The New South--replete with shopping malls, hub airports, educated African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti--is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does the collision between past and present account for the continued preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary culture? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are just a few of the writers who draw on a new kind of Southern background while reaching out to a broad American readership. Yet many of these writers have...