Read Faulkner, Percy, then laugh with Grant

My seventh grade English teacher’s homework assignment was one sentence by William Faulkner. Simple, right? It carried on for five pages – and the rest of my life. I lose myself in its tumescent portrayal of the taming of the Mississippi Delta. Start here, with “Big Woods,” an assemblage of Faulkner’s hunting stories. 

Or enjoy William Alexander Percy’s learned, anachronistic 1941 memoir, cogitating over sharecropping and the devastating 1927 flood: “Lanterns on the Levee,” introduced by Walker Percy.

British author Richard Grant’s 2015 “Dispatches from Pluto” offers a hilarious, robust narrative of this New York couple’s impetuous acquisition and acclimation to a Delta plantation.

– Chris Schroder, The 100 Companies