The Reading Life: Roy Blount, Gone Up North

(NYTBR) - “The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away,” Tom Waits sings on “Step Right Up.”
The large print in the new fall issue of The Oxford American heralds the results of the magazine’s poll of writers and scholars to determine “the best southern books of all time.” The winners? Best novel: William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” (1936). Best nonfiction book: James Agee and Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). (Read all the results here and here.)
That’s cool - but it’s the small print in the new issue that caught me short. The Oxford American’s editor, Marc Smirnoff, writes in an editor’s note that Roy Blount Jr.’s consistently excellent column “Gone Off Up North,” which has appeared in the magazine for more than a decade, is no more. Continued

Photo: Walker Evans