwards

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 18/30

   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. 

Published 4/2/26

The Awakening (1899)

by Kate Chopin

Grand Isle, Louisiana

Louisiana: 19/30

  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.

Published 4/6/26

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)

 by George Washington Cable 

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 20/30

  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.

Published: 4/9/26

The Feast of All Saints (1979)

by Anne Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana:21/30

  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.

Published 4/15/26

Little Altars Everywhere (1992)

by Rebecca Wells

Thornton, Louisiana

Louisiana: 22/30

   Wells is best known for her viral phenomenon, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which is the publishing industry equivalent of the late-blooming chart success of Appetite for Destruction by Guns n' Roses.  Both rose to number one on their respective industry charts over a year after publication.  This success drew the attention of Malcolm Gladwell in HIS best-seller, Tipping Point, where he explored the word of mouth that made Ya Ya such a hit.   The website for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America mistakenly lists the publication date as 2009, no idea where they got 2009 from, and not the first or second time they've listed the wrong publishing year for a mapped title.

   I'm not sure it was because of my utter disinterest in the book or actual issues with the writing, but Little Altars Everywhere felt more like a knitted together cluster of short stories.  It's a fine, well-travelled literary tradition though I don't think Wells was getting stuff published in the New Yorker before Little Altars Everywhere was released.  I would place Wells' bibliography squarely within the "chick-lit" genre- 1992 was the year the phrase was coined, in reference to Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale.  Altars fits into that broad category although it's also obvious to an almost painful degree the literary debt Altars owes to its southern literary forebears.    Maybe it's just the early Eudora Welty stories I started reading after this book that put me in mind of this, but it always seems like there is pressure on writers from the deep south to add some element of freakishness, either race based or otherwise, that sets the action apart from what you commonly see in other parts of the country.

  Here, there is a plot line- in a light comic novel mind you- about mother son incest that would be eyebrow raising even a much more seriously regarded work of fiction.

Published 4/22/26

A Density of Souls (2000)

by Christopher Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 23/30

   This is an utterly ridiculous novel by the son of author Anne Rice.  Three boys and one girl are friends as children.  Upon entering high school, two of the boys become "jocks," the girl becomes the girlfriend of one of the jocks and the fourth, who is clearly the main protagonist, is gay.   The other three all turn on the gay friend for reasons that are entirely unexplained.  Although there are no year specific tells, it seems clear that A Density of Souls, is set in the 90's, in a period where anti-gay bullying was still OK, but the bullied had an idea that their situation was temporary and would improve outside of high school.  The story just gets more ridiculous by the page, with plot points involving incest, insanity, forced institutionalization and lots and lots of gay stuff.   By the end, the mysteries are resolved, but it left this reader scratching his head.  What the hell did I just read, was my thought at the end.  Published by Harvey Weinstein, as well.

Published 4/29/26

Queen Sugar (2014)

by Natalie Baszile

St. James Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 24/30

  Cotton gets most of the press when you consider deep south agriculture, but sugar is part of the story as well.  If you don't know the story of sugar and the role it played in advancing the slavery-industrial complex in the 18th and 19th century, you can't grasp the significance of a novel about a young African American woman who suprise-inherits a sugar plantation in Louisiana, but to be fair, neither does the protagonist- a native Californian who uproots her daughter in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband and decides to make a go of it in the deep south.

 Queen Sugar is pitched somewhere between "issue novel" and "chick lit" with elements that hint at something deeper with plot points that sound like they were written for television (Queen Sugar was adapted into a movie for Oprah's OWN network).  Charley, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with survival and to a lesser degree with the issues faced by her own family, specifically those of Ralph, her ne'er-do-well younger brother, the product of a childhood fling between her father and a local, mentally unstable girl during high school.  Ralph has led a life filled with issues- taken from his mother in Louisiana to live with Charley and their father in California, being returned to Louisiana for being to difficult, dropping out of college a couple semesters short of his college degree (in Civil Engineering?!?!), succumbing to drug addiction in Phoenix of all places, losing his wife to an overdose, abandoning her body and taking his son back to Louisiana.  It wasn't hard to tell where Ralph was headed.

  I enjoyed Queen Chapters for the portions that actually dealt with the process of farming sugar cane- after reading endless books about cotton farming, it was a welcome shift.  I also thought the plot was more interesting than the book Baszile wrote, but I can see where she was aiming.

Published 5/6/26

A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992)

by Robert Olen Butler

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 25/30

    I'm not sure when exactly it became a problem for an author of one race to write an entire book in the voice of a second race of which he or she is a member, but clearly it was a not problem in 1992, when A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain, which is a collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in Louisiana as told by a white guy whose qualification is (checks notes) being an American soldier in Vietnam during the war.  Aside from that small issue this is an enjoyable collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in and around New Orleans.   I did frequently wince when it came to Butler writing about these characters IN Vietnam or when it came to the characters talking about non-Christian Vietnamese spiritual identity. 

Published 5/7/26

City of Refuge (2008)

by Tom Pizzota

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 26/30

  Cit of Refuge is a Hurricane Katrina novel, specifically focusing on the aftermath and how it impacts two families, one white with one of those "only in the past" situations where an entire family of four is supported by a male breadwinner who works for an alt-weekly, and the Mom's only job is to take care of the children and complain about everything.  The African American family is more interesting- a brother/sister pair with the sister's adult child.   The actual description of Katrina and its aftermath as experienced by the African American protagonist (the white couple have decamped to Oxford before relocating to Chicago), is the real-life equivalent of the opening of a work of dystopian fiction, but the aftermath is not- the worst of it being a few rough days at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans followed by bus relocations to anywhere- in the case of the sister of the brother/sister duo, a Christian camp in Arkansas surrounded by cotton fields. 

  The worst of it for the white family is listening to unsympathetic voices on early oughts' talk radio.  I thought it was clear that the agenda of the writer was not to create some kind of gothic freakshow of Fema trailers and the survival of the most destitute, but rather to show a more "average" experience of having your whole life ruined overnight.  All in all, it hardly seems dystopian- after the storm itself and the aftermath, pretty much everything works like it should in this book, and by the end all the characters are resuming "normal" lives, either inside New Orleans or in their new homes.

Published 5/13/26

Delicious Foods (2015)

by James Hannaham

Ovis, Louisiana

Louisiana: 27/30

  I read this whole novel thinking it was set in Mississippi, not Louisiana.  It very much reminded me of Paul Beatty, and I was more than a little surprised it took the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to bring Delicious Foods to my attention.  Significantly, Delicious Foods contains an element of transgression in its plot, about a modern-day farm where drug-addicted African Americans are held in sort of debt peonage to a white owned corporation.  Crack itself is a character here, who goes by Scotty, if I'm not mistaken, and the protagonist is Delores, a mother-of-one whose life takes a crack induced downward spiral after her do-gooder husband is murdered in vile fashion by contemporary analogues of the KKK for his organizing work in rural Louisiana. 

 After a trick goes bad and Delores gets a couple of her teeth knocked out, she is easily recruited to the farm, where she is provided with necessities (including crack) and a dormitory type living environment, and compelled to work on harvesting and maintaining a variety of crops, notably watermelon.  Despite the marketing materials using the term "slavery" to describe the environment Delores finds herself in, the truth is more complicated, and Hannaham seems to also being working on a critique of the underlying capitalist system as much as he is making any race specific statement.  On the other hand, the environment and characters are very specific to the plantation south and "second slavery" system, so there is a complexity of theme that is often absent in the works in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  

  There is also nothing specifically Louisiana about Delicious Foods, rather it is a work from a third area, the delta, which crosses state lines in the north of Louisiana and the center of Mississippi. 

