One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eyes with an American South all too often overlooked Paul Theroux offers spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich background and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel publication, Theroux explores a piece of America – the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also a number of the nation’s worst schools, about Deep South: Four Periods on Back Highways housing, and unemployment prices. It’s these elements of the South, frequently ignored, that have caught Theroux’s willing traveler’s eyes. On road journeys spanning four months, wending along rural highways, Theroux appointments gun displays and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and elements of Mississippi where they still contact the farm up the road ‘the plantation.’ He foretells mayors and social workers, authors and reverends, the functioning poor and farming families – the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who came back house to rebuild a place they could by no means live without. Through the writer whose ‘great objective is definitely to transport us beyond that reading seat, to challenge himself – and thus, to challenge us’ (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vibrant and haunting, full of life and loss alike.