Nine books about homesickness for a place that doesn’t exist anymore

Stephanie Soileau's new collection of short stories is Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. Her work has also appeared in Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught creative writing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Southern Maine. Originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, Soileau now lives in Chicago and teaches at the University of Chicago.

At Electric Lit she tagged nine favorite literary expressions of homesickness "for a place that does not exist anymore—and maybe never did exist as you imagined it." One title on the list:

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

With satire that will singe your eyebrows, Paul Beatty tells the story of Bonbon, a young Black man raised in Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After racially profiled and much maligned Dickens is removed from the California map, Bonbon campaigns to redraw the borders (literally, with white paint, but in other ways too) of a home that is oppressed, oppressive, and still, despite that, home.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue