It's like I've been waiting for years for someone to ask about this!
See, Vera? Dress yourself up; you get taken out somewhere fun.
Jayne ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
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 9:07:23 am PDT #8561 of 28431
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
lisah - Mar 10, 2009 9:14:20 am PDT #8562 of 28431
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 28431
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 28431
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 28431
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 28431
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 28431
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 28431
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 28431
"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.
Hil R. - Mar 10, 2009 6:22:19 pm PDT #8570 of 28431
Sometimes I think I might just move up to Vermont, open a bookstore or a vegan restaurant. Adam Schlesinger, z''l
I second the recommendation of The Temple Bombing, and add And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank by Steve Oley. I've also heard good things about The Peddler's Grandson by Edward Cohen, but I've never read it.