100 Books Like Lanterns on the Levee

This is a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River in general and the Flood of 1927 in particular. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, it was incredibly insightful and full of context, especially about the relations between the ruling-class planters and their African American workers. The influx of Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants is detailed and explains much of the Delta's cultural diversity.

The book also tells the story of the government’s response to the devastating flood, ultimately propelling Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928.

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.

Even though this is a collection of short stories, it tells the story of Mississippi and the South in a way few have captured. I have recommended this book to dozens of people over the years who were looking to begin reading Mr. Faulkner’s work.

The stories about Native American culture (Red Leaves, A Justice, and Lo) are insightful and completely changed my thinking about that culture. The stories of small-town life come alive in unique and disturbing ways, but they are always inventive and deep. I love these stories and the fact that even after eighty or ninety years, they continue to introduce one of the greatest writers in the English language to the people of the world.

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I understood that much of American popular culture came from this odd place between Memphis and Vicksburg. James Cobb’s book tells the story of Blues music, agriculture, cataclysmic floods, and American apartheid.

I found it curious but fascinating that the Delta was one of the planet's most racially and culturally diverse places.

It took me two tries to finish this tremendously difficult novel about a father who desperately wants a son, and gets two. Considered by many to be Faulkner’s most challenging work, it defeated me on my first attempt. But I was captivated by this example of fatherhood gone obsessively wrong, so returned to it and soldiered through.

It was worth the effort. I hope I never find any commonality with the main character of this novel, and I’m not sure if I should take solace from Faulkner’s conclusion that we can never really understand another person, and may not want to. I read it as a cautionary tale of what a family can become.

I hesitate to describe The Trees — in fact, I recommend you avoid reading any reviews, or even the back cover, because the book is so full of surprises that it would be a sin to spoil any of them. I’ll only say that of all the recent books dealing with the intractable shame of racial struggles, this is my favorite, hands-down. Prepare yourself to be alternately sick with laughter or sick with horror — which is exactly the experience of the protagonists, and of their real-life compatriots. Afterward, like me, you’ll want to read everything else Percival Everett has written.

Perhaps the most powerful story surrounding The Bitterweed Path concerns the creation of the novel itself. This tale of cross-class, same-sex love set in late 19th century rural Mississippi – a place and time so well evoked you can feel the heat – was originally published in 1950(!). They say historical novels reflect the time in which they’re written at least as much as the time in which they’re set, and there’s a distinct obliqueness to the writing here. That does not detract from the astonishing eroticism of main character Darrell’s first glance at Roger, the boy he will fall in love with (and vice versa). Nor does it diminish the radical shift, in more than one sense of the term, when Roger’s father also emerges as a mutual love interest for Darrell.

Ace Atkins played defensive end for Auburn. His picture once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. His dad coached for the 49ers. In other words, Ace knows football, and that fact is on full display in The Innocents. Although the plot doesn’t center around football, this novel features one of the best depictions of a Southern, sleazeball coach you’ll ever find in fiction. Oh, and it’s a part of Ace’s Quinn Colson series. So if you like it, there’s more where that came from!

Ryan Carroll is a young woman who has recently moved back home to rural Mississippi to live in her childhood home. A home where, as a young child, she became lost in the surrounding woods one winter night and was saved by a mysterious young man who was gone by the time rescuers were able to find her. All these years later, she finds she is irresistibly drawn to these woods.

I love it when a character can feel a calling to something, and they follow that instinct, which leads them to an epic adventure. One day, while she is taking a dip in a pond tucked back into the thick of these woods, she sees him, the boy who saved her. She soon learns that there is an entire secret world hidden in the woods surrounding her childhood home, and it’s not one populated by humans. Once this story… show more.

Black people, enslaved and free, sued whites in court in Mississippi and Louisiana, and sometimes they won. 

Welch researched hundreds of documents in some archives off the beaten path. She discovered a hitherto unknown chapter of African American life which changes our perspective on the legal system. 

I felt inspired by the courage and resilience of the litigants.