"This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created." -Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
The South has produced some of America's most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives-the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression.
The stories haven't always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can't obscure a complicated history. The state's African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi's places.
With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state's literary terrain can help us better understand America as a whole
An illustrated tour of the landscapes of Mississippi that have inspired the state's many lauded writers, from Faulkner and Welty to Morris and Ward.
W. Ralph Eubanks is author of Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road. He has also contributed articles and reviews to the Chicago Tribune, Preservation, The Hedgehog Review, The American Scholar, Time, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, The New Yorker, and NPR. He is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. Eubanks lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and three children, and is currently visiting professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Award-winning author and Mississippi native W. Ralph Eubanks treats us to a literary tour of the evocative landscapes that have inspired writers in every era. The state has been both a backdrop and a central character in some of the most compelling prose and poetry of modern literature.
The journey unfolds on a winding path, touching the muddy Delta, the rolling Hill Country, down to the Gulf Coast, and all points between. In every corner of Mississippi lie the settings that informed hundreds of iconic works.
Immersing us in these spaces, Eubanks helps us understand that Mississippi is not only a state but a state of mind. Or as Faulkner is said to have observed, "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."
"Ralph Eubanks' A Place Like Mississippi is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created. A Place Like Mississippi is further proof that while Mississippi is 50th in many things, when it comes to riveting, textured, literary art, we one of one, as is the genius of Ralph Eubanks." -Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
"I wish I could have been riding shotgun with Ralph Eubanks as he drove the haunted and haunting roads of Mississippi. Fortunately, this captivating book is the next best thing, full of trenchant dispatches that speak to our current moment." -Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
"Some of the most prolific American writers have hailed from Mississippi. Included in that list is essayist W. Ralph Eubanks whose newest work of nonfiction seeks to understand the state's influence on modern literature." -Time
