"The Thanksgiving Visitor," a 1968 story also by Capote, is a companion piece to "A Christmas Memory" and recounts further adventures of Buddy and his friend Sook, as well as Buddy's run-in with Odd Henderson, the town bully.

Capote's novel The Grass Harp (1951) tells the story of a band of social outcasts, including a young boy and his older female relative, who disrupt their complacent community when they retreat to the woods and begin living in a treehouse.

Carson McCullers's Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1936) is the story of Cousin Lyman, a traveling hunchback dwarf who brings excitement to a lonely Southern town when Miss Amelia falls in love with him and follows his suggestion to open a cafe.

Black Boy is Richard Wright's 1941 autobiographical novel, which vividly describes his harsh, hardscrabble boyhood and youth in rural Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee...