USA: Florida, The South
William Faulkner The Reivers . The last and most humorous work of this celebrated Southern author. The Sound and the Fury , a fascinating study of prejudice, set like most of his books in the fictional Yoknatapawpha County in Mississippi, is a much more difficult read.Carl Hiaasen Basket Case , and many others. Hiaasen is the funniest crime writer on the scene - and a razor-sharp chronicler of Florida's weirder, wilder side. This one sees dead rock stars, a grumpy investigative reporter and a giant frozen lizard caught up in a fast-moving caper plot.
Zora Neale Hurston Spunk . Short stories celebrating black culture and experience from around the country, by a writer from Florida who became one of the bright stars of the Harlem cultural renaissance in the 1920s.
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird . Classic tale of racial conflict and society's view of an outsider, Boo Radley, as seen through the eyes of children.
Cormac McCarthy Suttree . McCarthy is better known for his "modern Western" works like Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses , but this beautifully written tale, of a Knoxville, Tennessee scion opting for a hard-scrabble life among a band of vagrants on the Tennessee River, is his best.
Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter . McCullers is unrivaled in her sensitive treatment of misfits, in this case the attitude of a small Southern community to a deaf-mute.
Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind . Worth a read even if you know the lines of Scarlett and Rhett by heart.
*Toni Morrison Beloved . Exquisitely written ghost story by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, which recounts the painful lives of a group of freed slaves after Reconstruction, and the obsession a mother develops after murdering her baby daughter to spare her a life of slavery.
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find . Short stories, featuring strong, obsessed characters, that explore religious tensions and racial conflicts in the Deep South.
Alice Walker In Love and Trouble . Moving and powerful stories of black women in the South, from the author of the much-acclaimed The Color Purple .
Eudora Welty The Ponder Heart . Quirky, humorous evocation of life in a backwater Mississippi town. Her most critically acclaimed work, The Optimist's Daughter , explores the tensions between a judge's daughter and her stepmother.
Bailey White Mama Makes up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlight Motel . Witty, touching tales of Georgian life. The eponymous, eccentric mother is the delightful central character of the former, while the fond portrayal of White's small home-town in the second is spot-on.
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