Published 5/20/26

Meely LaBauve (2000)

by Ken Wells

Cathoula Bayou, Louisiana

Louisiana: 28/30

  My ability to handle the 1,001 Novels project is solely due to the fact that I live in Los Angeles and have a Los Angeles Public Library card.  As any diehard library user knows, the strength of a library is not a single branch but the ability to request books from all the different branches, or, in the case of the interlibrary loan used by the American University system, any book in any university library.  The Los Angeles Public Library request feature, which you can use in the app or online, is amazing, and typically the book arrives at my local branch within a week.  I mention that here because I actually had to buy a copy of Meely LaBauve off of Amazon, making it one of the few novels the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have available.  

   This book is a coming-of-age novel about a child of mixed-race heritage- probably Native American and African American, though given the location and the variability of the racial implications of identifying as a Native American over the years, the question is a fraught one.  Meely is a feral child, living by the Bayou with a father who is equally devoted to fishing and trapping and being a knockdown, drag-out alcoholic It's a boy's life, and the comparison of Meely to a swamp-bound Huck Finn is fair.  

Published 6/3/26

Visting Hours (2012)

by Jennifer Anne Moses

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana 29/30

  I am missing one book from Louisiana, and I can't figure it out for the life of me.  As far as I'm aware, Visiting Hours is the last book from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Visiting Hours was last because I had to buy a copy- I was surprised didn't have this interesting novel about the grim lives of patients waiting to die in an AIDS hostel in... the 1990s? The early 2000s?  It actually really reminded me of Blackouts by Justin Torres, the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction winner, which concerns a man dying of AIDS (I think) in a New Orleans SRO.  

  I could have used more Bayou.  I'm really loving the swamp-lit of Florida, and Louisiana seems like a missed opportunity in that regard, maybe because the geographical location overlaps so completely with the Cajun population that one supersedes the other.   One other conclusion I drew from this chapter is that Hurricane Katrina did real damage to the city both physically AND psychically. 

Published 6/4/26

A Free Man of Color (1997)

by Barbra Hambly

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 30/30

  I found the missing Louisiana title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  A Free Man of Color by Barbra Hambly.  What happened here is I read the wrong Barbra Hambly novel- Good Man Friday, both volumes from her series detailing the exploits of free man of color and surgeon, musician and private investigator Ben January.  Good Man Friday was cool because January went to Washington DC and ran into Edgar Allan Poe- the actual inventor of the detective story. The juxtaposition of the past of relative racial harmony and toleration and the (at the time of the story) new American regime, where white are free and black are not, provides much of the plot and narrative tension. 

1,001 Novels A Library of America Collected: Mississippi

 1,001 Novels A Library of America 

Collected:

 Mississippi

   I am genuinely passionate about consolidating this blog into 200 posts, with 10 chapters of 20 posts each, with some chapters being chronological and others being thematic, combining autofiction and criticism.   I'd imagine that this project would be one of the ten chapters.  The 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die would be one of the ten chapters.  Writing about World History would be a chapter. Aesthetics would be a chapter.   And then 2008- 2010 would be a chapter, 2011-2013 would be a chapter, 2013-2019, 2020-2023, 2024-2030. That's eight chapters right there. 

  Mississippi is a dark spot on the map of American literature. Faulkner and Welty are both more-or-less canonical authors in the canon of 20th century American Literature.  Beyond that you've got contemporary writers like Jesmyn Ward and Robert Jones Jr.- prize winner types writing about African American experiences.  Honestly, I got more from the non-fiction I was reading about this same area- specifically the cotton plantation economy and its relationship to slavery and capitalism.  That was eye opening. 

Published 9/17/25

Light in August (1932)

by William Faulkner

Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

Mississippi: 1/18

  Faulkner might be considered the apotheosis (a word he uses at least three times in Light in August) of high modernism in America, in that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Faulkner won in 1949, Hemingway in 1954, Steinbeck in 1962.  Only Faulkner is comprable to the high modernism/experimentalist prose of the early 20th century, both Hemingway and Steinbeck are the opposite of the flowery, ornate prose and complicated plot structures of Faulkner.   Faulkner has also maintained a legacy through the writers he influenced- Cormac McCarthy, to name one. At the same time, it's hard not to think Faulkner's time has past- a dead white male, an alcoholic and a frequent user of the n word, there are plenty of textual and non-textual reasons that a contemporary student of literature could through an MFA program without reading more than a short story here or there.

   At the same time- and I'm saying this as someone who is 250 books into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, there is no denying the Faulkner simply is one of the top five American novelists of the 20th century.  It is simply undeniable, even if you don't like modernist prose, the south or writers who use the n word. If you think about it in terms of the south as a literary place, consider that Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, one of the great prose narratives of the South, in 1936.  The movie came out in 1939. Faulkner wins the Nobel a decade later. 

  I listened to the Audiobook because I've read plenty of Faulkner novels, and I've always felt like they would be good Audiobooks.  This version was only recorded 10 years ago.  I think it a fair observation that the American literary establishment itself didn't appreciate the brilliance of Faulkner at the time he was writing- I went and looked at the New York Times and saw a plea from Malcolm Lowery- published in the 40's, that said Faulkner was out of print. 

Published 12/2/25

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

by Barry Hannah

Clinton, Mississippi

Mississippi: 2/18

  Both Mississippi and Alabama scored eighteen titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  That ties them for last place in this specific chapter, behind Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  18 titles does put them both above the single digit states of the mid-Atlantic.  I've also moved away from the original 13 colonies of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first of the hinterlands that were settled (excepting those that lay within the original 13 colonies).  Here, the dynamic was first, the clearing out/removal of the Native tribes- most of whom were property holding and "civilized" within the usage of that term at the time.  Second, it was the cotton revolution which opened up huge swaths of Alabama and especially Mississippi for enormous, slave driven cotton plantations.   The need for slaves, exhaustion of the soil in the upper south from Tobacco farming and the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad drove a huge, forced population movement, as the slave holders of the Virginias and Carolinas sold their slaves "down the river" to work on the plantations of the newer south.

   Not that Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by moderately well-known southern author Barry Hannah, addresses any of that.   Instead, Orphan is a loosely assembled collection of eccentric and violent characters living around a lake.  It's not a great book- it was the author's last novel- but it, at least, interesting, and neither a work of chick-lit or a YA title.  I will say I've never read a book where so many people were sliced open by knives.

Published 1/9/26

Where the Line Bleeds (2008)

by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

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

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

Published 1/12/26

The Gone Dead (2019)

by Chanelle Benz

Money Road, Greenwood Mississippi 

Mississippi: 4/18

  It isn't often that the titles on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America raise questions about the role of authenticity in fiction, but such was the case for The Gone Dead, by British American author Chanelle Benz. The plot concerns the interracial daughter of a dead-before-his-time African American poet (her father) and what can only be described as her severely misguided attempt to "get to the bottom" of the "mysterious" circumstances surrounding the death of her father.

  Clearly, the protagonist has not read the same books I have about this part of the country because it is just about 100 percent clear that any "mysterious" death of an African American man in the deep South is caused by white racists who are then protected by the local law enforcement and political establishment. I could have told this lady that in a five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee. Fair to say that I didn't linger on The Gone Dead, because reader I knew where this was headed. It was either the cops, friends of the cops or the cops when they were off duty that killed your daddy and you don't need 283 pages to tell the story.

Published 1/19/26

Mudbound (2008)

by Hilary Jordan

Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Mississippi: 5/18

  Mudbound is a classic Susan Straight 1,001 Novels: A Library of America pick, a book that won some award that Barbara Kingsolver made up for unpublished books- it then got published and sold a bunch of copies.  The version I checked out from the library was the Ebook version of the Netflix cover version of the book from the Netflix version I'd didn't know about.  It's about a well-off but "spinster adjacent" white woman from the upper south who marries a youngish widower- she meets him because he is an engineer travelling around for Government projects during the Great Depression (I think).  Little does she know that it is his lifelong dream to go back home (the Mississippi Delta) and become a farmer.  It's "little does she know" because he does not bother to tell her during their courtship. 

 Nevertheless, Laura McAllan (her married name) is cognizant of her incipient spinsterhood and loves the old lug besides, so she agrees to the thing.  The title of the book is her somewhat whimsical name for the farm that Henry (the husband) takes over.   Henry has a damaged (by service in World War I) younger brother who is a manic pixie dream boy circa the 1940's.  The farm has several sharecropping families, some white and some black, and Jamie (the younger brother) befriends the oldest son of one of the black families, Ronsel, also a veteran, and a tank operator to boot (Jamie being a pilot). 

  If you've been reading this blog, you know how this is going to end up, not well for the African American World War II veteran.  And reader, it does not. 

Published 3/23/26

The Past is Never (2018)

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

Forest, Mississippi

Mississippi: 6/18

   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. 

Published 3/24/26

Can't Quit You, Baby (1988)

by Ellen Douglas

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 7/18

  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. 

Published 3/26/26

Waveland (2009)

by Frederick Barthelme

Waveland, Mississippi

Mississippi: 8/18

  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. 

Published 3/31/26

Biloxi (2019)

by Mary Miller

Willow Avenue and Volunteer Park, Biloxi, Mississippi

Mississippi: 9/18

   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.  

  

Published 4/3/26

Pariah and Other Stories (1983)

by Joan Williams

Arkabutla, Mississippi

Mississippi: 10/18

   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.

Published 4/16/26

The Oxygen Man (1999)

by Steven Yarbrough

Indianola, Mississippi

Mississippi: 11/18

   Indianola is in northwest Mississippi, what I imagine to be "catfish country," where cotton farmers converted their plantations to aquaculture in an attempt to adapt to changing times.  Within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, The Oxygen Man is interesting because it is a debut novel on a small press- besides academic imprints there are very few non-major press books in the 1,001 Novels project, which seems like a lost opportunity.  Yarbrough writes in modernist style with the narrative skipping between time periods, for the benefit of the audience the years are added in between segments.  The main protagonists are a brother-sister duo of what can only be described as a white-trash family- Dad is an itinerant commercial painter, Mom is the town whore.   As a pair they have penchant for big fights followed by lusty make-up sex, and they are not afraid to do either in public, to the chagrin of their minor children.

  Unsurprisingly, this behavior impacts the children's lives and attitudes, with the fulcrum of the story hinging on a semi-public sexual encounter between the sister, witnessed by the brother and his friend.

Published 4/17/26

The Prophets (2021)

 by Robert Jones Jr

1833 Haining Road, Vicksburg Mississippi

Mississippi: 12/18

Author Robert Jones Jr.

Published 2/22/21

The Prophets (2021)

by Robert Jones Jr.

  An early front runner for the National Book Award longlist, The Prophets is the debut novel by American author Robert Jones Jr., about a forbidden love affair between two slaves on a Mississippi plantation in the early 19th century.   And although the hook should be enough to pique the interest of most fans of American literary fiction, this book is by no means "just" a LGBT love story set in the antebellum south.  Jones ably blends different voices- the white children of the plantation owner, women slaves on the same plantation as well as voices from Africa- which expand the standard parameters of the American slave narrative across the ocean in time and space.

  Like Marlon James, Jones Jrs' take on the African American LGBT experience is physical and intense.  His two protagonists, Isaiah and Samuel, are nuanced figures, even as their actions become increasingly direct.  Jones deserves plaudits for his frank and direct depiction of the trauma inflicted on the enslaved by their so-called masters, reserving special spite for the "progressive" white children of the planation over class. 

   Although I shouldn't have to say this in 2021, The Prophets is not "just" for people interested in LGBT issues in literary fiction.  It is a broadly appealing work, and it packs a narrative punch that will make you glad you picked it up.

Published 4/21/26

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
Jackson. Mississippi

Mississippi: 13/18

  Looking at a Google Ngram that compares the popularity of Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty, Welty comes in third place.  All three authors have experienced precipitous declines in frequency since the turn of the millennium, with only O'Connor showing some resilience.   Having read the three authors, the simplest explanation is that at some point it became untenable to teach students with materials that use the "n-word," in any way, shape or form.  Welty's short stories are chock full of it, although since her stories cover such a wide swath of time, it is possible to observe some characters holding back from the term as time progresses into the Civil Rights era.  My understanding is that saying the n word in any context in a classroom is enough to get a teacher fired.

  I think Welty also suffers because she never got comfortable with the novel as a format- even her Pulitzer Prize winning "novel" The Optimist's Daughter, clocked in at 208 pages.  Short stories do well in literature courses but aren't as great for the buying public or critics. As I've brought up many times, trying to write a review of a book of short stories is straight up not a good time because you are either summarizing a bunch of plots, or trying to draw connections with little or no insight into the authorial mindset. 

 This was my first time reading her work- my major observation is that she sure did seem like a practitioner of "Southern Gothic" but did not like the term.   Perhaps the development of the entire literary genre was a reflection of the tastes of the audience for literary magazines based in the north- the New Yorker, for example.  It's not hard to imagine that editors at the New Yorkers thought that their audiences were interested in the freakishness of the south, and that they picked stories that reflected that, and that writers like Welty got the message.   Conversely, it is hard to imagine whatever literary culture that existed in the south being happy with the freaks in Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty.   Perhaps though it was preferable to literature which frankly addressed racial practices in the south in the mid 20th century.

Published 4/27/26

Joe (1991)

by Larry Brown

Oxford, Mississippi

Mississippi: 14/19

   I chuckled when I read the jacket copy, which compares author Larry Brown to Faulkner, Welty and O'Connor in the same sentence.  What you mean he writes like three of the five non-African-American authors that matter in the deep south?  If you look up the author online you will soon see that he is associated with a genre called "grit-lit."  The Good Reads page is a mess and lists titles from Faulkner to O'Connor and everything in between.  To me, it sounds like an attempt to rebrand Southern Gothic for the "modern" (aka 1990s) period.   The prevalence of freaks, and freak like behavior in literature from the deep south is unique within American literature, sure every state and region has its dysfunctional families, but the patriarch of the dysfunctional family in this book really takes the cake.  Calling him a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic doesn't begin to do his depravity justice.

Published 4/30/26

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

by Brad Watson

Mercury, Mississippi

Mississippi: 15/19

     Living in California, it is easy to lose track of the relative size of places like it and New York to places like Alabama and Mississippi.  For example, the largest city in Mississippi is Jackson and it has a population of 146k.  In California, Jackson would be the 40th largest city, between Visalia and Victorville.  The total population of Mississippi, just about 3 million, is smaller than the CITY of Los Angeles, let alone the county or metropolitan statistical area.   Of course, the founding fathers foresaw this, which is why we are saddled with a political system which allows areas like the deep south and rural Midwest to put their candidates into the Presidency at the expense of places like California and New York.

     For places like Mississippi, it's not a question of the city/town/rural distinction of more populated areas, rather it is a question of small towns and rural areas.  Even the books putatively mapped onto urban areas in Mississippi take place in rural settings.   The Heaven of Mercury is a pure example of the small-town novel, nominated for the National Book Award for fiction back in 2002 about a local newspaper editor and his lifetime of unrequited love for a childhood almost-sweetheart.

    I've observed before that the use of a map to plot the titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America presupposes certain kind of plots and narrators.  None of the book in the Mississippi chapter split their temporality between Mississippi and some other place.  Characters who leave Mississippi leave the novel.  This means you have a choice between people coming back from some other place and people who never leave.   Within that category Mississippi is almost unique in that NONE of the novels are about people coming back from some other place and ALL of the books are about people who never leave. 

  At least, with our newspaper editor character in The Heaven of Mercury we have a literate protagonist. 

Finus, the protagonist, is, I think, the most sophisticated of any of the protagonists in the Mississippi titles.

