The Best Southern Books of August 2024 https://ift.tt/VSjHvyE
Happy school supply shopping season! Not an August goes by without me experiencing a powerful urge to buy a new backpack, but I usually settle for new pens because yes, I do still have the one I used in high school, which yes, is ripped at the shoulder straps because I always carried too many books around. If you’re also satisfying school supply shopping urges, try one of these new August releases!
Counterpoint: “A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry’s first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.”
St. Martin’s Griffin: “Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other’s lives once and for all… Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately. It’s not until they board the tour bus that they discover they’ve both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they’re trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy.”
Belle Point Press: “A stark and lonely voice rings clear in Justin Carter’s debut collection. Brazos teems with ghosts, bloodlines, and gas flares, tracing a “river cloaked in mud” that trudges toward the Texas Gulf Coast. In these poems, a complex Millennial coming-of-age story emerges amidst the grief for a place that seems to disappear while standing still— always haunted by the ways ‘we’ve all been pulled under’ the currents of violence, identity, and change.”
William Morrow: “Following an unforgettable cast of characters and a jaded female P.I. enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy in 1980s Mississippi, The Queen City Detective Agency is a riveting, razor-sharp Southern noir that unravels the greed, corruption, and racism at the heart of the American Dream.”
University of North Carolina Press: “Stories I Lived to Tell is more than a selection of stories from revered mountain storyteller Gary Carden–it is a testimony of a distinguished culture, sense of place, and spirit of community that connects the Appalachian past to its present. This memoir-in-stories invites the reader to move beyond stereotypes to experience the scenes, characters, and community of the author’s childhood and formative years, intersecting with the regional folktales and mythologies that fired his imagination.”
The University Press of Kentucky: “In a span of minutes, the lives of four members of Brickton Community College change forever when an active shooter enters the campus and opens fire. Running on adrenaline and fear, the group — a crew of students and their teacher — subdues the perpetrator in a violent frenzy that leads to the man’s death. Reeling from the shock of their collective actions, the group is thrown into turmoil when they realize that the person they have killed is someone they all knew. Narrated in alternating voices and set against the backdrop of an economically depressed Appalachian town, Laura Leigh Morris’s The Stone Catchers explores the immeasurable pain and trauma experienced by the survivors of a school shooting.”
Beacon: “Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities. Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.”
University of South Carolina Press: “In lyrical, fragmented prose, Rachel Hanson lays bare the impossible choice between self-preservation and her love for five younger siblings for whom she had become a second mother. As the years pass, Hanson struggles with guilt for leaving her siblings as she slowly realizes she could not save them. The End of Tennessee is a testament to a sister’s love, resilience, and determination, a book for anyone who has left one life to create another.”
Hurricane Baby
By Julie Liddell Whitehead
August 20, 2024
Madville: “Julie Whitehead’s journalistic skill packs the stories of Hurricane Baby with detail and authenticity. In 2005, Wendy Magnum of Hattiesburg, Mississippi suffers remorse after having an intimate encounter with Judd McKay, a friend her husband, Ray, trusted with his family during Hurricane Katrina. Tommy Hebert turns to alcohol to handle what he saw in search-and-rescue in Metairie, Louisiana. Mike Seabrook’s relationships with his God and his wife, Dinah, are tested after he loses a patient in his emergency room in Slidell, Louisiana. Lori King goes into premature labor as a result of the storm, and her husband, James, discovers that his best friend died trying to protect the Kings’ home in Kenner, Louisiana from looters.”
Hub City: “From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family. Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.”
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