11 books like The Fighter

When Pat Conroy died in 2016, I knew what the late Southern gentleman-writer, Lewis Grizzard, meant when he wrote, Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself.

Pat Conroy understood the Southern male in ways that only fellow Southerners can know in all its fullness. I felt less Southern at his passing than I had felt in a long time. Pat Conroy was my better self as a Southern male. He understood me without knowing me.

The Prince of Tides protagonist, Tom Wingo, is undoubtedly filled with the simplicity and complexity, goodness and evil, connection to history that describe the southern male who often will define being Southern as a fundamental personal value.

Want some insight into the Southern male, and who wouldn't? The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy is where one should start.

Peachtree Road is considered a modern-day Gone with The Wind, in that it is set in the pivotal, changing times of 1960’s Atlanta, and concerns the opulent area of Buckhead, where the privileged who built modern-day Atlanta live. The story is narrated in lyrical language by Shep Bondurant, an insightful young man born to privilege, who tells the coming-of-age story of Southern traditions and hypocrisy, and the impact of growing up alongside his troubled cousin, Lucy. A deeply probing story on multiple levels concerning society and the impact of family. 

Ron Rash is a national, literary treasure. The author of multiple award-winning novels, this book is an assembly of 34 short stories, most set in Appalachia, and depicting the social nuances and landscape of the American rural South. I recommend this because it will provide a great introduction to the incomparable author known as The Appalachian Shakespeare. As a writer, Ron Rash epitomizes the idea of landscape as destiny, and his well-drawn characters come to life from his flawless use of regional language. 

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Rick Bragg’s writing is poetry.

He grew up dirt poor in Alabama. I grew up in a middle-class suburb in New Jersey. He and I have little in common but our love for our mothers. This story touched me on many levels. All mothers sacrifice to some extent in raising their children, but Rick’s mother went above and beyond while facing dire circumstances to provide for hers.

It made me appreciate my mother even more. And though I hadn’t discovered this book prior to my story, it reconfirmed my commitment to my mother. 

I am a fan of this style of writing. Some may call it pulp fiction. Perhaps, hard-boiled? I suppose it is like comparing bare-knuckle fighting and boxing under the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Chandler's style, and those like him, is down and dirty, and supposed to be realistic. Indeed, in his essay, he writes: "Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic." He was writing in the context of denigrating the old-fashioned British-style mystery. I do believe he has a point. Anyone who is familiar with his work and style can understand my penchant for liking crime fiction that is realistic. The remainder of my picks reflect this. 

New Orleans is a historic, intriguing, and complicated city. 

So many forces have shaped its settlement, development, culture, and character.

Pierce Lewis helped me understand how New Orleans’s location and geography brought it into being and influenced how it has grown, along with how different immigrants and the blending of their cultures have shaped the city. 

He traces how the city’s economy has evolved in relationship to national economic trends and local political decisions on where and how to invest. The book is full of maps, photos, and images that enhance and illustrate the narrative and is written in an engaging style. 

It ends with a clear-headed perspective on the problems faced by New Orleans at the turn of the 21st century. 

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

This masterful work helped me put context around music and musicians I already loved by fusing scholarly study and excellent biographical portraits of blues musicians, enlivened by vivid writing and a deep empathy for his subject matter. This is my own goal in everything I write, and this book has remained a touchstone throughout my career.

I went out of my way to hire Bob Palmer when I was Guitar World's managing editor, and getting to work with him remains a career highlight. I am not alone in my ardor for this book; it’s no coincidence that it appears on virtually every list created about blues or roots music on this site.

Because Greg Iles is one of my all-time favorite writers and this book is terrifying. I’ve read it twice, and it cooked even faster the second time around. The family dynamics between Harper Cole and his wife really gripped me, but when this came out in 1997, it really hammered home how evil the internet could be, and how killers could lurk in complete disguise and hide themselves behind facades and masks and computer screens. Greg Iles has so much range in his storytelling it's scary. If you haven’t read him, start with his first and work your way through! You won’t be disappointed!

Richard Grant a British journalist and adventure writer traveled the world before moving from New York City with his Brookland girlfriend to transform a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Mississippi into a new home and a new life.

In the process he discovers the real Mississippi—good and bad—as “the most American place on earth.” This book makes the reader laugh, cry, but most important think deeply about jazz, sex, politics, food, America’s class system, racism, democracy, and what it means to be American which is in constant change.

Grant’s writing is addictive and an elixir—you can’t put it down.