Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South by Roy Blount Jr.

This book offers a collection of essays that reflect widely on the U.S. South. Often taking a quite humorous point of view, Blount reflects on the South itself and on the country's perceptions of the South at large. He never lets anyone entirely off the hook--he's equally willing to expose hideous assumptions about the South and to expose Southern prejudice and intolerance. While some of the essays are more compelling than others, many had me laughing out loud. I particularly liked the one with a bunch of potential country song titles and the one that reported a fictionalized tennis match between William Faulkner, Zasu Pitts, Dorothy Parker, and Clark Gable.