I think I blinked and now it’s nearly the end of July, I truly don’t know how it happened. I hope you’ve squeezed all the juice out of summer and also eaten at least one BLT with a garden-fresh tomato. If you’re looking for a few more books to read by the pool or the river or the creek, check out this month’s fantastic new Southern novels, short stories, and poems out.
Continental Drift
By Mai-Linh Hong
July 1, 2026
Trio House Press: “From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.”
The Great Wherever
By Shannon Sanders
July 7, 2026
Holt: “An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait. An expansive family saga told with a wry and distinctly modern voice, The Great Wherever is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our families, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.”
Good Morning Means I Love You
By Kendra Allen
July 7, 2026
Ecco: “In her arresting first novel, Kendra Allen investigates love, partnership, motherhood, pleasure and the pursuit of freedom in one young woman’s defiantly unconventional terms. This is a novel of the self in all its simultaneities and a living portrait of intimacy written in poetic, bold, and sensual prose that shines a light on what it means to redefine expectation.”
Perverts
By Mac Crane
July 7, 2026
The Dial Press: “Nothing is off limits for Mac Crane as they rework classic stories of rejection, isolation, and connection to suggest that the so-called pervert, by existing in the margins of society, may be the one who sees the world most clearly. Crane brings their keen eye for the unsavory to seventeen transgressive stories that are as tantalizing and addictive as the characters’ experiences. A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.”
Should the Waters Take Us
By Stephanie Soileau
July 14, 2026
Doubleday: “Should the Waters Take Us reaches across four hundred years of history to illuminate the many epochs and peoples of this storied place. Soileau has crafted an emotionally explosive family saga, as well as a masterful literary crie de coeur about the ways in which moral compromise can eat away at the very fabric of the places we call home.”
Paradise Pawn
By Meg Richardson
July 14, 2026
Tin House: “Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from Cartier jewelry to chainsaws to cars. … With incredible heart and wit, Richardson navigates current-day themes of trust, familial love, female friendship, and class differences, and asks us how far we would go to protect the ones we love most.”
What the Trees Remember
By Abigail Cutter
July 21, 2026
She Writes Press: “A post–Civil War novel that opens just as Reconstruction is falling apart, What the Trees Remember depicts a time of extreme social unrest and the birth of the Jim Crow era as experienced by strong women constrained by the limitations of the time they live in. Through the devastating loss of loved ones, the destruction of the comfortable life they’ve known, and Nature’s wrath, Dora and Alma strive to rise above their trials by drawing strength from the natural world and never losing faith in themselves.”
A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife
By Erica Wright
July 21, 2026
Black Lawrence Press: “The poems in Wright’s new collection consider the beauty and fragility of ecosystems, some turning inward, to the animalness of the human body. Through pregnancy, loss, and parenthood, these poems respond to the feats of strength called upon by motherhood as well as the mental gymnastics required to start a family in the face of ecological disaster. Despite these challenges, A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife is joyful, often defiantly so. Wright offers us ecopoems, but slant — as quick to banter with God as to praise rainforests.”
The Wind Witch Murders
By Casey Dunn
July 28, 2026
Severn House: “Raised by her fiercely religious grandmother to fear everything her mother represented, Raven’s life has been built on secrets and doubt. But when the past reaches out to claim her, she must choose: remain in the world that has always feared her, or step into the legacy her mother left behind. Because the wind remembers what everyone else has forgotten. And some murders were never what they seemed.”
Indie Darling
By Lauren Nossett
July 28, 2026
Flatiron Books: “Nashville is a city of two faces, where the glitter often masks the grit. Propulsive and atmospheric, Indie Darling is both a page-turning mystery and a powerful meditation on art, obsession, and the perils of being a female artist in a celebrity-obsessed world.”
Broken Houses
By Chelsea Rathburn
July 29, 2026
LSU Press: “In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father’s placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.”
Southern Review of Books 