Seven books about immigrants encountering the American South

Blake Sanz, originally from Louisiana, has recently been chosen by Brandon Taylor as the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award for 2021. His collection of stories, The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, was published in October 2021 by the University of Iowa Press. He teaches writing at the University of Denver.

At Electric Lit Sanz tagged "seven of [his] favorite books about immigrant and first-generation encounters in the U.S. South," including:

The Celestial Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer

Imagine a Mississippi town where, in the lead-up to 9/11, a Chinese grocer has a crush on a Honduran employee, and a Mauritanian boy ... stumbles upon the wonder of the Delta blues, while a Black Ivy League student returns here to find out the story of her great grandmother’s life, and a white landowner tries to help his longtime neighbor quit a gambling addiction fed by the local casino (the new business that threatens the livelihood of the whole area’s population). This is Shearer’s imaginary town of Madagascar, and these are only a few of the characters and situations that populate this wondrous and lush book, a panoramic Mississippi novel that recalls the best of canonical Southern fiction while also insisting that that tradition enter the 21st century, with all its modern complaints and entanglements.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue