The Best Southern Books of September 2024 https://ift.tt/nQDZ86a
It’s late September so I’m planning my annual autumn 80s movie marathon — When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I’ve also been crunching as many leaves as possible and it’s always a surprise how much serotonin that provides. Life is so full of little joys, even amid big sorrows. New books, of course, are also joys. Check out this month’s roundup of new releases to add to your celebration of fall!
Texas Review Press: “What Good is Heaven navigates queer youth and coming-of-age in the pastoral, but also hostile environment of the mountainous farm country in north Alabama. In registers that move between the religious, personal, political, and even ecocritical, What Good is Heaven asks what it means to love and be loved by what hurts you, to be implicated in perpetuating the same kinds of harm, and what it means to call such a complicated place your home.”
Fireside Industries: “In this visceral and powerful anthology, well-known and emerging Appalachian writers create an authentic space for processing and healing as they document and share the depth of the July 2022 flood’s devastation. Through words and images, Troublesome Rising reveals the writers’ fears, desperation, sadness, and anger while detailing and examining the disaster’s causes, the need for solutions, and how flooding has historically impacted the Appalachian community and culture. In a shared, varied, and resounding voice, this compelling collection not only serves as a historical document and an in-depth investigation of the event, but also as a celebration of Appalachian strength, determination, and resilience.”
Old Wounds
By Logan-Ashley Kisner
September 10, 2024
Delacorte: “Two transgender teens end up in a small, isolated town, where they must escape the locals who plan to sacrifice one of them to an ancient monster that only eats girls. A pulse-pounding thriller perfect for fans of Midsommar and Hell Followed with Us!”
Grove: “A masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. … Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.”
Simon & Schuster: “One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family. … Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.”
Harper: “Nagle tells the story of the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in Eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed in its long history of greed, corruption and lawlessness, and the Indigenous resistance that has shaped our country.”
Greater Ghost
By Christian J. Collier
September 15, 2024
Four Way Books: “In Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality.”
Miss Southeast
By Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
September 15, 2024
Curbstone Books: “Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be ‘more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.'”
Hub City: “Come By Here traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved. Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: ‘It is better to speak.'”
Terra Firma: “Essays that celebrate urban nature with keen observation and earthy humor. Nature isn’t only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door. Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.”
Ecco: “From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own. Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.”
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