The Golden Apples (Penguin Modern Classics)

This collection of short stories of the Mississippi Delta by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author is “a work of art” (The New York Times Book Review).

Here in Morgana, Mississippi, the young dream of other places; the old can tell you every name on every stone in the cemetery on the town’s edge; and cuckolded husbands and love-starved piano teachers share the same paths. It’s also where one neighbor has disappeared on the horizon, slipping away into local legend.

Black and white, lonely and the gregarious, sexually adventurous and repressed, vengeful and resigned, restless and settled, the vividly realized characters that make up this collection of interrelated stories, with elements drawn from ancient myth and transplanted to the American South, prove that this National Book Award–winning writer, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had “an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.”

“I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’—one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern—has ever been written.” —The New Yorker