Here are 100 books that The Old Forest and Other Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
The Old Forest and Other Stories.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I am Lecturer in US Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London, and I work on issues of national security and identity, political rhetoric and the role of the everyday in shaping politics, especially media and popular culture. I have written extensively on American politics and US foreign policy over these past years with two published monographs and more than a dozen articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, plus a couple of op-eds and multiple TV and radio appearances. My most recent research project explores the role of populism under the Trump presidency and its political impact in the United States.
This book is maybe my favorite novel ever written about politics and the lengths that some men are willing to go in the pursuit of power.
It features a memorable cast of characters, most importantly, of course, the figure of Governor Willie Stark, the quintessential populist politician, who manipulates others for his own gain and demonstrates a total lack of morals. Set in the 1930s, the story of Stark’s rise to power and eventual downfall always strikes me for how contemporary it feels and how many parallels it offers with the populist politics of our own time.
It took a career as a librarian to help me understand my need for order, instead of the emotional chaos I grew up with in a large family. Being the child of an alcoholic father and a codependent mother gave me little personal value. After gaining some sense of worth in college, I wanted to give my kids the stability and support every child deserves, but I had to learn how to do this. I used my resources: education, self-scrutiny, honesty, art, nature, and the good Lord of the universe.
As a leader in autobiographical fiction, Wolfe writes of a large family dominated by an alcoholic, authoritarian father who is highly dramatic in words and behavior.
His wife’s determination to survive by running a boarding house and investing in real estate leaves little time for parental attention to the needs of their children.
While most grow to repeat the dysfunctional family habits that hinder healthy development, the youngest child, with the help of his teachers, struggles enough to finally take steps away from the pain, and out of the cycle, as I did with my own life.
The spectacular, history-making first novel about a young man’s coming of age by literary legend Thomas Wolfe, first published in 1929 and long considered a classic of twentieth century literature.
A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man’s burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy.
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
I’ve read it twice, and I can only stand back in wonder at how a person could create such a magnificent work of art (his first novel) at age 26. For richness of character development, philosophical weight, and power of language, this is one for the ages. Though the subject matter is heavy, it’s not a difficult read. Yet there are passages where you’ll want to slow down and take in the music of the words.
In this novel, the South looms dark and ominous in the background with its Biblical rhetoric, its conflict between a tradition of religious fundamentalism and modern scepticism, racial contrasts and the industrialisation of a rural society. But more than a novel of time and place, it is the story of a tormented family submerged in infidelity and driven by a vengeful love that is blocked, hurt and perverted. Peyton Loftis, who frantically needs a husband precisely because she loves her father; the decadent Milton, whose infidelity has made his marriage no more than a stage drama; and Helen, his wife,…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
Has to be one of the funniest novels ever written: a road-trip story with weird characters, small-time conmen, and twisting dialogue that could’ve been assembled by Beckett. It’s impossible to predict where the story’s heading. There’s nothing like it out there, and it’s as different from Portis’s brilliant True Grit as Mark Twain from Cormac McCarthy (both of whom Portis resembles), and probably his best.
Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray's cards, shotgun and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they've gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple's spending as far as Mexico. There Ray meets Dr Reo Symes, the seemingly down-on-his-luck and rather eccentric owner of a beaten up and broken down bus, who needs a ride to Belize. The further they drive, in a car held together by coat-hangers and excesses of oil,…
In second grade my teacher told me I should be a writer—I haven’t wavered in my path since. I was a voracious reader as a child and regularly snatched books off my mom’s night table. My love for flawed characters grew with each book I devoured. I felt a connection with these characters, which fueled my dream to become a writer. When I was twenty-one years old and studying writing, I wrote in my journal, “I want to write books that make people cry.” I love to explore the gray areas in life, and I’m honored that readers have told me my books do make them cry (and laugh).
I love this short story collection by Jill McCorkle, because Jill is a master of complex yet subtle emotions—it left me laughing out loud on one page and crying on the next. The characters in each story are flawed and multi-dimensional and so gloriously human that I rooted for them, despite any shortcomings.
In Your Husband Is Cheating on Us, I sympathized with the unnamed narrator/speaker because her humanity shines through, even though she’s the other woman coming clean to her affair partner’s wife (and I was even hoping for her morally murky proposal to succeed). I love the short story form, and this is one of my favorites, but they’re all stellar in this collection. It’s a Funeral! RSVP feels like chatting with a best friend who’s made some questionable decisions, but you love her anyway—especially when the narrator divulges her dark secret. It’s funny and tender and heartbreaking.
