The Best Southern Books of February 2025 https://ift.tt/02hjyeS
Things in the U.S. are dark right now. But we can turn to stories for a place to rest, a reminder of hope, and an opportunity to learn something new. This month (and every month), we encourage supporting Black authors and Black-owned bookstores.
SUNY Press: “Snapping Beans offers a collective narrative of Southern queer lesbian women and gender-nonconforming persons. Throughout the text, the American South acts as both a region and a main character, one that can shame and condemn but also serve as a site of reconciliation. Blending autoethnography and oral histories, Jayme N. Canty explores how both geographic location and social spaces, such as the Church, intersect with categories such as race, gender, and sexuality to shape and mark identity.”
Ballantine: “Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, Junie commits a desperate act — one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her.”
Wednesday: “Sariyah Lee Bryant can hear what people need — tangible things, like a pencil, a hair tie, a phone charger — an ability only her family and her best friend, Malcolm, know the truth about. But when she fulfills a need for her friend Deja who vanishes shortly after, Sariyah is left wondering if her ability is more curse than gift. This isn’t the first time one of her friends has landed on the missing persons list, and she’s determined not to let her become yet another forgotten Black girl. Not trusting the police and media to do enough on their own, Sariyah and her friends work together to figure out what led to Deja’s disappearance.”
Tin House: “Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.”
Regalo: “Freedom reverberates in Skye Jackson’s breathtaking debut, Libre, with evocative poems that are heart-wrenching, haunting, sensual, and tender. This collection explores the experiences of a young Black woman in New Orleans as she navigates the pull of familial and romantic relationships, celebrating the joys of Blackness, art, and friendship.”
Atlantic Monthly Press: “With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.”
Penguin Press: “Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story…In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis’s chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.”
William Morrow: “Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality. Insightful, evocative, and richly imagined with stories of hidden history, People of Means is an emotional tour de force that offers a glimpse into the quest for racial equality, the pursuit of personal and communal success, and the power of love and family ties.”
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