Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., picks the best books about the South. Next to tomes by Faulkner, Welty and other familiar names, he includes:
- All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten. "The one book that explains the South," it's the story of Shaw's life that the illiterate black Alabama sharecropper told to Rosengarten.
- A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews, an autobiography that Howorth said complements Richard Wright's Black Boy.
- Elegy for a Southern Drawl by Rodney Jones, "one of our great poets, and his best book of poems."