A Place Like Mississippi takes readers on a fascinating journey through the evocative landscapes that have inspired generations of writers. W. Ralph Eubanks, an award-winning author and native of Mississippi, offers a compelling literary tour of the state.

From the muddy Delta to the rolling Hill Country, down to the Gulf Coast, Mississippi has been both a backdrop and a central character in some of the most compelling prose and poetry of modern literature. This journey touches on the settings that informed hundreds of iconic works.

Immerse yourself in these spaces and discover that Mississippi is not just a state, but a state of mind. As Faulkner is said to have observed, "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."

The year is 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth has returned to his home—a forgotten corner of Tennessee—after twenty years of roaming. The wife he walked out on has withered and faded. His three sons are grown and angry. Warren is a womanising alcoholic; Boyd is driven by jealousy to hunt down his wife's lover; and Brady puts hexes on his enemies from his mother's porch.

Only Fleming, the old man's grandson, treats him with respect and sees past all the hatred, realising the way it can poison a man's soul. It is ultimately the love of Raven Lee, a sloe-eyed beauty from another town, that gives Fleming the courage to reject his family's curse.

In a tale redolent with the crumbling loyalties and age-old strife of the post-war American South, Gay's characters inhabit a world driven by blood ties that strangle as they bind. This is a coming of age novel, a love story, and a portrait of a family torn apart. Provinces of Night introduces a distinctive voice in American fiction with a superb cast of characters.

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, offers an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction.

It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes—wily, energetic, a man of shady origins—quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.