Next Reads: Southern Classics: Home

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most remarkable plays of our time. It created an immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. It shot Marlon Brando to fame in the role of Stanley Kowalski, a sweat-shirted barbarian, the crudely sensual brother-in-law who precipitated Blanche's tragedy.

Also Available as a Downloadable and a DVD.

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people. But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone.

A brilliant evocation of a place, a heart-rending family story, a gripping and suspenseful mystery—

Also Available in Large Print and as an Audio Book.

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him

Ernest Gaines brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

When Janie Starks returns home, she seeks identity and independence as the small southern black community buzzes with gossip about the outcome of her affair with a younger man.

Also Available as an Audio Book.

The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice.

Also Available as an Audio Book, a Downloadable and a DVD.

At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine, finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated.

The life and loves of the beautiful and selfish Scarlett O'Hara set against the American Civil War through the subsequent Reconstruction.

It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

A fat New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly, gets a job at his mother's urging but ends up leading a worker's revolt.

A feisty young boy fakes his own death to escape his abusive father and heads off down the Mississippi River with his newfound friend Jim, a runaway slave. The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

Also Available as a J Audio Book.

Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration.

The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a Southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.