When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
What I find striking about this story is that Faulkner’s depiction of Abner Snopes—the barn burner—is so uncompromising. He’s an angry, disaffected man who, when he can’t find his footing in society, reacts with violence. The reader is given no reason to sympathize with him, just asked to understand that he has a code: Integrity through vengeance. If that’s hard to understand—(it is for me)—that is, I think, the point.For a story published in 1939 about Mississippi in the late 1800s, it feels dishearteningly relevant.
The 1958 film adaptation,The Long, Hot Summer, chops this story up and tosses it in with a few other Faulkner works. It’s far less edgy, but it stars Paul Newman.
My heart has been Southern for 35 years although I was raised in Boston and never knew the South until well into my adulthood. I loved it as soon as I saw it but I needed to learn it before I could call it home. These books and others helped shape me as a Southerner and as an author of historical Southern Jewish novels. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t describe 19th-century North Carolina so much as immerse his voice and his reader in it. Dara Horn captures her era seamlessly. Steve Stern is so wedded to place he elevates it to mythic. I don’t know if these five are much read anymore but they should be.
As a fiction author who investigates the Southern Jewish Experience as it transects with the African American one, I’ve found the work of Eli Evans indispensible. This collection of essays highlights Evans’ Civil Rights Era bona fides, his work in the LBJ administration as speech writer, his trip with Henry Kissinger to the Middle East. But it is also a book at its most personal and insightful when it celebrates small-town Southern life and the Southern Jew’s place in it. In the title essay Christian neighbors, both Black and white, are at church or enjoying Sunday supper after church, which leaves the often isolated Jewish children with little to do. An experimental fishing trip with his father on one such Sunday warms the heart and brings a smile. It’s worth the price of the book entire.
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
Anna Julia Cooper is one of the nineteen and twentieth American philosophers I find most exciting.
Her book, A Voice from the South, is the first feminist book to introduce the idea of intersectionality! She spent her very long lifetime writing about education, women’s rights, racism, and she has a fascinating correspondence with the intellectuals of her time, including W.E.B Dubois.
But until recently getting hold of her writings wasn’t terribly easy, unless you were willing to read online, or had access to a good academic library.
This beautiful and cheap edition is a godsend and everyone should buy it.
A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black intellectual history, feminism and activism
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African-American social and political activism.
This volume brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia…
I’ve loved learning about history since childhood, as attested by my bookshelves full of American Girl series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Royal Diaries (Cleopatra was my favorite). After writing my first book about reenactors pretending to be French explorers, I worked as a history writer for Smithsonian Magazine. I especially love the philosophical and political questions of how we still interact with the past and how history is presented. I hope you’ll enjoy thinking about that and learning some history from these books!
I read this book while working on my own because Horwitz is a master of weaving a story with many characters about a complicated piece of the past. He provides ample detail about the lengths to which reenactors will go for their performances—and some of the methods are outright gross.
But I love that even when Horwitz is grappling with ways that modern interpretations can obscure the actual past, he never resorts to mockery when talking about his subjects. He might disagree with their perspective about the Civil War, but he listens and reports what they tell him. I recommend this for anyone trying to understand how the Civil War still plays such a prominent role in our world nearly two centuries later.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent takes us on an explosive adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where Civil War reenactors, battlefield visitors, and fans of history resurrect the ghosts of the Lost Cause through ritual and remembrance.
"The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This splendid commemoration of the war and its legacy ... is an eyes–open, humorously no–nonsense survey of complicated Americans." —The New York Times Book Review
For all who remain intrigued by the legacy of the Civil War—reenactors, battlefield visitors, Confederate descendants and other Southerners,…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book made me want to pour a glass of cider. Diane Flynt writes about her hunt for heirloom apples as the owner of Foggy Ridge Ciders in Virginia. Along the way, she shares the rich history of apples in the South.
Her writing is poetic. I could almost taste the apples and smell the evening air in the orchards as she checked on her trees. Flynt makes a strong case for why we need agricultural diversity and how the terroir of place is important for the food we produce.
My only regret in reading this book is that Flynt is retired, so I’ll never be able to taste her fine ciders.
For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantation owners, and multiple presidents, each group changing the course of southern orchards. She shows how southern apples, ranging from northern…
