Southern Literature
We are a bookstore in the American South — in a small Georgia city at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Southern literature is not a category we observe from a distance. It is the tradition we live inside. These are the books that define it — the essential works, the living writers, and the conversations that the literature of the South has been having for three centuries.
Where to Begin: The Essential Works
If you are new to Southern literature — or if you want to read more deeply into it — these are the books that define the tradition. Every one of them is worth your time.
The novel that introduced millions of readers to the moral landscape of the American South. Scout Finch, Atticus, and Maycomb, Alabama — timeless and still essential, still contested, still alive.
Faulkner's masterwork — the collapse of the Compson family in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Dense, demanding, and magnificent. The greatest American modernist novel, set in the South. If you read one Faulkner, this is it.
Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning masterwork — a ghost story about slavery's aftermath, set just after the Civil War. The most important American novel of the twentieth century's second half. If you haven't read it, read it now.
Ward's National Book Award winner — a road trip through Mississippi that is also a ghost story and a meditation on racial trauma across generations. Ward is the best living Southern writer. This is her masterpiece so far.
The greatest American short story collection. Thirty-one stories set in Georgia and the South, full of grotesques, grace, and violence. O'Connor is the essential Georgia writer. Start with "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."
Conroy's greatest novel — the Wingo family of the South Carolina Low Country, their beauty and violence, love and damage. Nobody writes the Southern landscape — the marsh, the tides, the heat — like Conroy.
The most popular novel of the last decade — and a genuinely good Southern novel, whatever its critics say. The marsh, the isolation, the murder mystery, and the feral girl who grew up wild in the coastal Carolina wilderness. Owens, notably, lived in Georgia.
Southern Writers Working Today
The Southern literary tradition is not a museum piece. These writers are alive, publishing now, and carrying the tradition forward.
Understanding the South: Essential Non-Fiction
These works of non-fiction are indispensable for understanding the American South — its history, its racial architecture, its contradictions, and its enduring power over the American imagination.
We are an Appalachian bookstore — the Blue Ridge comes to an end at Currahee Mountain, just outside Toccoa. Appalachian literature is our literature. These are the books that capture the mountain South.
Southern Literature Is What We Do
We are a Southern independent bookstore — and we take the literature of this region personally. Ask us for a recommendation. Any title on this list is available to order, and we keep the Southern fiction section well-stocked. Come see us at 47 Doyle Street in Historic Toccoa, Georgia.
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