Seven top 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:

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

They’re not analogs, but there’s something of Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Gifty, Yaa Gyasi’s Stanford grad student in neuroscience whose Ghanaian-Alabaman family has been beset by a host of tragedies. Gifty’s brother has died from addiction to opiates, and her mother has attempted suicide and remains depressed beyond functioning. But more than anyone in the Compson family, Gifty feels like someone to root for. Why? Perhaps it’s her earnest struggles to balance dedication to neuroscience and her Evangelical faith. The book includes beautiful passages where we see Gifty praying, and later rejecting that faith, given what she’s learned of its inherent racism as practiced in Alabama. It also includes much of Gifty’s disdain for her grad school colleagues, avowed atheists who seem so removed from anything like a soulful life.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue