Here are 100 books that A Violent Gospel fans have personally recommended if you like
A Violent Gospel.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
O'Connor was an uncomfortable contradiction: she isolated herself as much as possible from the world she so beautifully described, writing about ordinary Southern lives with real human feeling and understanding - while holding personal views that were deeply ugly.
I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I will say is that her stories have a cast of people who seem strange until you recognise them, and then they are suddenly far too familiar. She wrote that anything out of the South would be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it actually was grotesque, in which case it would be called realistic.
A number of my characters owe their existence to her assortment of murderers, false prophets, hypocrites, malevolent strangers, and good old Southern weirdos.
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction.
There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death―is a…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
The Bundren family sets out across Mississippi to honor their dying matriarch's wish to be buried in her hometown, and nearly everything that can go wrong does. The ending is uneasy rather than truly resolved, and the landscape itself is a main character: it floods and burns and resists the Bundrens throughout.
Faulkner understood something crucial about the South, and Southerners by extension: it will not cooperate, and the people who love it regardless are complicated and oftentimes their own worst enemies.
I have been pressing this book into people’s hands since I studied it under the direction of Faulkner scholar Charles Chappell, and I aimed for my own book to sit in the same uneasy space.
The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
The film adaptations make True Grit look like a Western. It is not.
It is an Arkansas book, and Mattie Ross is an Arkansas character: fourteen years old, tiny, and completely on board with the violence she knows avenging her father's murder will require. She has courage and goal-oriented ruthlessness.
Mattie’s fortitude underlines the gap between what my characters can see for themselves and what they can actually reach. That gap is at the heart of what my novella is about.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
Ree Dolly is seventeen, raising her little brothers because her mother is too mentally unwell to do it herself, while her meth-cooking father has gone missing. His disappearance will ruin her already impoverished family if Ree cannot figure out what has happened.
Woodrell's Ozarks are in the same territory as my own debut, in pretty much every way: geographically, culturally, and in terms of the drug epidemic that continues to destroy American communities, especially in the South. Ree and Honey would probably never meet. But the same forces shaped them both, and the same neglect threatens them.
This is the book I would assign as required reading for anyone who is interested in what my book is trying to do.
This is a fiercely original tale of love, heartbreak and resilience in the lonely wastes of the American Midwest. The last time Ree saw her father, he didn't bring food or money but promised he'd be back soon with a paper sack of cash and a truckload of delights. Since he left, she's had to look after her mother - sedated and losing her looks - and her two younger brothers. Ree hopes the boys won't turn out like the others in the Ozark mountains - hard and mean before they've learnt to shave. One cold winter's day, Ree discovers…
I believe in democracy. I think the US has the opportunity to be the world’s first multicultural and inclusive democracy. And I think that’s a very, very hard thing to do. I’ve been writing about democracy through the lens of presidential history my whole career, and I think the US has done some things so impressively well while at the same time it frustratingly keeps failing to live up to its own ideals. The tensions and contradictions in our history as we try to expand and enact those ideas are endlessly fascinating. And I’m nervous that we may be seeing the end of a national commitment to democracy.
I love this book because it’s political science at its best; it uses a lot of great data to study how history affects us in the present; it shows us how hard change is and also what makes it possible. It’s depressing and hopeful and super smart. It’s social science but it’s also very readable.
The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South
Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched views of white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery-compared to areas…
As a writer who can never seem to tell a simple chronological, beginning/middle/end story in the books I write, I want to make a case for fictional works that fall somewhere between novels and traditional short story collections: shape-shifting novels. A shape-shifting novel allows for an expansiveness of time—for exploring the lives of generations within a single family, or occupying a single place, without having to account for every person, every moment, every year. Big, long Victorian novels, remember, were typically serialized and so written, and read, in smaller installments. The shape-shifting novel allows for that range between the covers of a single, and often shorter, book.
Even though it wasn’t commercially successful in its time, Cane was a critical success. I love the fact that it’s come to be considered a representative work of both literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.
The book’s three-part structure was described by Toomer as a circle, moving from stories, poems, and songs featuring rural characters in Georgia in the first part, to stories set in theaters and sections of dramatic dialogue set in the cities of Washington, DC, and Chicago in the second part, and finally back to the rural South in the third part.
It is a beautiful and wildly experimental work, and flies in the face of many assumptions about African American characters, in both the South and the North.
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work-part drama, part poetry, part fiction-powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I have always loved short stories for the way they pull readers into a complete universe and leave a lasting impact, all in a much shorter span than a novel. This is what makes them special! I love when an author presents an indelible image to recall later, or a passage that makes me go back to roll the words over my tongue again, or a turn of events that leaves me heartsore, or filled with longing, or purpose, or appreciation. Often, these shorter glimpses leave a longer impact because they are required to get and keep attention quickly. And the really good short stories do exactly that.
This is a “bring to a deserted island” kind of book.
I’m in perpetual awe at the way Carson McCullers wrote with an unflinching eye on people—their strengths and weaknesses and every nuance in between—and always, with love. I have laughed and cried and pondered the largest questions, all in a single McCullers story. And there’s simply no one who writes like she did.
The novelist, dramatist, and poet Carson McCullers was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction.
In nineteen stories that explore her signature themes of wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South, McCullers's novellas "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" are also included.
"[These novellas are] assuredly among the masterpieces of our language," Tennesee Williams said.
I’ve written a couple of books about other subjects, but most of my professional life has been devoted to writing, speaking, and teaching about the South. I’ve been doing it ever since I went north to college and graduate school in the 1960s. My early books and articles were written as a sociologist, mostly for other sociologists, but in the 1970s I started writing what I learned to call “familiar essays” for a more general readership, and lately I’ve been writing about Southern foodways—three books about barbecue (so far), one of them a cookbook. I’ve also written several country songs (only one of them recorded).
This magnificent history of the South’s landscape, an unexpected one-off from a historian of military medicine, looks at how humans have shaped the Southern land and vice versa. It debunks the romantic view of pre-Columbian Indians as “natural ecologists” living in harmony with nature, showing how they radically altered their environment by hunting and burning. Europeans were even more exploitative and brought with them diseases that loved their new home. Later developments like flood control, wildlife protection, and anti-pollution measures have had profound and sometimes unanticipated consequences. The book is richly detailed and unusually well-written—not surprising, since Cowdrey has also written award-winning science fiction and fantasy.
Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns…
I am an American novelist and a lifelong, enthusiastic student of American history. To me, history is people. In addition to first-hand accounts and biographies, one of the best ways to understand those people is historical fiction. For the last two decades, I’ve lived in the Southern United States, surrounded by the legacy of slavery, America’s “peculiar institution” that claimed an unequivocal evil was a positive good. Because both the enslaved and their enslavers were human beings, the ways that evil manifested were as complex as each individual—as were the ways people maintained their humanity. These are a few of the novels on the subject that blew me away.
This novel begins just after the American Civil War and Emancipation, but it foreshadows the horrific legacy of slavery. The titular character, a Black man named Sam who is now free, goes in search of Tilda, the wife whom slavery ripped away from him. Meanwhile, her Confederate enslaver drags Tilda westward, refusing to give up the woman he thinks he owns. How do you rebuild a society and a family in the wake of slavery’s devastation? Pitts explores this question unforgettably, acknowledging the inevitable violence but with a glimmer of hope. Freeman put me through a whole gamut of emotions. It rung me out and gave me a soothing cup of tea at the end.
Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged." At the same…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
Taylor is one of the authors who made me want to be a writer. He’s a magician of the short story, compressing events and characters from the upper South into luminous stories that can seem more real than life. He wrote longhand in poetic lines, usually drafting about a hundred pages for every ten he kept. The result is a rich reduction of scenes that move us to laughter and tears. Taylor holds the mirror up to life, and you can’t help but be drawn in.
From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.
