A Profound New Southern Book

Come with us to North Carolina to meet David Joy, the author of one of the most important Southern books you’ll read all year. And speaking of books…

By Chuck Reece

Jul 29, 2023

This week, we introduce you to one of the most important Southern books you will read this year: North Carolina writer David Joy’s Those We Thought We Knew.

After the 2010 feature film of Ozark Mountains novelist Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone launched Jennifer Lawrence into superstardom, arts writers around the nation began to point to a literary genre they called “Southern noir”—or “rural noir.” And David Joy’s books, beginning with 2015’s Where All Light Tends to Go, fit the bill just dandy. His thrillers set in the rural communities of the western North Carolina mountains captured the lives of Appalachian people—with their bright joys and dark obstacles—beautifully.

His fifth novel, set to be published Tuesday, is indeed a thriller—but one that dives headlong into an issue many white Southerners these days would rather avoid: race. Those We Thought We Knew is a daring, thrilling novel that brilliantly portrays characters who just can’t let go of myths and false versions of history that learned as they grew up.

“I think that Americans, and particularly white Americans, have a false belief that if we don’t talk about it, it will just go away,” David told me. “We refuse to have the hard conversations. We refuse to address the defect. This book was an attempt at forcing characters into those conversations.”

Read my in-depth interview with David, then buy a copy of his book. If you’re a Southerner who cares deeply about the future of our region, you can’t let 2023 pass without reading Those We Thought We Knew.

—An interview with David Joy
—A review of Those We Thought We Knew
—"How to Save the Summer": Poems by Chris Wood

Also this week, Marianne Leek, another great North Carolina writer and longtime Salvation South contributor, weighs in with her review of Those We Thought We Knew.

As you can see from Ashley T. Evans’s rocking good photographs from the garden she shares with David Joy in Jackson County, North Carolina, it’s time for some early harvesting. Tennessee poet Chris Wood—with excellent timing—joins us this week with two verses about what Southerners do when the summer vegetables come in: can them and eat them.

Let me finally call your attention to something new: the Salvation South Bookshop. For a long time, when our stories reference books, we’ve linked to them at Amazon, because Mr. Bezos pays you a tiny commission on book sales. And when we say “tiny,” we mean teeny-weenie, itsy-bitsy tiny. This year, Salvation South has earned a whopped $1.53 from this.

We’d rather support the indie bookshops we love and haunt all the time. David Joy himself clued us in to Bookshop.org, so we’ve now set up a Salvation South Bookshop through them. In our shop, you can always find books your contributors and referenced in our stories. When you buy them, the local bookstore of your choice gets paid, and we make a smidgen, too. You can always count on a careful selection of great Southern books in the Salvation South Bookshop.

Y’all have a happy week. Drink lots of water and stay cool.

Chuck Reece

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Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.