Books like Shiloh and Other Stories — picked by fans

Based on the boyhood memories of author Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the best portraits of small-town American life in the 19th century.

Centered around the coming-of-age of George Willard, the 22 stories in the book provide numerous character sketches of people in the fictional town of Winesburg. Anderson writes in a plain style that suits the world he describes.

The book pioneers an approach to fictional portraiture also taken up by Wiseman in his later Our-Town cycle of films that focus on individual rural communities—Aspen, Belfast, Maine, In Jackson Heights, and Monrovia, Indiana—and adopt a seemingly similar straightforward style. Like those films, the book features a series of glimpses that together add up more than just the sum of its parts.

Kent Haruf wrote Our Souls at Night as he was dying. What happens in it? Not a lot. It’s much easier to write stories in which things blow up, plot devices creak, and an ending ties everything up neatly. This quiet, elegiac novel is not that.

Addie and Louis, elderly neighbors, begin sleeping together because the nights are long and they are lonely. Her young grandson, Jamie, visits. Louis gives him a catcher’s mitt and brings home a shelter dog, Bonnie. Their grown children interfere. Complications ensue. And there are no quotation marks to indicate dialogue.

Yet, here I am telling you to go, now, find this book and read it today? Am I crazy? You decide (after you read the book).

P.S. Skip this film. Jane Fonda’s Stepford Wives’ perfection ruins a movie that needed its female beauty defined by wrinkles and gray hair, and an aging, infirm body.… show more.

There is a purity and grace about this book that is deeply moving; it tells me about the love of a good man, as he explores his own life in the face of death. All he has to leave his small son is not money but the possibility of dedicating oneself to a good life.

It is set in middle America, in 1956, when I, as it happens, was ten years old. Everything that matters to me is captured here in this exquisite book. It is written beautifully, not ever weighed down by mind-numbing cliches. If only everyone would read this book, I thought as I sobbed my way through it, there would be no wars, and there would be time and inspiration for healing the planet. I take it with me wherever I go.

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, an adult narrator looks back at childhood and the lingering effects of childhood loss and displacement. He recalls his mother’s death, his father’s remarriage, and moving from a beloved home. The author also tells a parallel story of the scandal that befell his friend Cletus: his father shot his mother’s lover, and then drowned himself. For the narrator, his lost boyhood home is recalled like a dream of paradise lost, a mirage of another life: “I dream about it, the proportions are so satisfying to the eye and the rooms so bright, so charming and full of character that I feel I must somehow give up my present life and go live in that house: that nothing else will make me happy.” This novel about haunting memories of a lost place and past will haunt the reader. This was one of my father’s… show more.

Who doesn’t like a good treasure story? When you are an experienced metal detectorist, such as me, this book makes total sense. Much research is packed into the book which covers states: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though only one of these legends came near my home, I enjoyed reading about the history and scanning the old maps. The book’s appearance reminds me of a personal journal written by an old explorer.

This will not provide a treasure map with an X mark on where to dig, but for me, it does incite an itch to dust off the old Gold Bug and take a backroads to drive looking for a promising site to explore and recede to an earlier time when grandma might have lost her broach in the chicken pen.

This book told me a lot about both its heroine, Henrietta Wood, and its author, Caleb McDaniel. From an obscure 19th-century newspaper article mentioning a court case in Ohio, McDaniel learned of a female slave from Kentucky who had been freed in Cincinnati, kidnapped, and illegally sold back into slavery, and who, after the Civil War, returned to successfully sue for damages the men who had kidnapped and re-enslaved her.

Both the heroine and the author are untiring in their efforts to get to the truth and to convey that truth to a wider audience. I was impressed with McDaniel’s willingness to share with his readers his doubts and fears about recovering this story, and equally impressed by his efforts, successful in the end, to match the determination of Henrietta Wood.

Not a dread-inducing house this time but a lighthouse—in the middle of the woods. This book is so original in its elements—a haunted lighthouse, a sheriff in love with the woman who shot him, and a big-cat sanctuary—that it is completely awe-inspiring how Koryta is able to weave together a complex, creepy ghost narrative. Koryta (and his pseudonym, Scott Carson) is always a guaranteed purchase when a new book publishes.

As one of the most unflinching, realistic depictions of PTSD in modern history, First Blood gave me shivers. It provides an intense dive into the psyche of someone traumatized by warfare and how messy and unpredictable one can become when attempting to adjust to civilian life. It may be hard for some to stomach. 

I loved this great story about trying to do the right thing when everything is stacked against you. Ecological disasters rarely make the news anymore, but in this book, a teen discovers that a mining operation in her grandma’s town is making people sick. She can’t abide the corruption of local authorities and how everyone is held hostage by the jobs the mining industry brings.

I cheered Liberty along as she fought and fought, gathering help along the way from unlikely corners. She draws on her sense of justice to find a way that works around the corruption and right the wrongs in a real way, and I was reminded that even if you can’t help everyone, helping as many as you can is worth it.

When I moved to Kentucky many years ago, the large Confederate memorial on a downtown street was a puzzle to me because I knew that Kentucky had been a Union state. As one historian said many years ago, “Kentucky seceded after the war was over.” Marshall’s book walks us through that process. She covers everything from politics to postwar violence to children’s literature to the resistance efforts of Kentucky’s African Americans as she explains why those Confederate memorials and monuments went up all around the state.