The Best Southern Books of July 2025 https://ift.tt/iQV9vUd
I keep seeing all these posts about we’re closer to 2050 than 2000, and it continues to blow my mind. Honestly, the concept of a year 2050 doesn’t even seem real to me. But today, I’m choosing to hope that 25 years from now, the world looks a little less terrifying than it does today. I’m choosing to hope that our communities will come together and fight for a better world, and that 25 years from now, we’ll see some of the fruits of that labor.
Of course, each of us has a part to play in this struggle for something better, whether it’s organizing, caring for vulnerable people in our communities, working towards a more inclusive workplace, or supporting artists and authors who make culture. If you’re looking for authors to support, here are some of the best Southern authors and books from July 2025.
Penguin Books: “Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other.”
Diode: “Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations. These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss.”
Simon & Schuster: “An exuberant, hilarious, and profound memoir by a mailman in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, who found that working for the post office saved his life, taught him who he was, gave him purpose, and educated him deeply about a country he loves but had lost touch with.”
Penguin Press: “A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.”
Sourcebooks Landmark: “From the acclaimed author of The Floating Girls and The Night the River Wept comes a gritty, coming-of-age, slow-burn Southern mystery with devastating characters and a twist that will leave you aching, exposing the all-consuming, obsessive power of first love and what it can do to a person.”
University of Alaska Press: “Nursery Rhymes in Black is a poetic recollection of race, roots, culture, and identity. Paying homage to the memory and work of elders and ancestors, Latorial Faison remembers her own matriarch, mother, grandmother — the rich memories of having grown up in rural, historic Southampton County, Virginia. These poignant poems mark significant moments and tell the lives of the people along the author’s journey through the post-segregation Jim Crow South.”
Henry Holt: “Steeped in the strangeness of contemporary life and suggestive of expansive metaphoric possibilities, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression.”
Tin House: “In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them… Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present — and how our present choices will echo for years to come.”
Bantam: “When two best friends’ hobby of crashing weddings takes a deadly turn, they’re forced to embark on a road trip of survival in this addictive thriller… As past grudges resurface, Kayla realizes that the best friend she thought she knew is more dangerous than she could ever have realized.”
Random House: “Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance — even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.”
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