Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929) is the inescapable Asheville book. A thinly veiled portrait of his boyhood at his mother's boarding house, it caused a scandal when it was published and a generation later was recognised as a classic of American modernism. The Thomas Wolfe Memorial on North Market is the original of the fictional Dixieland.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997) follows a wounded Confederate soldier walking home from the Civil War to the mountains west of Asheville. The landscape — the high balds, the hollows, the long ridge lines — is rendered with extraordinary precision and reads as well as a guidebook to the surrounding Pisgah country.
Serena by Ron Rash (2008) is a darker novel of the southern Appalachians, set in a 1930s logging camp not far from the city. Rash, who lives in western North Carolina, has written several short story collections worth seeking out — Burning Bright is a good place to start.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, while set in Georgia, captures the same small-southern-city atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s as Wolfe.
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson includes a hilarious chapter on hiking through Pisgah on the Appalachian Trail and is a good light companion for visitors who want to understand the southern Appalachians.