The Best Southern Books of March 2025 https://ift.tt/D1SPdcp
The sun was shining today and I sat on my porch without a jacket for the first time this year, and it turns out I desperately needed it. I’m so relieved that it’s stoop-reading season again! Early spring is the perfect time to read something that will help you notice the world around you, and we’ve got a lot of environmental writing coming out this month, so you’re in luck!
Berkley: “A man lunges in front of a car. An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. On this reservation, not all is what it seems in this new spine-chilling mythological horror from the author of Sisters of the Lost Nation.”
Blair: “For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film.”
Tin House: “In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense — of anything, really — but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime.”
Knopf: “The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing — not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories… Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting — enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been — and what still could be.”
Terra Firma: “Taken as a whole, the anthology emerges as a powerful call to action, urging collective reflection on our carbon footprint and a shared commitment to sustainable futures. It stands as a profound exploration of the intersections of ecological awareness, social justice, and poetic expression, inviting readers to contemplate their place in the broader web of life.”
University of Massachusetts Press: “Set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, the stories in Joyriders offer a resonant vision of rural and small-town life: lonely, half-haunted landscapes are pierced with moments of light, and even the most taciturn faces conceal inner worlds both rich and strange. Comfort and heartache abound — entangled, inseparable… Characters’ paths repeatedly bend in unforeseen directions, and the shape of each story surprises — illuminating, in this way, the surprising contours of entire lives.”
University Press of Florida: “Furman’s meditations give rise to an environmental ethic that challenges distinctions between nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, solitude and family life. Rather, with humor and hope, he encourages readers to engage in life with the mindset that the human and non-human are inextricably connected — and to ask how they can better belong together.”
Doubleday: “In her heartfelt, electrifying rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Collins has captured the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. The embrace of both inertia and danger, the longing for freedom and anarchy even as we crave a place to belong. Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is a time capsule stuffed with heat and booze, electric guitar riffs and big, empty spaces.”
Carnegie Mellon: “In her sixth collection Goat-Footed Gods, award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the infamous Goatman of Pope Lick, identified by The Washington Post as one of the deadliest cryptids in America… The Goatman lyrics are braided with poems about Driskell’s child’s traumatic injury from a fall. Always at the heart of Driskell’s poetry is her insistence that the path to the sacred is found not through the doctrine of ancient gods, but in walking clear-eyed through the dark woods of our historical past and exploring the never-ending wonder of the natural world.”
Beacon Press: “W. J. Lofton writes vivid, accessible poems that channel the energy, urgency, ambitions, joys, and sorrows of a young Black queer artist. They are about love and flirtation, sweet tea and hot sauce, God and family, life and death, police brutality and extrajudicial killings.”
0 Commentaires