Published 5/5/26

Billy (1993)

by Albert French

Banes, Mississippi

Mississippi: 16/19

      Billy is one of the three books from Mississippi that I had to buy from Amazon because they are not available from the Los Angeles Public Library.   It is a work of historical fiction about the events leading to the state of Mississippi executing a 10-year-old for the accidental murder of a white girl during a fight.  Reading the book I surely thought that this was based on a historical case, but it was not.  It is true that American executions of defendants who were juveniles at the time of the murder occurred well into the 20th century, with Supreme Court cases approving the practice as late as 1989 (for 16- and 17-year-olds.)  Billy is yet another novel from this chapter where the use of the n-word is frequent- given the context of the plot (the murder of a white child by an African American child) I suppose it's "understandable" but it doesn't make Billy any easier to read.  Once again, the reader is heavily reminded of the incredible amount of simple hate that white people had and presumably have for the African American population.   As an example from this book, only two characters in the entire book- the defense attorney and the priest at the Mississippi state death house, express ANY reservations about the state executing a 10-year-old for a clearly accidental death.

Published 5/19/26

The Hate U Give (2017)

by Angie Thomas

Carnation Street, Garden Heights, Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 17/19

   This YA novel was adapted into a pretty popular YA movie (with Sabrina Carpenter as the racist white friend from prep school).  It's about a young, African American girl (high school student) who is riding shot gun when her friend from the neighborhood is shot by a white cop.  Readers of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will not be surprised by the events which follow, though Thomas deserves some credit for evoking the specific time and place (the following/unfollowing of a race-themed Tumblr blog is a minor plot point).  At 400 plus pages, I didn't really linger on the prose, but I think I got the drift of it. As a criminal justice practitioner I didn't find the details of this particular fictional shooting of a young minority man by a white cop in the deep south particularly troubling, as far as those circumstances go.   Here, the cop mistakes a heavy comb being stored in the front driver door for a glock, which is ridiculous, but also something that no African American south would ever do (one, what teenage male owns a heavy duty hair brush let alone keep it in their driver side door while driving around the deep south.

Published 5/27/26

Wolf Whistle (1993)

by Lewis Nordam

Arrow Catcher, Mississippi

Mississippi: 18/19

     The end of each state is a cause for reflection on my part- what I've learned, any avenues I am interested in pursuing further, etc.  Mississippi is a dead end- I think I'll always be interested in Faulkner because of his interesting canonical history, but the more books I read set in Mississippi, the less interesting Faulkner becomes.  Here at the tail end of the chapter, Wolf Whistle has been kicking around my Kindle for six months.  This is an example of the "post-Faulkner" genre of southern lit, where authors with literary ambition are compared to one or all of the handful of authors from here with any literary cache.  Wolf Whistle is a surprisingly "even handed" recounting of the Emmett Till murder, mostly from the point of view of the murderer.     Considering how many of the books in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America deal with the murder of an African American male at the hands of local white people, I'm not sure Wolf Whistle was a necessary pick, but no doubt my viewpoint of this book was largely informed by it's second-to-last place in the random reading order.

   

Published 6/8/26

A Time to Kill (1989)

by John Grisham

Mississippi: 19/19

    I'm elated, finishing Louisiana and Mississippi in back-to-back weeks.  Florida is a real (metaphorical) breath of fresh air after reading so much about racial hatred and race-based injustice.  Fitting to end Mississippi with John Grisham, Mississippi best-sellingist author and all-around good guy.  Artistically, it's hard to say much about the man beyond pointing to his status as a perennial best seller.  He doesn't have the literary fictionish touch of Stephen King, and the court room thriller doesn't have the cache of detective fiction or police procedural.  And, with a net worth estimated at 400 million, I doubt he cares, or at least, he doesn't act like someone concerned with his literary legacy.

   A Time to Kill is, of course, his first novel, about a young-ish criminal defense lawyer in small-town Mississippi who is hired to defend an African American accused of gunning down the two white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter.  It's the kind of crime that transcends racial prejudice, a fact which is key to the plot in many different ways.  For me, it was all very "busman's holiday"- reading about my day-to-day concerns of being a criminal defense lawyer.  I think, though, you can tell that Grisham wrote this book without an inkling that he would became a mega seller of popular fiiction.