Cheers to another excellent roundup of Southern literature, including a memoir in essays, an anthology of First Peoples poetry, and novels set all around the South!
Even Shorn
By Isabel Duarte-Gray
May 4, 2021
Sarabande Books: “Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book’s equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray’s poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. Duarte’s poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.”
Family Law
By Gin Phillips
May 4, 2021
Viking: “Set in Alabama in the early ’80s,Family Lawfollows a young lawyer, Lucia, who is making a name for herself at a time when a woman in a courtroom is still a rarity. Written in alternating voices from Lucia and Rachel’s perspectives,Family Lawis a fresh take on what the push for women’s rights looks like to the ordinary women and girls who long for a world redefined. Addressing mother daughter relationships and what roles we can play in the lives of women who aren’t our family, the novel examines how we shape each other and how we make a difference. The funny, strong, and yet tender-hearted female leads ofFamily Law illuminate a new kind of timeless Southern fiction — atmospheric, rich, and with quietly surprising twists and nuances all its own.”
Things We Lost to the Water
By Eric Nguyen
May 4, 2021
Knopf: A stunning debut novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. Their search for identity — as individuals and as a family — threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.”
Olympus, Texas
By Stacey Swann
May 4, 2021
Doubleday: “A bighearted debut with technicolor characters, plenty of Texas swagger, and a powder keg of a plot in which marriages struggle, rivalries flare, and secrets explode, all with a clever wink toward classical mythology. An expansive tour de force,Olympus, Texascleverly weaves elements of classical mythology into a thoroughly modern family saga, rich in drama and psychological complexity. After all, at some point, don’t we all wonder: What good is this destructive force we call love?”
Living Nations, Living Words
Ed. By Joy Harjo
May 4, 2021
W. W. Norton: “Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project — including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others — to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment.”
On Juneteenth
By Annette Gordon-Reed
May 4, 2021
Liveright: “Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’sOn Juneteenthprovides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed — herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s — forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.”
Girl in the Walls
By A. J. Gnuse
May 11, 2021
Ecco: “Elise knows every inch of the house. She knows which boards will creak. She knows where the gaps are in the walls. She knows which parts can take her in, hide her away. It’s home, after all. The home her parents made for her, before they were taken from her in a car crash. And home is where you stay, no matter what. Eddie is a teenager trying to forget about the girl he sometimes sees out of the corner of his eye. But when his hotheaded older brother senses her, too, they are faced with the question of how to get rid of someone they aren’t sure even exists. And as they try to cast her out, they unwittingly bring an unexpected and far more real threat to their doorstep.”
Revival Season
By Monica West
May 25, 2021
Simon & Schuster: “Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small Southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father — one of the South’s most famous preachers — holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. Celebrating both feminism and faith,Revival Seasonis a story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community. Monica West’s transporting coming-of-age novel explores complicated family and what it means to live among the community of the faithful.”
Pumpkin
By Julie Murphy
May 25, 2021
Balzer + Bray: “Waylon Russell Brewer is a fat, openly gay boy stuck in the small West Texas town of Clover City. His plan is to bide his time until he can graduate, move to Austin with his twin sister, Clementine, and finally go Full Waylon so that he can live his Julie-the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-music-Andrews truth. So when Clementine deviates from their master plan right after Waylon gets dumped, he throws caution to the wind and creates an audition tape for his favorite TV drag show, Fiercest of Them All. What he doesn’t count on is the tape getting accidentally shared with the entire school. As a result, Waylon is nominated for prom queen as a joke. Clem’s girlfriend, Hannah Perez, also receives a joke nomination for prom king. Waylon and Hannah decide there’s only one thing to do: run — and leave high school with a bang. A very glittery bang.”
Fierce and Delicate
By Renée K. Nicholson
May 31, 2021
West Virginia University Press: “Renée Nicholson’s professional training in ballet had both moments of magnificence and moments of torment, from fittings of elaborate platter tutus to strange language barriers and unrealistic expectations of the body. When, inevitably, Nicholson moved on from dancing, severed from her first love by illness, she discovered that she retained the lyricism and narrative of ballet itself as she negotiated life with rheumatoid arthritis. An intentionally fractured memoir-in-essays,Fierce and Delicatenavigates the traditional geographies of South Florida, northern Michigan, New York City, Milwaukee, West Virginia, and also geographies of the body — long, supple limbs; knee replacements; remembered bodies and actual. It is a book about the world of professional dance and also about living with chronic disease, about being shattered yet realizing the power to assemble oneself again, in a new way.”
