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Provinces of Night, by William GayRead about the other entries on the list.
William Gay was a brilliant writer from Tennessee who served in Vietnam, worked as a carpenter, house painter, and drywall hanger, and didn’t publish any of his fiction until he was 58 years old, even though he’d been working on his craft since he was a teenager. In Provinces of Night, it’s 1952 and Boyd Bloodworth’s wife runs off to Detroit with a salesman, leaving him and his teenage son to fend for themselves in a ramshackle house in the Tennessee countryside. Colorful characters, occult curses, and crazy family escapades ensue. James Franco has announced he’ll direct and produce a film version of Gay’s The Long Home, hopefully winning more readers for the terrific writer, who died in 2012.
--Marshal Zeringue