A Call for Reviews
Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The project, created in 2020 by writer-editor Foster Dickson, collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970.
The editor of Nobody’s Home is interested in reviews that examine how beliefs, myths, and narratives in the South or about the South are presented in books and movies. Submissions of reviews will be considered year-round. The following lists of books and movies are ones that the editor would particularly like to see reviewed, so if a writer or scholar has read or seen one of these, a review would be appreciated. (See the projects Submissions page for more.)
Books (chronological by publication date)
The Twelfth of August (1971) by WR Morris
The Mississippi Chinese (1971) by James W. Loewen
You Can’t Eat Magnolias (1972), edited by H. Brandt Ayers and Thomas Naylor
The Changing Politics of the South (1972) by William C. Havard
The Americanization of Dixie (1974) by John Egerton
Issue Voting and Party Realignment (1977) by Donald S. Strong
The Enduring South (1986) by John Shelton Reed
Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South (1990) by John Shelton Reed
Confederates in the Attic (1998) by Tony Horwitz
The Southern Cross (1998) by Christine Leigh Heyrman
The New Politics of the Old South (2009) edited by Charles S. Bullock III and Mark J. Rozell
Why the South Will Survive (2011) edited by Clyde N. Wilson
Dispatches from Pluto (2015) by Richard Grant
Waste (2020) by Catherine Coleman Flowers
The Long Southern Strategy (2019) by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields
The Southern Way of Life (2023) by Charles Reagan Wilson
Movies (chronological by release date)
Nashville (1975) * Gator (1976) * Ode to Billy Joe (1976)
Passion Plantation (1976) * I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979, TV)
Porky’s (1981) * Shy People (1987) * A Gathering of Old Men (1987, TV)
School Daze (1988) * Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) * Rosewood (1997)
Eve’s Bayou (1997) * Traveller (1997) * The Waterboy (1998)
A Lesson Before Dying (1999, TV) * Monster’s Ball (2001)
Alabama Moon (2009) * The Blind Side (2009) * The Help (2010)
The Dynamiter (2011) * Free State of Jones (2016)
Sophie and the Rising Sun (2017) * Lost Child (2017)
House on the Bayou (2021) * Alice (2022)
Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on February 19, 2023.
