Fiction:
Faulkner - Absolam! Absolam! and As I Lay Dying
Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
Larry Brown - Big Bad Love
Barry Hannah - Airships
Kaylee: So, uh, how come you don't care where you're going? Book: 'Cause how you get there is the worthier part.
'Serenity'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Hayden - Mar 10, 2009 9:06:38 am PDT #8560 of 28476
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
Hayden - Mar 10, 2009 9:07:23 am PDT #8561 of 28476
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
It's like I've been waiting for years for someone to ask about this!
lisah - Mar 10, 2009 9:14:20 am PDT #8562 of 28476
Punishingly Intricate
It's like I've been waiting for years for someone to ask about this!
hah! You are on it! All I could think of were these collections of stories we read for my southern lit class in grad school: Stories of the Old South and Stories of the New South. There was great stuff in both of them.
Hayden - Mar 10, 2009 9:16:50 am PDT #8563 of 28476
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
Fogel & Engermann's Time On The Cross is a hideous book that someone might recommend to you. I think you should read it, knowing that it's an abomination of history.
Thomas Dixon's The Clansman is the work of fiction that Birth of a Nation was based on.
Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is another work of fiction, but the details are rather eye-opening.
Cormac McCarthy's early work Child of God is a great slice of Southern Gothic.
Sorry, more nonfiction:
Eric Foner's Reconstruction
David Halberstam's The Children (which is the finest book he ever wrote)
Sara Evans - Personal Politics, which is about the way that feminism was changed by the civil rights movement
Hayden - Mar 10, 2009 9:18:41 am PDT #8564 of 28476
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
There was great stuff in both of them.
I have a few of those collections! And I agree.
lisah - Mar 10, 2009 9:27:14 am PDT #8565 of 28476
Punishingly Intricate
Cormac McCarthy's early work Child of God is a great slice of Southern Gothic.
Oh yeah. As is Outer Dark .
Toddson - Mar 10, 2009 9:32:20 am PDT #8566 of 28476
Friends don't let friends read "Atlas Shrugged"
Cavalier and Yankee by William R. Taylor
Pix - Mar 10, 2009 9:56:02 am PDT #8567 of 28476
The status is NOT quo.
William R. Taylor
Okay, that's creepy. That's my dad's name, middle initial and all. And though he is a published author (a filmography of Sydney Pollack published in the late 70s), that is definitely not his book. I guess it's not an unusual name, but it still made me look twice.
meara - Mar 10, 2009 11:10:17 am PDT #8568 of 28476
Wow, Corwood is all over that!
I'm just all excited about my public library still being Teh Awesome. I was linked to a random YA publisher that has cool books (but not a lot of them), and started seeing if my library had them, but since they're not a big one, wasn't hopeful...but then I realized I'd already read a few of their books. And lo and behold, the library carries most of their books! YAY. So I put a bunch of the interesting ones in their catalog on hold. From my house. At midnight. Cause I can do that too.
I love the future.
Ginger - Mar 10, 2009 11:15:00 am PDT #8569 of 28476
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda
More nonfiction:
20th century
Melissa Faye Greene: Praying for Sheetrock - racial politics in a microcosm
The Temple Bombing - While the subject is the 1958 Temple bombing (You may recall that Miss Daisy's response was "But the Temple is Reform."), it's a bigger examination of the Other in the South.
Janisse Ray: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
As a Vanderbilt grad, I'll put a word in for The Fugitives' I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. I think their basic tenet was wrong like a wrong thing, but they sure wrote pretty.
Civil War/Reconstruction
Albion Tourgée's A Fool's Errand, an 1878 memoir about Reconstruction by the man who later represented Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Mary Chesnut's Civil War (C. Vann Woodward, ed) - like almost any diary, it gets tedious at times, but it's a great contemporary source.