Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. This is a lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this story - a black man charged with raping a white girl in the Deep South of the 1930s. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a staple of American literature and has been made into a feature-length film of the same name.

Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time. Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. None take us into the burning fields and cities of the American South as Gone With the Wind does, creating haunting scenes and thrilling portraits of characters... (more)

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

When Siddalee Walker, oldest daughter of Vivi Abbott Walker, Ya-Ya extraordinaire, is interviewed in the New York Times about a hit play she's directed, her mother gets described as a "tap-dancing child abuser." Enraged, Vivi disowns Sidda. Devastated, Sidda begs forgiveness, and postpones her upcoming wedding. All looks bleak until the Ya-Yas step in and convince Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of their girlhood... (more)

South of Broad

by Pat Conroy

The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship. Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high... (more)

All over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running... (more)

The Mermaid Chair

by Sue Monk Kidd

A dazzling novel of passion and spirituality—the instant blockbuster bestseller from the author of The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd’s phenomenal debut, The Secret Life of Bees , became a runaway bestseller that is still on the New York Times bestseller list more than two years after its paperback publication. Now, in her luminous new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill... (more)

The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

PAT CONROY has created a huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low country as well as... (more)

Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

PAT CONROY, America’s preeminent storyteller, delivers a sweeping novel of lyric intensity and searing truth–the story of Jack McCall, an American expatriate in Rome, scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and... (more)

Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second... (more)

Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

The town of Cold Sassy, Georgia is scandalized on July 5, 1906 when E. Rucker Blakeslee, a widower for three weeks, eloped with Love Simpson, a northerner.

Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, an illegitimate young girl, dreams of escaping her Greenville County, South Carolina, home, her notorious, hard-living family, and the unwanted attentions of her abusive stepfather, Daddy Glen. A first novel. Reprint. National Book Award finalist. NYT.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who... (more)

As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

The Bundren family try to give their deceased matriarch her desired burial in neighboring town Jefferson, but the trip is fueled by selfish desires from each family member as secrets are unravelled in this multi-narrated portrait of a disturbing family.

The Water is Wide

by Pat Conroy

The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence–unless, somehow, they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them,... (more)

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)

by Truman Capote

Contains: Breakfast at Tiffany's House of Flowers A Diamond Guitar A Christmas Memory

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

by Fannie Flagg

She’s one of America’s fairest and funniest ladies. Actress and screenwriter, director and comedienne, Fannie Flagg is also a most accomplished and high-spirited author. Said Kirkus of her first book, Coming Attractions : “It’s subtitled ‘A wonderful novel’ and that’s exactly what it is.” Here is her second. Get ready, because it’s going to make you laugh (a lot), cry (a little), and care (forever). What is... (more)

Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an... (more)

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

A popular Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy follows the adventures of New Orlean's lower denizens of the French Quarter.

The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.

The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh, unyielding father, Lily Owens has shaped her entire life around one devastating, blurred memory--the afternoon her mother was killed, when Lily was four. Since then, her only real companion has been the fierce-hearted, and sometimes just fierce, black woman Rosaleen, who acts as her "stand-in mother."When Rosaleen insults three of the deepest racists in... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: southern writer

by Harper Lee

by Margaret Mitchell

by Rebecca Wells

by Pat Conroy

by Rick Bragg

by Sue Monk Kidd

by Pat Conroy

by Pat Conroy

by Charles Frazier

by Olive Ann Burns

by Dorothy Allison

by Carson McCullers

by William Faulkner

by Pat Conroy

by Truman Capote

by Fannie Flagg

by Rick Bragg

by John Kennedy Toole

by William Faulkner

by Sue Monk Kidd