Or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, [link] which is slighter, but a good read.
Oh, man. That book, along with Bastard Out of Carolina and The Book of Ruth, made me wary of "Southern women's fiction" as a genre for years.
If you're willing to deal with a bit of preachiness, there's Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The gender-role stuff is huge and explicit and a bit biased (women=creative force for good, men=you can imagine), but I found them interesting.
I recommend Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, or Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man (which is a short story collection)
If you're willing to deal with a lot of preachiness, try Tepper's The Fresco. I think she takes the feminism and twists it into something ugly, but it might be good fodder for some heated discussion.
...try Tepper's The Fresco. I think she takes the feminism and twists it into something ugly, but it might be good fodder for some heated discussion.
I think she does that a lot.
It's more unusual for Tepper when one of her books doesn't make someone feel that way, in fact.
Thanks for all the great suggestions.
I knew the hivemind wouldn't let me down.
I love Atwood and Paley and sometimes Lippmann(Although she's a life-stealing heffa and I don't like her series books as well as the stand-alones. Which is not related to the heffa issue.)
Off-topic, Corwood: thanks for the pimpage.
It's a joke.
Because she's a best-selling mystery novelist and I'm a wannabe, and she's married to my Fake Literary Husband.
So it's like she has the life I wanted or something.
(mock-shaking fist)
Bitch.
Laura Lippman and David Simon are married?!? I had no idea! That's cool.
So it's like she has the life I wanted or something.
Oh, *phew* -- I thought for a moment that you were saying she'd done your FLH wrong or something! Because I lurve her, and lurve the two being together even more (even if he is totally your FLH).