The Best Southern Books of October 2023 https://ift.tt/Ho8i5OX
Happy October, y’all! The weather is perfect, I’ve already consumed my body weight in a delightful fall treat I consider to be trail mix because it makes it sound healthy but is, in fact, just peanuts and candy corn. I hope you’re getting all the Halloween candy your heart desires while you’re reading one of these new Southern releases!
West Virginia University Press: “The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers’ drug addictions.”
Tor: “Starling House is a gorgeous, modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Opal is a lot of things — orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier — but above all, she’s determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.”
Hub City: “In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories. Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories.”
University of Chicago Press: “Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, Queen Anne’s lace on the roadsides, and toxic chemicals in the watershed, Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate is a book about Southern Appalachia in a contemporary moment of change and development. Layering a personal lyric voice with a broader awareness of labor issues and political and ecological crises, The Upstate redefines a regional poetics as one attuned to national and global systems. These poems observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation and raging in their own quiet way against their continuation.”
Harper Muse: “Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — young people are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television. Feeling emotions for the first time in what feels like forever, the excited and frightened Rose finds herself becoming increasingly involved in the resistance efforts.”
Riverhead: “When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.”
Autumn House Press: “A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable.”
Univeristy Press of Mississippi: “In Finding Myself Lost in Louisiana, author Keagan LeJeune brilliantly weaves the unusual folklore, landscape, and history of Louisiana along with his own family lineage that begins in 1760 to trace the trajectory of people’s lives in the Bayou State. His account confronts the challenging environmental record evident in Louisiana’s landscapes. LeJeune also celebrates and memorializes traditions of some underrepresented communities in Louisiana, communities that are vanishing or have vanished—communities including the author’s own.”
Spiegal & Grau: “In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.”
FSG: “A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award. A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.”
0 Commentaires