Thirty years after heading south for good, Daren Wang revisits his little hometown in upstate New York, the unlikely setting of his Southern novel, and drinks in a Bar Bar.

When Daren Wang’s book tour takes him to Chicago, he drinks with Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate, who recently departed her native South for Chi-Town.

Joyce Carol Oates, two weeks ago, threw out a snarky tweet that Mississippians don't read. Funny, then, how many books Daren Wang had to sign when he was there.

Daren Wang visits the first Bar Bar on his drinking tour of the South — New Orleans’ Napoleon House — with three inked-stained authors and one famous, Nashville songwriter, the great Radney Foster.

So, four writers and a bookseller walk into a bar in North Carolina. And they learn how drink-mixing magic is a lot like people-mixing magic.

Daren Wang knew little of New Orleans beyond the tourist attractions of the French Quarter. On his book tour, he hoped to broaden his perspective on the city. He succeeded, but only after writer Mark Childress steered him to a special place right there on Bourbon Street.

When you drink in Nashville with Robert Hicks, author of the best-selling “The Widow of the South,” you get some interesting choices.

Daren Wang set out to drink bourbon cocktails with great Southern writers. So, what do you do when best-selling author Charles Frazier wants gin instead? 

The first stop on Daren Wang’s tour was Jackson — for the Mississippi Book Festival. Searching for a proper cocktail with Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly, they found just the ticket, but in a very unlikely place.

Daren Wang, the author of the highly acclaimed new novel, “The Hidden Light of Northern Fires,” is spending the entire fall touring to promote his book. The Bitter Southerner asked Wang, as he travels the South, to sit down and drink with some of region’s greatest writers. For the next three months, Daren is going to take us all out drinking with writers, every Wednesday.