Oxford is the most literary town in Mississippi and arguably in the American South — the home of William Faulkner, John Grisham, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, and a long list of younger writers shaped by the University and Square Books. A short Oxford reading list is a useful way into the place.
Airships — Barry Hannah was the writer-in-residence at Ole Miss for most of the 1980s and 1990s, and Airships (1978) is the short story collection that made his reputation. The stories are short, wild, often hilarious, and unmistakably Southern without ever being either nostalgic or genteel — the prose moves faster than almost anything else in late-20th-century American writing.
Hannah taught generations of Mississippi writers (Tom Franklin, Donna Tartt for a semester, Ralph Eubanks, many others) and his influence on the town is still felt twenty years on. Pair it with his novel Geronimo Rex or his memoir-ish collection Bats Out of Hell.
As I Lay Dying — Faulkner's 1930 novel is the easiest way into his Yoknapatawpha cycle — a short, savage, often funny account of a poor Mississippi family carrying their mother's coffin across the county to her family burial plot. Told in fifteen voices through 59 chapters, the book is set in the country immediately around Oxford and the Bundren family's slow journey passes through every kind of rural Mississippi landscape Faulkner knew first-hand.
Read it before visiting Rowan Oak and the surrounding countryside — much of it is recognisable on the back roads east of Oxford. Pair it with Light in August or The Sound and the Fury if you have time for a second Faulkner.
Heavy: An American Memoir — Kiese Laymon is the most prominent of the younger generation of Mississippi writers to come out of Oxford in the past decade — he taught at the University of Mississippi for most of the 2010s, and his memoir Heavy (2018) is set partly in Oxford and partly in his native Jackson. The book is about Black bodies, family, abuse, and the South; it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
It is a very different reading of Mississippi than Faulkner or Hannah — sharper, more direct, more reckoning. Read it alongside Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (a Mississippi novel, though not an Oxford one) for a wider portrait of the contemporary state.
Joe — Larry Brown was a Lafayette County firefighter who taught himself to write in his off-hours and produced some of the rawest fiction to come out of Mississippi in the second half of the 20th century. Joe (1991) is his strongest novel — the story of a hard-drinking forest worker and a poor white teenager who falls into his orbit, set in the country immediately north of Oxford.
The book is short, brutal, and full of the kind of working-class north Mississippi voices that almost never appear in Faulkner. Brown died in 2004 and is buried in nearby Tula. Big Bad Love, his linked short story collection, is a good companion.