The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit by Mitch Ploskonka, Scott Romine (Series edited by) Memoir following a friend group so

following a friend group so damaged that only a funeral could bring them back together

Lots of people might have wanted Irwin Johnson dead—anyone from his betrayed wife to his jilted mistresses’ jealous husbands to the mafiosi he was stealing business from

but just arriving there proves more difficult than she could have imagined

I read it in a single sitting

Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s disappearance

The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit by Mitch Ploskonka, Scott Romine (Series edited by) Memoir following a friend group soThe Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by resistance to respectability and class performance, and shaped by reckoning with the legacies of whiteness and