The Best Southern Books of January 2025 https://ift.tt/v6iESCp
Cheers to 2025, y’all! The staff of the SRB is excited to spend another year digging into the complexity and vibrancy of voices and stories of the South. Get a jump start on your reading goals with one of these wonderful new releases!
Timber Press: “In Bad Naturalist, readers meander with her through orchards and meadows, forests and frog ponds, as she is beset by an influx of invasive species, rattlesnake encounters, conflicting advice from experts, and delayed plans—but none of it dampens her irrepressible passion for protecting this place. With delightful, lyrically deft storytelling, she shares her attempts to coax this beautiful piece of land back into shape. It turns out that amid the seeming chaos of nature, the mountaintop is teeming with life and hope.”
Button Poetry: “Through multilayered language and immersive imagery, SaintDenisSanchez interweaves political and social issues – from the lasting impacts of colonialism to environmental disaster – with intensely personal narratives of love, learning, and loss. The long, lyrical form and enrapturing poetic voice draw you in and refuse to let you go. before & after our bodies maps a stunningly poignant family tree and gets at the root of the social forces that shaped its growth.”
Knopf: “Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era — with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses — and who seem to care little about what their children are up to — Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.”
Counterpoint: “A modern and classic story of family, I’ll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year — 1995 — anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child. With heart, wit, and courage, and through pain, these characters traverse territory that both challenges and defines the bonds of family.”
Scribner: “Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.”
W. W. Norton: “Known for his tragicomic voice and unforgettable characters, John Dufresne tells the story of Olney, whose beloved son, Cully, collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida. Hilarious and devastating in equal measure, My Darling Boy is a hero’s quest for our time, a testament to families touched by the opioid crisis, and a remarkable achievement from one of our most talented authors.”
Berkley: “They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened… Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.”
Hanover Square: “The beloved author of Don’t Cry for Me and Perfect Peace returns with a poignant, emotionally exuberant novel about a young queer Black man finding his voice in 1980s Chicago — a novel of family, forgiveness and perseverance, for fans of The Great Believers and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Poignant, sweeping and luminously told, Isaac’s Song marks a return to the beloved characters of Don’t Cry for Me, and a highwater mark in the career of an award-winning author.”
University Press of Mississippi: “Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and the other rooted in pain. Through an analysis of commercially published ‘southern’ cookbooks from the 1990s to the present, Tippen examines the range of rhetorical purposes and strategies writers have employed, some of which undermine the reality of a painful past and cause harm or violence, and others which serve as tools for truth and reconciliation.”
National Geographic Society: “In this lush and lyrical memoir, she tells a story of exploration and reckoning that takes her from her home in Washington, D.C., to an exotic array of locales: Thailand and Sri Lanka, Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal, Benin, Costa Rica, and St. Croix. The journey connects her with other divers, scholars, and archaeologists, offering a unique way of understanding the 12.5 million souls carried away from their African homeland to enslavement on other continents. But for Roberts, the journey is also intensely personal. Inspired by the descendants of those who lost their lives during the Middle Passage, she decides to plumb her own family history and life as a Black woman to help make sense of her own identity.”
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