The most recommended books about Mississippi

As much of a specter as its subject, Biography of a Phantom came from an odyssey that began in the late 1960s when the late folklorist Robert “Mack” McCormick set out to solve Robert Johnson’s 1938 death.

McCormick tracked down enough of the Mississippi blues legend’s living friends and relatives to crack the case. But Mack succumbed to mental illness before finishing the book, which has been a subject of intense interest and controversy ever since.

Eight years after McCormick’s death, the book finally came out in 2023. I find it a moving but deeply sad cautionary tale about the ownership of stories and legends -- and lines that should not be crossed.

Fiction as literature of the resistance? Larry Brown’s Joe is a top candidate for what I’d call The Great American Novel. There are many entries, of course: as many stories as there are communities, past, present, and even future. 

What I love about Joe is the simplicity of metaphor. A backwoods ne’er-do-well, Joe Ransom makes his living killing—literally—the great wild biodiversity hardwood powerhouse forests of the Mississippi bottomlands by injecting them with poison so that they die, and the rich forest can be converted to the homogenous, fast-growing, essentially sterile monoculture of southern yellow pine. His way of life—wild, reckless, dangerous—is disappearing as well, and as he kills the thing he loves most, he drinks himself ever-deeper into harm’s way and seeks a violence commensurate with the one he is inflicting upon the forest. Worse yet, he begins to train a young acolyte, an orphan disciple, Gary Jones. The sentences… show more.

A bookseller pressed this into my hands when I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I read it on the plane and almost wished the flight were longer so I could finish before being jolted back to the present day. 

1964, Jackson, Mississippi – sisters Violet and Marigold are desperate to leave their hometown after the deaths of their parents and older sister. They take different paths, never imagining that they have a dangerous connection to the brutal murder of three men—one Black, two white—as part of the resistance to the Summer of the Vote. Nor do they imagine their paths will lead them back to each other. 

This book transported me to another time and place, making me shiver with the terror of the sisters’ fight for survival, and rejoice with relief when they choose hope – just what historical fiction ought to do.

As a historian of science, I was fascinated to see how science could be used, abused, and hijacked by regimes of power.

As a Mississippian, I was appalled at how persistent and insidious the problem of racial injustice remains in my state’s legal system. This is an eye-opening book that also reads like a true-crime page-turner.

For me, this book was unexpected and original in its style and tone. It deals head-on with hard issues but manages to entertain the reader at the same time. Quite a feat.

The story explores the history of black lynchings in America, particularly the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and its unresolved ongoing impact. However, the book unfolds as a clever satire, also comedy caper, also detective novel, also zombie apocalypse genre.

It has cops, academics, witch doctors, wary locals, rednecks and reappearing cadavers. Stereotypes are employed without apology and the dialogue is skilful and hugely entertaining. The injustice reverberates long after the last page is turned, leaving you feeling that this subject needed presenting in this way at this time, and Everett was just the man for the task.

This book, justly honored with the Pulitzer Prize, surprised me with its formal range and intensity of experience.

Trethewey is celebrated as a chronicler of our collective history, but I was far more taken with the poems of personal history—and, more specifically, personal loss. The poems that examine the absence left by her mother’s untimely death are, to me, the defining poems of the book. These often exemplify her gift for presenting the most telling detail or selecting the word that will resonate on the broadest level.

Let me hone in on one poem, “Myth,” a recasting of the Orpheus story. What astonished me about this poem was the formal structure. It consists of two sections of nine lines, each arranged in terza rima stanzas. The second section rewrites the first half—in reverse! The effect is to convey the experience of descending into the darkness of the underworld and then… show more.

This is one of my favorite novels and one that I can’t stop recommending. There isn’t a word wasted in this intimate and evocative novel which is based between Ireland and New York.

The protagonist, Tess Lohan, was born in Ireland in 1944. Through Tess, we are given a ringside view of Irish life in the 40s, the harshness and stoicism, the distance between family and that which is unsaid. Tess takes us from Ireland to New York City in 1962 and the challenges of loneliness and joy of an Irish immigrant.

We see her struggling as a single mother and an ironclad friendship with Willa, a person of color from Mississippi who shares her apartment block. We see tragedy during 9/11 and follow Tess into old age. I almost mourned when I finished this novel. 

I was in between two consecutive house moves and with all my cases packed around me, really needed something absorbing to distract from the stress. A tough call. Grisham did the job, though.

He’s a master storyteller, and this had a blinder of a hook right at the start. Ray Atlee is a law teacher in Virginia when he gets a call from his father, a judge, to return home. But he doesn’t get there in time – the judge has died already, and in suspicious circumstances. Ray subsequently picks up a trail of dangerous secrets, his father was not the man he thought he was.

I loved this because it’s fast paced, intriguing, and Grisham’s style is both intelligent and immersing. Also learned about Cesna planes and the deep American South! 

If there is an heir to Harper Lee in the realm of legal thrillers, my vote goes to John Grisham. There’s a basic sense of decency in Grisham’s books that appeals to me. In A Time for Mercy, Grisham’s enduring character Jake Brigance returns to Clanton, Mississippi in a story constructed around a polarizing small-town murder. However, precious little can be categorized along strictly black and white lines in this crime. Grisham understands that we live in a world where the grays of reality are predominant and inherently more interesting. He makes sure we understand the characters, even those we may dislike or disagree with. Grisham doesn’t take the easy way out in A Time for Mercy. The story unfolds to a surprisingly untidy yet satisfying conclusion that leaves the reader with plenty of food for thought.

After reading this book, I felt closer to the remarkably courageous Fannie Lou Hamer and better able to talk with others about race and the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.

We cannot promote tolerance and heal racism unless we know each other's life stories and come to care about the same things. In sharing Mrs. Hamer’s life story in great detail, Keisha Blain made me a co-owner of the trauma experienced by this inspirational historical figure.

This book details the mundane and the heroic aspects of one racial justice warrior's life. It describes the beatings, injustice, forced sterilizations, sexual assaults, and other degradations Mrs. Hamer and her fellow racial justice advocates suffered and lived to tell about. They did this so that we could change such injustice and live in a country that lives up to its creed and follows the rule of law.

I… show more.