50 States

Before Clint Eastwood brought his masterful adaptation to screen, Mystic River was a novel by Dennis Lehane, the story of three boys in working-class Boston.

Kent Haruf’s book Plainsong is true to its namesake, a “simple and unadorned melody or air” that is tender in its portrayal of three families in Holt, Colo.

Tayari Jones’ debut, Leaving Atlanta, is set during the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders, at which time a total of 29 black children were killed.

Rebecca Well’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood follows Vivi, Necie, Teensy, and Caro, who, despite being 60 years old, are still causing trouble in Pecan Grove, Louisiana.

Barbara Kingsolver, of The Poisonwood Bible fame, wrote The Bean Trees about finding salvation in an ostensibly barren situation—appropriately, this low-key debut novel is set in Arizona.

Nancy Lord’s short stories, collected in The Man Who Swam With Beavers, despite spanning years, locations, and all sorts of protagonists (both human and animal), are connected by their basis in Eskimo folktales and their evocation, both figurative and literal, of the Alaskan wilderness.

Michigan: The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides — Eugenides’ debut novel captures in one masterful stroke both the comfort and suffocation of the 1970’s northern suburbia.

For many of us, San Francisco’s Castro Street or the badlands of North Dakota can seem as exotic as Oslo or Mumbai. Cross-country road trips are every collegiate’s dream: scaling the Colorado mountains and sipping juleps in Charlestown before visiting the first Starbucks in Seattle. Even the thriftiest travelers need cash to cover all 50 states, but what if you could travel through literature?