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The best Southern writing that will ‘ride inside your blood vessels’ as selected by the acclaimed Virginia-born novelist Glenn Taylor was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. His first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, was a 2009 National Book Critics Circle award finalist and acclaimed by Patrick McCabe in the Guardian as ” a galloping, defiant epic “. His second novel, The Marrowbone Marble Company, was published last month. Buy The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor from the Guardian bookshop “Last year, smack in the middle of the southern leg of my first real book tour, I was signing stock at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, which we can safely call the South. Quail Ridge is a wonderful little independent store with an impressive inventory. When I finished signing the stack of books, the store manager took them off to be shelved. I browsed. She called to me from two aisles over: ‘Do you want to be shelved in fiction or Southern fiction?’ I laughed. I thought of all the things I always think of when folks wonder about southern West Virginia’s regional designation. The civil war. Lincoln’s presidential decree. The creation of my home state in the year 1864. Violence. Blood. Cuisine, culture, storytelling. A slow ease to things. I answered her: ‘I’ll let you decide. I’m just happy to be here.’ “West Virginia is not the South. Yet, as soon as I write that, I have to question what South we’re speaking of. Are we talking about maps or music? Are we talking about parts of speech, burial custom, family gatherings, cornbread, religion? Coal or cotton? Hill or field? In the end, I get tired of thinking about it. I get tired of labels on literature, of categorising fiction by region or race, of trying to figure what Southern voices New York likes and doesn’t like. Yet, at times, I freely embrace such cataloguing. If Quail Ridge Books wants to stick my novel between those by Southern scribes, I’d be honoured. And so, I will participate. I will list my top 10 Southern books, but I’ll note that at least one may not be Southern, in some folks’ estimation. Each is a book that has, at one time in my life, sustained me as a reader and a writer. These books will ride inside your blood vessels. They’ll stick to your ribs.” 1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee It may strike you as too obvious a choice, or too innocent, or too commonplace. Maybe I’m overly biased by the fact that my dad read it to me aloud, twice, when I was a young boy. In the end, it just feels right. It can be read again and again. The prose never breaks down under scrutiny. It is evident that the words were composed with great toil, over a vast stretch of time. The book is not, contrary to popular opinion, meant for children. It is for everyone. Everyone should read it. If my wife and I were to have a fourth child, and if that child were to be another boy (we have three boys already), I would insist that his name be Atticus Finch Taylor. I have lived long enough to know that when it comes to how we treat one another, adults can learn a great deal from children. Harper Lee’s book reminds us of this, and perhaps Dill best exemplifies this notion when he says, “I’m little but I’m old.” 2. Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg One day, maybe the banks of the world will trade not in money, but in stories. Bragg knows that stories are our most valuable collective currency, that they will outlive everything else, and he mines deep to tell the tale of his grandfather, whom he never knew. It is some of the best writing on a particular people and their particular place that you will ever come across. Bragg writes: “A man like Charlie Bundrum doesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second- and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers. The thing to do, if you can, is write them down on new paper.” 3. Red Hills and Cotton by Ben Robertson This was published in 1942, and Robertson was killed in a plane crash in 1943. This was just the beginning for a writer who possessed the gift of the true storyteller. His memory and his connection to the old ways were both beyond impressive. He wrote: “The world to us is filled with sin, and for our souls there is a struggle that never stops. In the South we had rather save our souls than make a lot of money.” 4. Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington Snake-handling. Most of us barely have a picture in our minds of what this activity might involve. We wonder who might do such a thing as pick up a serpent in church. Maybe we’re hip to good Texas music, and we know the song by the Gourds which goes, “Jesus Christ with signs following/ Serpents up in the air/ Hell-bent on heaven-bound/ your earthly end is near.” Dennis Covington goes where most of us never will, and he does things for the sake of real writing that most of us could never do. This book may have begun as journalism when, as a writer for the New York Times, Covington covered the attempted murder trial of a snake-handler, but it evolves into something else altogether. It is the real deal. 5. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews What is memory? What is identity? How do the events of our childhoods shape what we become? These may seem pedestrian or cliched questions, but read Harry Crews’s memoir and see if you don’t consider such questions more deeply. Crews is a wildly misunderstood writer. His novels have perhaps been less than consistent. He’s enjoyed the drink and the dogfight and the bloodsport more than most. He’s awoken to find a hinge tattooed in the crook of his elbow. You’ll understand it all a little better when you read of his childhood in Georgia, where he was born to sharecropping and hog-butchering and unexplainable heartbreak again and again. I have a CD on which Crews says, “Stories was everything, and everything was stories.” Ain’t that the truth. 6. Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin This book was immeasurably important in my development as a writer. It showed me that a relatively young author can call forth the past in such a way as to make the reader forget who wrote the words. It is raw, wise and real. It puts you squarely upon the bloodied Alabama ground of the 1890s Mitcham Beat war. My wife tried to talk to me as I was finishing it, and I ignored every word she said. I did not want it to end. 7. The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogun This is Appalachia. And maybe it’s the South, too. It will probably be shelved beside academic books because it is an exhaustively researched historical perspective on the coal mine wars in West Virginia in the 1920s. And maybe I am biased, as much of it takes place in my father’s hometown of Matewan. But know this: you’ll read it and realise that maybe you never truly knew the meaning of words such as “the Union” or “redneck” or “outlaw train” or “working class”. 8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” It’s the kind of first line every writer wishes for. It reads as if destined, channelled by some ancient teller. It reads biblical. Much like Faulkner’s, Hurston’s magnificent book can be tainted by wildly varying political opinions, critical approaches and the like. And, again, as in Faulkner’s work, dialect is an easy target. This book was oft misunderstood before, and it will be misunderstood again. But it is beautiful and powerful, and it must be read. 9. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner I don’t care to speculate on which of his works is great and which isn’t. I don’t presume to know what’s highbrow and what’s low-brow when it comes to Faulkner. Present tense and multiple, alternating points of view – none of that talk interests me either. The fact is, he wrote this book while everybody else slept. He wrote it at the Ole Miss power plant, where he worked as a night watchman, and he finished typing on January 12 1930, which is precisely 45 years to the day before I was born. Just listen to the words on the page. 10. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor A debt is owed to O’Connor by anyone who has tried their hand at the short story. She is so much more than A Good Man is Hard to Find, and this book proves it. The stories remind us of the grace and violence in our little lives. Their mysteries boldly refuse to be analysed in some cold, academic manner. As O’Connor said, “In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.” We don’t dissect these particular stories. We enjoy them. Fiction Harper Lee Literary fiction United States American civil war guardian.co.uk