She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie

Where does a single, twentysomething girl go for adventure when she’s been raised among Manhattan artists, drag queens, and intellectuals threatening to move to Cuba? If that girl is Kyle York Spencer, an aspiring newspaper reporter, she heads south, to North Carolina, to cut her chops at the Raleigh News & Observer.

Setting up shop in the Tar Heel state, Spencer finds herself interviewing everyone from skeet-shooting cowboys and Christian Rockers to the Human Carver—a serial killer—and the...