10 future classics by North Carolina authors

Earlier this week, we featured ten classic novels by North Carolina authors. Today, we are featuring ten future classics by writers from our home state:

The Gulf is an uproariously hilarious novel about a down-on-her-luck New Yorker who upends her life to start a low-residency creative writing workshop for Christians on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Long-time southerners will notice nods to PTL and other signals that will have you snort-laughing while shaking your head.

Wiley Cash is not only a fantastic author, but he is a champion for independent bookstores, his publisher, and his employer (UNC-Asheville). His debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, is a hauntingly hypnotic tale about brotherhood, religion, fatherhood and tragedy in a small North Carolina town. For fans of Harper Lee and Flannery O’Conner. Also, see The Last Ballad.

Master of Reality is the best book in the 33 1/3 series (a series that details a great and/or historical album in each volume). The novella is inspired by the Black Sabbath album of the same name, but rather than give us a history of the album or an in-depth critical analysis as many other books in the series do, Master of Reality gives us a protagonist who has been hospitalized, and in the process, had his Walkman (with Master of Reality cassette inside) taken away. The book is a letter to the hospital’s staff explaining why the protagonist needs his cassette and his Walkman back. A masterpiece of storytelling. For further reading, see the National Book Award-nominated Wolf in White Van.

A masterpiece of historical fiction, with A Well-Behaved Woman, Raleigh’s Therese Anne Fowler gives us an intimate look at one of North Carolina’s favorite families, the Vanderbilts. Focusing on the rags-to-riches rise of Alva Smith Vanderbilt, this novel gives us a glimpse into one of the most fascinating figures of the Gilded Age. Also see Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

Destroy All Monsters is Charlotte author Jeff Jackson's debut with a major publisher (his previous novel Mira Corpora, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year nominee, was published by indie press Two Dollar Radio). Destroy All Monsters is a gritty, surreal rock & roll novel about an epidemic of concert shootings, the death of a genre, small town living and growing up.  For fans of Vladimir Nabokov, Godzilla and Patois Counselors.  Also, see Jackson’s Novi Sad and the previously mentioned Mira Corpora.

Bobcat and Other Stories is as close to a perfect short-story collection as one can find. The prose is magnificent, the stories are wildly varying in topic and demeanor, and you want to pick it back up again as soon as you are finished. The stories in this volume are about plagiarism, dinner-parties, broken marriages, obligation and optimism, vileness and vulnerability.

Mesha Maren is from West Virginia, but she lives in North Carolina now, so we are claiming her. Sugar Run starts on the day that it’s protagonist, Jodi McCarty, is released from jail (she was arrested when she was 17 years old). What follows is a gothic southern road trip reminiscent of Larry Brown and Denis Johnson.

Another masterful short-story collection by a North Carolina writer, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned rewards us with stories about Viking marauders, a foreign footprint on the inside-windshield of a car, drugged teenagers and carnivals. Wells Tower’s vision of America is like a cross between Ernest Hemingway’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s. This collection was praised by Michael Chabon and Vendela Vida.

The Lesson is the debut novel by Cadwell Turnbull, a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. It is an epic tale of a race of aliens that descend upon and intermingle with the residents of the US Virgin Islands. The Lesson is praised by John Kessel and Wilton Barnhardt and was a favorite of attendees of BookExpo 2019 in New York City.

No One is Coming to Save Us has been called The Great Gatsby of the American South. It is about JJ Ferguson, a man who returns home to a small North Carolina town only to find that businesses are shuttered, and Jim Crow is still very much alive. No One is Coming to Save Us is the winner of the NAACP Image Award for a Debut Novel, and was a Washington Post and Bookpage ‘Best Book of 2017.'