Lately, there have been entire days in Tennessee that haven’t reached the 90s! I would even go so far as to say fall is on the way. I will be spending the season browsing as many bookstores as possible and searching for the perfect new sweater — think Harry from When Harry Met Sally. If you’re also pretending to be in a Nora Ephron movie and haunting your local bookshop, check out one of these wonderful new Southern releases.
Razzle Dazzle
by Major Jackson
September 5, 2023
W. W. Norton: “Whether addressing racial conflict and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in America, bearing witness to the plight of refugees, or grieving the contradictory nature of humankind, these dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice, and accountability.”
One Blood
by Denene Millner
September 5, 2023
Forge Books: “Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women’s equality in early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel explores three women’s intimate, and often complicated, struggle with what it truly means to be to be family.”
Night Journey
by Greg Johnson
September 5, 2023
Regal House: “Told in alternating sections, the novel dramatizes one family’s terror-filled crisis even as it explores the boundaries of familial and erotic love. The dynamics of power, gender, and fraught sexuality govern this riveting novel, as does the theme of deception in all its guises. Night Journey is the finest and most powerful book yet by award-winning author Greg Johnson.”
Good Women
by Halle Hill
September 12, 2023
Hub City: “Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries — or lack thereof — influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect… With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.”
Snakes of St. Augustine
by Ginger Pinholster
September 12, 2023
Regal House: “The theft of Trina Leigh Dean’s beloved snakes – including a rare Eastern indigo named Unicorn, Banana Splits the yellow ball python, and Bandit the banded king snake – coincides with the disappearance of a troubled young man named Gethin Jacobs. While his sister Serena searches for him, she gains an unlikely accomplice – Jazz, a homeless community college student. Meanwhile, Trina’s friend Fletch, a burnt-out cop, scours St. Augustine, Florida, for the stolen snakes. His quest puts Fletch on a dangerous collision course with Gethin, raising questions about community, family, and the power of compassion.”
Status Pending
by Adrian Blevins
September 15, 2023
Four Way Books: “A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins’ oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict.”
Mr. Texas
by Lawrence Wright
September 19, 2023
Knopf: “A hilarious, sharply drawn send-up of Texas politics — from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author. A novel about a dark-horse candidate who risks his personal happiness for a career in the Texas House of Representatives. Lawrence Wright has crafted a hilarious, immensely clever roller-coaster ride about one man’s pursuit of goodness in the Lonestar State.”
The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning
by Ellen Ann Fentress
September 15, 2023
University Press of Mississippi: “Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned Southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white Southern woman today.”
Dark Ride
by Lou Berney
September 19, 2023
William Morrow: “Twenty-one-year-old Hardy “Hardly” Reed — good-natured, easygoing, usually stoned — is drifting through life. A minimum-wage scare actor at an amusement park, he avoids unnecessary effort and unrealistic ambitions. Then one day he notices two children, around six or seven, sitting all alone on a bench. Hardly checks if they’re okay and sees injuries on both children. Someone is hurting these kids. Faced with a different version of himself than he has ever known, Hardly refuses to give up. But his commitment to saving these kids from further harm might end up getting the kids, and Hardly himself, killed.”
The Unsettled
by Ayana Mathis
September 26, 2023
Knopf: “From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel — set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama — about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.”
Southern Review of Books 