Jordan County: A Novel

Before Shelby Foote under took his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle — "a landscape in narrative" — of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecl...