Books like The Whole Town's Talking

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 short book of fiction whose main character I remember by name decades after first reading it: Robert Kincaid, a photographer, a traveler, going it alone.

I’ve thought back on this book while discovering, first-hand, that all sorts of great loves don’t always end in the happy-ever-after we might wish for. But we’ve been blessed to have experienced them nonetheless. His was a haunting dedication: "For the peregrines."

In contrast to his books about the Old West, McMurtry’s contemporary Westerns tell a more unvarnished truth. I read this book for the umpteenth time just prior to beginning my first novel, Where the Hurt Is. My book was a crime novel. McMurtry’s was a coming-of-age story. Nevertheless, his depiction of his book’s quasi-fictional Thalia, Texas rang so many bells and reminded me so much of the small Oklahoma towns where I grew up, I can’t deny being influenced by it.

At times, I would grow short of breath as I was reminded of parallel characters and events from my own childhood. Even today, the claustrophobia of Thalia and its characters’ fear of being unable to escape scares the crap out of me.

When I think of Maine, I think of mill towns. When I think of mill towns, I think of Empire Falls. And to consider Russo’s titular town is to consider what happens to a community when its once-lucrative mills are abandoned.

I have witnessed it repeatedly through the years, all around the state of Maine—first our mills go out of business, then the towns that grew around those mills gradually, inexorably decline. Russo captures this struggle, creating characters as real as the millworkers I grew up with.

He also emphasizes a strange thing that happens in these blue-collar communities: even though the people who live there know their town will never be as it once was, most of them still can’t bring themselves to leave. 

Who knew that the life of a prim and proper midwestern suburban housewife could be so riveting and moving? Written by a man (!) and told in vignettes that act like facets to a many-sided gem that is this novel, Mrs. Bridge is a mind-blowingly beautiful book that centers on the invisible forces of patriarchy that restrict a woman, wife, and mother.

Although this book is many years old, it is forever timely. With humor and clear, satisfying, and exquisite writing, this is a book that I return to often since, like a glittering jewel, it is surprising at every turn.

This book reminded me of the deep parallels in the histories of Missouri and Kentucky. I don’t tend to associate Kentucky with Missouri, but Astor’s book really drives home why that is wrongheaded. Both were border states and, during the war, both suffered guerrilla insurgencies, had divided populations, and ended up supporting the pro-Confederate Lost Cause vision of the war. And when so much writing on Kentucky’s history is focused on its white inhabitants, Astor restores agency to its African American residents, showing how they resisted slavery and then, after emancipation, created their own institutions to contest for racial equality in the face of fierce opposition.

This is a very powerful book that takes the city of St. Louis as a case study to illustrate the amount of violence, discrimination, and inequities that have happened across a 300-year period, particularly with respect to race. 

Johnson develops the idea of racial capitalism throughout the book, and notes that “the red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” At the same time, the city has also been home to both communist and Black radical organizing into the 20th century. 

A highly interesting and important case study of American inequality and exploitation.

I love Chapman.

He might not be the godfather of Missouri archaeology, but he sure was the dean. This was his whole life! This book is by far the most concise, encyclopedic book of ancient Missouri, written in clear language, with great maps by his wife and research partner Eleanor Chapman.

You don’t have to have 14 PhDs and a language translator to read him. He’s an amateur’s dream, and I am very much an amateur! It's impossible to write about ancient Missouri without Chapman; he’s really indispensable, and I lean very heavily on these books, not just as a guide to what was there, but how to think about it, too.

He’s not mystical or magical, like too many American archeologists today. He just reports what he sees as the facts, ma'am. What I found tragic, though, is that a lot of the sites he covers have been deliberately… show more.

I was introduced to the beguiling novels of Jonathan Carroll by the owner of a bookstore where I worked when I was young. Thirty years on and I still greatly anticipate a new novel by this unclassifiable author. 

It follows the efforts of a teacher and his girlfriend to write the biography of a deceased children’s author whom they idolize. I love that Carroll’s books begin with familiar scenarios but soon take off into a very unique kind of magical realism.

Carroll always writes with a sure, sweet touch; his dialogue is whip-smart, his characters larger than life, and his stories always zip along with an easy conversational tone. You can start anywhere with his books, but there’s a special place in my heart for this one.

Street Justice is a terrific ethnography on an issue too seldom talked about in criminal justice textbooks, namely, payback in the context of drug dealing.

Jacobs and Wright did not set out here for any new philosophical insights about revenge. Instead, they are interested in its reality. What emerges from this study is a stark catalog of how retaliation actually works, among real people, in a real American city, and what a chilling picture it is.

Based on interviews with actual St. Louis offenders who related their personal experiences with loss, pain, humiliation, and anger, Street Justice is an eye-opener even for those of us who thought we knew something about this topic.

Read this book if you a cop. If you are just interested in law and violence, as I am, read this one alongside Miller, Gould, and a few of the Icelandic Sagas, and I guarantee you will… show more.