November is always a shock to me; I look up and panic about how cold it’s getting and where the year went. It’s a rough adjustment into winter — the world is dark, the days are short, and life is really hard. Books are a comfort in this time, so I hope you’re cozy, wherever you are, and curled up with a new book.
Gullies of My People
By John Lane
November 1, 2023
UGA Press: “While scouting sites for geology field trips, poet and naturalist John Lane encountered deep gullies created between the Civil War and the 1930s contributed to by his mother’s tenant farming family and their rural neighbors in Piedmont South Carolina. This brush with the poor farming practices of the past leads Lane into an exploration of his own family’s complicated history and of the larger environmental forces that have shaped the region where he chooses to live.”
Today Tonight Forever
By Madeline Kay Sneed
November 7, 2023
Graydon House: “When thirty-three-year-old Athena Matthias is asked, yet again, to be a bridesmaid, she’s not exactly enthusiastic about the idea. Still reeling from a messy divorce from her wife, she’s never felt less inclined to celebrate love. By the time the cake is cut and the ultimate betrayal is revealed, Athena must find the courage to forgive — both others and herself — and embrace the beauty of a chance to move forward.”
Orders of Service
By Willie Lee Kinard III
November 14, 2023
Alice James: “As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt. This commentary on gospel traditionalism is armed with dreams of helping to reshape lived realities where being your truest self could be shunned or ostracized in deeply religious communities. It ruminates on this Deep South narrative by exploring how the age of social media has created a rich underground counterculture that offsets the surface rituals of grief and shame.”
Snakedoctor
By Maurice Manning
November 14, 2023
Copper Canyon: “Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor. Existing between haunting memory and pastoral dreamscape, this quiet collection showcases Manning’s storytelling at its finest… Through rhyme, blues, and haiku, Snakedoctor trains our ears to hear music in the mundane, to find beauty all around us: in the annotated margins of a well-read book, the flight of a father’s shadow puppet, the yellow centers of daisies.”
Daughters of Muscadine
By Monic Ductan
November 14, 2023
Fireside Industries: “Two events tie together the nine stories in Monic Ductan’s gorgeous debut: the 1920s lynching of Ida Pearl Crawley and the 1980s drowning of a high school basketball player, Lucy Boudreaux. Both forever shape the people and the place of Muscadine, Georgia, in the foothills of Appalachia… Covering the last one hundred years, these are stories of people whose voices have been suppressed and erased for too long: Black women, rural women, Appalachian women, and working-class women.”
The Professor
By Lauren Nosett
November 14, 2023
Flatiron Books: “On a spring afternoon in Athens, Georgia, Ethan Haddock is discovered in his apartment, dead, apparently by his own hand. His fatality immediately garners media attention: not because his death reflects the troubling increase of depression and mental health issues among college students, but because the media has caught the whiff of a scandal… Marlitt Kaplan never investigated love affairs… In her relentless pursuit to uncover the mystery behind Ethan’s death, Marlitt will be forced to confront the power structures ingrained in the classroom against the backdrop of a historic campus and an institution that sometimes fails its most vulnerable members.”
Gator Country
By Rebecca Renner
November 14, 2023
Flatiron Books: “Gator Country is the twisting true story of the impossible choices individuals must make to stay afloat in this world. Through its wholly unique blend of reporting, nature writing, and personal narrative, this book transports readers to vibrant and dangerous Florida landscapes and offers intimate portraits of those who call the region home. Broad in scope and vivid in detail, Gator Country is a fast paced tale of the risks people will take to survive in one of the world’s most beautiful yet formidable landscapes and the undercover investigation that threatens to topple the whole scheme.”
The New Naturals
By Gabriel Bump
November 14, 2023
Algonquin: “An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn’t look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven — it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere safe, somewhere everyone can feel loved, wanted, and accepted, where the children learn actual history, where everyone has an equal shot. From one of the most exciting new literary voices out there, The New Naturals is fresh and deeply perceptive, capturing the absurdity of life in the 21st century, for readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. In this remarkable feat of imagination, Bump shows us that, ultimately, it is our love for and connection to each other that will save us.”
Why Any Woman
By Keira V. Williams
November 15, 2023
UGA Press: “Why Any Woman examines key texts by and about Southern women as a means of understanding the role of regional popular culture in defining and redefining American feminisms as we approached the twenty-first century. Taken as a collective, these texts expand how we think about the whats, wheres, whens, and hows of feminisms in recent U.S. history.”
Southern Review of Books 