Nick White's bright story drove, Sweet and Depression , peels back the mantle on masculinity and identity in the Deep South. The stories are split into two parts—the kickoff features misfits reeling from expiry, disillusionment, and trauma, while the second captures angles of aspiring writer Forney Culpepper's life. White picks 10 Southern books you probably haven't read.

Information technology has been said, I forget by whom, that my home land of Mississippi has given nascence to more writers per capita than whatsoever other land in the country. While folks from my cervix of the woods have been known to exaggerate, information technology is a truth universally acknowledged that the Due south has produced several towering figures of American literature, many of whom we know by their concluding names: Faulkner, Wright, Welty, O'Connor, Hannah, and on and on. I didn't fully capeesh this rich literary tradition until I left home for graduate school in the Midwest. Only so did my homesickness lead me back to these authors, which, in turn, pointed me to other Southern writers whose books I plant to be every bit as compelling and as haunting every bit their larger-than-life forbears, but, for whatever reason, oasis't received the same amount of attention. The following is a list of 10 vital, and quintessentially Southern, titles that deserve to sit down on the shelf aslope the classics.

1. Exquisite Corpse past Poppy Z. Brite

The unforgettable story of two serial killers who meet in The Big Easy, fall in love (or, um, bloodlust) with each other, and wreak havoc on the lives of gay men, Brite's subversive cult classic might bear witness likewise bloody and gruesome for some readers, merely fans of Dennis Cooper and Carson McCullers (at her most grotesque) will capeesh the mode Brite conjures up this visceral tale of cannibals, shock jocks, and queer nihilism at the peak of the AIDS crisis.

2. A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan

Kenan's novel is a haunting meditation on organized religion and place, loosely retelling Dickens's A Christmas Tale, ready in Tim's Creek, North Carolina. During a demon-filled night in spring, immature Horace Cross must confront his ain burgeoning same-sexual activity desires by revisiting pivotal moments in his spiritual and sexual development. Peppered throughout the narrative are other voices of Tim'due south Creek, most notably Reverend Jimmy Green, whose interactions with Horace force him to question the customs that produced closeted men similar Horace and himself. A riveting narrative, told with original prose and inventive structuring, this novel is nothing short of a masterpiece and almost always finds its way onto my syllabi for courses in queer and Southern literatures.

three. Long Segmentation by Kiese Laymon

Laymon'southward extraordinary debut novel is a tale of two Cities—two boys named City, that is, who live in Mississippi at different times. The story opens in nowadays-24-hour interval Jackson with the start City (short for Citoyen) every bit he gears up to compete in the national televised competition, "Can Yous Use That Word in a Sentence," with his rival, Lavander Peeler. City discovers a volume, titled Long Partitioning, that appears to be narrated by some other Metropolis from the 1980s. From in that location, the novel becomes a wild take a chance story involving time travel, likewise every bit a bold exploration of Mississippi's racist legacies and how the effects of segregation and slavery go on to concord consequence for our narrators and the places they telephone call dwelling house. (Besides, dear reader, call back Kiese Laymon'due south proper name: later this year, his memoir, Heavy, will be published by Scribner and promises to low-cal the globe on fire.)

4. Final Vinyl Days: and Other Stories by Jill McCorkle

A reviewer once called McCorkle "our gimmicky Eudora Welty," and in this collection of nine darkly funny stories, yous volition detect this statement was non hyperbole. Like Welty, McCorkle is a master of vocalism. In this collection, she depicts women trying to brand the best of bad situations: whether they're out of work, out of luck, or out of dear, her characters read like the real-life inspirations of land music songs penned by Rosanne Cash or Mary Chapin Carpenter. "Your Hubby Is Cheating on Us," perhaps the best story in the collection, is a dramatic monologue told from the perspective of the other adult female to her lover's wife. What deepens this scenario into a true feat of imagination is how McCorkle imbues the prose with plenty sense of humour and pathos so that when you finish this woman's wild yawp, yous volition be both delighted and devastated. (Note: reading McCorkle is lovely, but hearing McCorkle read her work is a true experience for the ages—I've been blest to attend ii readings of hers, and each time, I've laughed and cried, often at the same time. If she ever happens by a bookstore or university near you, go.)

