100 books like Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River in general and the Flood of 1927 in particular. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, it was incredibly insightful and full of context, especially about the relations between the ruling-class planters and their African American workers. The influx of Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants is detailed and explains much of the Delta's cultural diversity.

The book also tells the story of the government’s response to the devastating flood, ultimately propelling Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928.

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.

The black-and-white images of Ralph Eugene Meatyard have long fascinated me and informed my visual work and writing. Meatyard was, by profession, an optician in Lexington, Kentucky, yet his personal passion was making photographs. His subjects were his wife, children, and family friends, who he often posed in murky settings as they wore masks and held dolls. These images are both disquieting and euphonious, tapping into something primal that hints at the secretive world of childhood.

I read this novel when I was twenty-two years old.

I remember exactly where I was (in the kitchen of a dilapidated apartment I loved) and what time of day I read it (early afternoon until early evening). I cackled and sobbed (I am not a sobber), and afterward, I couldn’t get the main character’s voice out of my head for days. He narrated everywhere I went and everything I did.

Before then, I’d always written casual nonsense for my own entertainment, but I knew afterward I wanted to do that—I wanted to make people laugh, horrify them, and put their hearts through the wringer. 

This is one of my all-time favorite novels, though I'm not quite sure how to explain it. Set in a small Texas town, Come, The Restorer is a strange, hallucinatory, and comical novel where nothing is quite normal, in fact far from it. Among the cast of characters are Mr. de Persia who becomes a prophet to the townspeople after he is discovered in a glass bathtub with an erection, the virginal Jewel Adair who following her husband's fiery death begins roaming the countryside naked, and Addis, Jewel's adopted son, who is on a singular quest to make himself a Panhandle saint. There's just no other book like this one.

I know, I know…this is a book you’re either going to love or hate, and it’s probably on a lot of lists. I love this book because before it was as common to “break the rules” and write frankly about taboo subjects, Katherine Dunn dove headfirst into an ocean of taboo and told a story that’s as exquisitely heart-wrenching as it is ghastly.

Despite her flaws (and I mean flaws in character–I don’t consider her physical traits to be flawed at all), the protagonist, Oly, is driven by devotion to her family as much as anything.

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I understood that much of American popular culture came from this odd place between Memphis and Vicksburg. James Cobb’s book tells the story of Blues music, agriculture, cataclysmic floods, and American apartheid.

I found it curious but fascinating that the Delta was one of the planet's most racially and culturally diverse places.

William Alexander Percy was an enigma. He was an attorney, a published poet, a World War I hero, and a ruling member of the planter class during his life in the Mississippi Delta (1885-1942). His father was a United States Senator, and his mother was French Catholic, a fact that riled the KKK members in 1920s Mississippi.

Percy is recognized as a godfather to the Southern Agrarians Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. This is a look back to a strange time in America. Some of the languages, especially those discussing race, are hard to read, but at the time, they were considered ultra-liberal. This book sets up much of the context needed to understand the significance of the Mississippi Delta.

British illustrator Patrick Woodroffe was an eclectic virtuoso, working with equal facility in oils, acrylic, pencil, pen and ink, silverpoint, and a unique technique of his own involving cutout drawings photographed in natural settings. Like McMullan’s, this book gives you a practical look inside one artist’s creative process. One remark of Woodroffe’s helped set me free artistically: “I don’t think strict accuracy is important, for if art is to offer us anything at all that is not to be found ‘out there’ or in photographs, then it can only come from those fortunate instances when the artist sees something not quite straight, when his visual memory fails him just a little. Getting it at least slightly wrong is I believe what art is all about.”

Similar to Cioran, Ligotti has a profoundly dark worldview, but not one that is unearned.

Ligotti’s own experiences with anhedonia and despair seep through his writing. I cannot get enough of it. Through his prose, he creates his own world wherein doom is assured and life seems like a poorly written, performed, and directed play that is in profoundly bad taste.

It may seem like work like this would depress you, but for me, it gives me a sense of understanding. Someone out there, even if it’s just Ligotti’s characters, has felt that gloom.