The good news is, books are still being published, bought, and read. The bad news is, for the foreseeable future, the bookselling and publishing industries are completely different than they were just four weeks ago. If you can still afford to support independent bookstores during the pandemic, here are the best new Southern books of April 2020.
Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara
By William Fargason
April 1, 2020
University of Iowa Press: “In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.”
Neck of the Woods
By Amy Woolard
April 7, 2020
Alice James Books: “If two girls are two halves of a deep, lifelong friendship, what does one girl wholly become when the other is gone? Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck Of The Woods, sets this question as a hero-quest deep inside the mythos of the American South, wandering through childhood stories in which a girl alone must work to save herself. These poems take on what happens when you wake up the morning after something happens, and find yourself in a different world, knowing there isn’t truly a way back home. Part-elegy, part-survivor’s testimony, Neck Of The Woods maps a path divided into a before and an ever after.”
Alabama Noir
Edited by Don Noble
April 7, 2020
Akashic Books: “Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book. Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Tom Franklin, Anita Miller Garner, Suzanne Hudson, Kirk Curnutt, Wendy Reed, Carolyn Haines, Anthony Grooms, Michelle Richmond, Winston Groom, Ravi Howard, Thom Gossom Jr., Brad Watson, Daniel Wallace, D. Winston Brown, and Marlin Barton.”
Improvisation Without Accompaniment
By Matt Morton
April 7, 2020
BOA Editions: “Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton’s debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness. These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker’s awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life’s toughest questions.”
The Book of Lost Friends
By Lisa Wingate
April 7, 2020
Ballantine Books: “From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours comes a new novel inspired by historical events: a dramatic story of three young women on a journey in search of family amidst the destruction of the post-Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who rediscovers their story and its vital connection to her own students’ lives.”
God had a body
By Jennie Malboeuf
April 7, 2020
Indiana University Press: “The mind and the body. The heavens and earth. God and animal. The speaker in God had a body considers how the image of a higher power is presented to her, beginning with a Catholic upbringing in Kentucky. Speckled with stars and peopled with creatures, these poems employ a trinity of sequences that address a present, past, and possible future—from a troubled reckoning with belief to loss and promise still ahead.”
The Coyotes of Carthage
By Steven Wright
April 14, 2020
Ecco Press: “Dre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful political consultant, his aggressive tactics have put him on thin ice with his boss, Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and mentored his career. She exiles him to the backwoods of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting to sell their pristine public land to the highest bidder.”
Simon the Fiddler
By Paulette Jiles
April 14, 2020
William Morrow: “In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army.”
Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction
By Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin
April 15, 2020
University of Georgia Press: “Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s 1946 autobiography The Making of a Southerner is considered a classic testament of a white southerner’s commitment to racial justice in a culture where little was to be found. Lumpkin’s unpublished novel Eli Hill, which was discovered in Lumpkin’s papers after her death, contributes to the same struggle by imaginatively re-creating a historical figure and a moment in the violent white resistance to Reconstruction.”
At Briarwood School for Girls
Michael Knight
April 21, 2020
Grove Press: “From the award-winning writer of Eveningland and The Typist, Michael Knight, At Briarwood School for Girls is an incisive, witty, beautifully-written novel set at a boarding school in the Virginia countryside.”
A Thousand Moons
By Sebastian Barry
April 21, 2020
Viking: “From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzling new novel about memory and identity, set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive parents John Cole and Thomas McNulty, whose story Barry told in his acclaimed previous novel Days Without End, she forges a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past.”
After the Last Border:
Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
By Jessica Goudeau
April 28, 2020
Viking: “The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees has been central to America’s identity for centuries—yet America has periodically turned its back at the times of greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the twenty-first century American dream, having won the “golden ticket” to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.”
Southern Review of Books 