5. Carbohydrate Among the Freaks by Lewis Nordan

Perhaps more well-known for his novels, Wolf Whistle and Music from the Swamp, Nordan's brusque fiction has delighted me for years, and his collected work, Saccharide Amidst the Freaks, brings together his best work from Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and The All-Girl Football Team. Quirky and bizarre, this collection includes many of his stories that characteristic the titular Sugar as he bumbles his way through childhood and adolescence in the Mississippi Delta. Information technology besides features Nordan'southward exquisitely rendered "The All-Girl Football Team," which recounts what happens one nighttime at a pocket-size-town high schoolhouse when the cheerleaders don pads and helmets and take to the gridiron and the varsity jocks put on brusque skirts and earnestly shake pom-poms—a raucously funny story that also investigates the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways nosotros are allowed to and prohibited from transgressing traditional gender roles.

half-dozen. The Bitterweed Path by Thomas Hal Phillips

Published in 1950, almost 20years before the Stonewall Inn riots, The Bitterweed Path charts the erotically-charged bond betwixt two boys separated past form in turn-of-the-century Vicksburg. Phillips's groundbreaking novel takes inspiration from the story of David and Jonathan in the Old Attestation and delicately depicts a love triangle that develops between the two boys and 1 of their fathers. The book spent over 40 years out of impress until the University of Due north Carolina Printing republished it in 1996, with a loving introduction past the scholar John Howard, who says that, with this novel, "we can speculate about loves, liaisons, meetings, unions, and emotional ties of various sorts between men—rural men, farmers, and white Southerners—who take however to fully emerge from the historical record of the postbellum era."

7. Lizzie by Dorothy Shawhan

Lizzie Dunbar, the privileged girl of the governor of Mississippi, bucks against tradition and founds a newspaper for women in the 1920s. As with the best of Southern literature, the titular heroine'due south story is only the half of it, as the aggressive novel evolves into a rich tapestry of voices, including the likes of authors Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, not to mention memorable narrations by a horse and a tree.

8. The Angelic Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer

Quondam Rowan Oak curator Shearer'south intricately-woven sophomore novel takes place in the fictional Delta town of Madagascar and is inhabited by a various bandage of characters, including Angus, the 2d-generation Chinese owner of The Celestial Grocery. Filled with resplendent, well-nigh magical prose, the novel is less concerned with plot and more interested in accruing a playlist of unforgettable voices.

9. Where the Line Bleeds past Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward is both well-known in literary circles and a mainstay on bestseller lists, and for good reason: she is producing indelible fine art that vividly captures the voices and lives of African-Americans in and around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, rendered in language that is both lush and visionary. Her debut novel, nonetheless, received less attention than her afterwards work has, which—as a Ward completist—I find appalling. As with Sing, Unburied, Sing and Relieve the Bones, Where the Line Bleeds is gear up in post-Katrina Bois Sauvage, MS, and follows twin brothers, Joshua and Christophe, during a pivotal summer in their lives after they graduate from high school. What marks this novel as truly atypical, though, is Ward's attending to place, which she demonstrates in all of her work, but in the pages of this particular book, Wolf River becomes another character  altogether—and as someone who grew upwards in front of a river, I keep to marvel at how Ward so accurately depicts the way our geographies can impact how we see ourselves and the bodies we inhabit.

10. Veneer past Steve Yarbrough

This gorgeous drove highlights the lives of Mississippians at abode and away. The title story centers on two childhood friends, a human being and woman, who reconnect over dinner while the man's family is away on vacation. As they reminisce, the past is, at first, given a nostalgic gloss, which slowly rubs abroad equally the two delve deeper into their histories. Such is the theme that connects the stories found here: the shiny "veneer" nosotros give our troubled pasts in order to live with them.