I live in a small town in Georgia that few people have ever heard of (I won’t give the name, but it’s very easy to learn with a tad of googling) but that is overrepresented in fiction. It served as the capital of Georgia from 1803-1868 and is mentioned in fiction from Gone With the Wind to Pretty Woman but it’s most famous for being the home of Flannery O’Connor, who based most of her fiction here, and for the Marion Stembridge murders on May 3, 1953 (the town’s sesquicentennial) that formed the basis for the novel Paris Trout and for two of Flannery’s stories. Alice Walker grew up 15 miles down the road and based The Color Purple in and around this area, while the “real” Uncle Remus lived ironically down the street from where Walker grew up; his cabin fell down many years ago, but a similar one is now a museum to him.
A lot.
Most notable - Ulysses by James Joyce and though it was set 100 years ago you can still really recognise the places and even the characters (I’m serious - he really captured some intangible Dublin feeling IMO). Also his short stories Dubliners
I’ve read a couple of books set in modern-day Dublin recently. Irish dopers may know of the spoof novels based on the character Ross O’Carroll-Kelly which are hilarious (thought I seriously doubt the humour would travel - sorry). Also recently read a book by a new author Chris Binchy (Maeve’s nephew) called People Like Us. It was a reasonably realistic portrayal of boring Dublin suburbia but that was just the problem - it was a boring book. I flung it carelessly across the room when I finished it (I like to be dramatic like that 
).
Another good one set about 100 years ago is Strumpet City by James Plunkett. That feels more historical in a way than Ulysses I think but you can still recognise the characters - particularly the Dun Laoghaire (south east Dublin suburb) ones.
OK I’ll stop now…
Hmm … I might have to pick up those Janet Evanovich NJ novels … they’re set condsiderably south of me, but it’s still Jersey, and that makes me happy.
In Peter David’s Knight Life, Morgan LeFaye has spent the last several centuries in her own private Hell on Earth–Verona, NJ.
Guess where I live?
[semi-related aside]
Vonnegut was the Commencement Speaker for the Syracuse University Class of 1994. I graduated from SU in '96 and was on the Activities Committee, so I got to attend the big Dinner Dance graduation weekend. I got to see Kurt Vonnegut do the hokey pokey. It was the best damn day of my life.
[/aside]
… has written 2 novels and a book of connected stories about the city I grew up in - Cardiff.
Hard for me to tell how good ‘Cardiff Dead’ was as it was about forming a band in 79 (which I did) and seeing the city new in 99 (the year I left) but on reading the other books it’s clear they are good.
That stuff is a little old, but it brings to mind the work from about a century ago by H. P. Lovecraft, whose evocation of the northern Massachusetts coastline (I’m thinking around Ipswich) is picture-perfect, IMO.
(Transplanted Bostonian, if ya hadn’t guessed yet.)
Lovecraft evoked images of a lot of New England, not just the coast north of Boston. He lived in Providence, R.I., and that shows up as the setting of several of his stories. Some are set in Arkham and Dunwitch, which seem to be inland. Pickman’s Model (and a few others) are set in Boston, with identifiable locales. IIRC, at least one is set in Salem. His fictional towns like Innsmouth are meant to invoke Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, etc. If you look in the various volumes that S.T. Joshi has annotated (Del Rey has published two sets of his annotated Lovecraft, but I know he has others out there – I’ve got his Annotated Shadow of Innsmouth from a small indy press) or look in journals and fanzines devoted tio Lovecraft, you’ll find places that people think inspired some of his settings.
One place that a lot of people think inspired The Dunwitch Horror is Mystery Hill/America’s Stonehenge in souther New Hampshire. I think they’;re right (although, curiously, Joshi doesn’t think so.) I also strongly suspect that The Blasted Heath in The Colour out of Space is inspired by the Desert of Maine, an anomalously bare expanse of sand in the woods of Maine.
Then there’s The Horror of Red Hook, obviously set in New York.