A Place Like Mississippi

A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape

By: W. Ralph Eubanks

Narrated by: James Shippey

“This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

The South has produced some of America’s most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide-ranging perspectives—the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression.

The stories haven’t always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can’t obscure a complicated history. The state’s African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi’s places.

With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state’s literary terrain can help us better understand America as a whole.

©2021 W. Ralph Eubanks (P)2022 Timber Press

Critic reviews

“Ralph Eubanks' A Place Like Mississippi is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created. A Place Like Mississippi is further proof that while Mississippi is 50th in many things, when it comes to riveting, textured, literary art, we one of one, as is the genius of Ralph Eubanks.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“It may not be the vacation travel you had in mind, but Eubanks’ journey through a real and imagined literary landscape… is a trip worth taking… this gorgeous writing transports me to the complicated cultural richness and profundity that rises above—in spite of—the not-good parts of the state that get so much attention, and that people like Eubanks are working hard to expel.” —Vanity Fair

“Reading A Place Like Mississippi is as much a visceral experience as it is an intellectual one, even down to the supple feel of the pages and the soft, elegant texture of the book in your hands. Many of the included photos are so striking in their beauty that to render them as words on the page is to plumb the depths of one’s own literary ability.” —The Georgia Review

What a wonderful experience!

I am a native of Queens, New York. I never expected or wanted to even visit Mississippi, but work brought me there over forty years ago and, in one sense I have never left. It is that kind of place!

Eubanks speaks of Love and Hate, and Mississippi has a lot of both, but he has found a way to capture both feelings in this astounding book. By traveling the length and breadth of the state and seeing it through the eyes of its many gifted artists he perfectly conveys the ambiguity of sentiments that infect anyone from anywhere that spends time there. | have driven its back roads and highways for all those years, but reading “A Place Like Mississippi” taught me so much that I had never known.

I am an avid reader and Music Lover, so I have long been mystified by the rise of so many fantastic writers and musicians from the soil of The Magnolia State. Even after reading this book, in one sitting by the way, I’m not sure that I can account for that miracle, but my appreciation for their sensitivity has grown so much. There’s just something about the land, its people, and the contradictions of their History that stirs the soul’s creative juices. Eubanks ties these artists’ work so closely to each of the regions he describes that it seems only logical that they would have produced the works they did. He composes a beautiful symphony of landscape and soundtrack that is wonderful to experience. I loved it. Five Stars!