S3 Ep. 26: The Past Is Never Dead: Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Michael Gorra on the 'New South' and Whether Faulkner Still Belongs There

In this week’s episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan are joined by acclaimed novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Pulitzer finalist in Biography Michael Gorra for a conversation about whether demographic changes are finally making the South new. We Cast a Shadow author Ruffin muses on what racial equality looks like in a futuristic South, and ponders whether political compromise can stabilize the oppositional nature of the United States. Then Gorra discusses his book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War; and considers the intricate set of limitations that come with writing from multiple fictional perspectives.  To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. And check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel and Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel. This podcast is produced by Andrea Tudhope.  Selected readings: Maurice Carlos Ruffin We Cast a Shadow The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (forthcoming) Michael Gorra The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie   Books:  Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton The Tradition by Jericho Brown Dry September by William Faulkner Light in August by William Faulkner The Unvanquished by William Faulkner As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity by Ralph Ellison Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Opinion | How Donald Trump will finally kill the Southern Strategy   Writers: HP Lovecraft Flannery O’Connor Eudora Welty Richard Wright Zora Neale Hurston Nikki Giovanni Toni Morrison Nafissa Thompson-Spires Rion Amilcar Scott Jamel Brinkley Tayari Jones Roxane Gay Randall Kenan James Baldwin Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Don DeLillo Henry James George Eliot Jesmyn Ward Charles Dickens Natasha Trethewey Television: Lovecraft Country Watchmen Atlanta Films: Terminator 2: Judgement Day Sorry to Bother You Directors: Jordan Peele Boots Riley Donald Glover Others: Justin Ward (journalist) FiveThirtyEight (podcast) Stacey Abrams (politician) Newt Gingrich (politician) James Meredith (civil rights activist) Disunion (NYT column) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices