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One of the New Yorker's "What We're Reading This Summer" * A Millions Most Anticipated Book (June) * A Goop15 May 2020 Feature * One of Apartment Therapy's "7 Must-Read Books Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer" * One of Debutiful's "9 Books You Should Read This June" * A Publishers Weekly "Upcoming Indie Press Books" feature Hailed by Lauren Groff as ¿fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,¿ and written with ¿incantatory crispness,¿ Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips.This collection takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips¿ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they¿ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. ¿The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips¿ imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.

This book "is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus's speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time"--

"Part coming-of-age romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern summer novel exploring sub-culture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb. Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their "mother-sage" Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island's namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb. This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle's commune-and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad's place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she'll stay there with him. But they still can't find Nutzo, the tiger's behavior has become increasingly erratic, and everyone's summer is about to take a strange, dark turn. Narrated by an ensemble cast of uniquely independent outsiders who have chosen counter-culture lives informed by their desires and past traumas, Bomb Island takes a rollicking journey through the weirds and wilds of Coastal Georgia. Stephen Hundley has crafted a spirited, zany novel with a big heart that examines the strength it takes to live freely and without shame"--

Duncan Park: Stories of a Classic American Ballpark recounts the history of Spartanburg's oldest wooden grandstand stadium. Built in 1926, Duncan Park stadium has been home to a semipro Negro Leagues team that had a star left-handed pitcher known throughout the South; a 1966 Spartanburg Phillies team named one of the 100 Best Minor League Baseball Teams; an American Legion Little World Series Champion; high school, college, and wooden bat-league summer teams; and legendary promotions and special events. Players and their families, coaches, sabermetricians, and all fans of America’s pastime will find in these pages a rich storehouse of our cultural heritage.

What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms, whispers the porous and questioning speaker ofIn the Hands of the River. In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as a boy made of shards.

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill's Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023 in Fiction ¿ One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of the Year One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2023 ¿ Featured in People Magazine's Best Books of Fall ¿ One of the Boston Globe's 20 Books We're Excited to Read This Fall ¿ One of Kirkus's 20 Best Books To Read in September ¿ Poets & Writer's "Page One" New and Noteworthy  ¿ One of the Southwest Review's 10 Must Read Books of 2023 ¿ Finalist for the 2024 Weatherford Award in Fiction ¿ Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist"A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review"A fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!" -Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church LadiesA woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy's mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. 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. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude. 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.

Told in the keen, honest voice of a young man growing up on the rural South Carolina coast, The Big Game Is Every Night grapples with masculinity, race, and family in contemporary blue-collar America. Grady Hayes's whole life revolves around football. When he breaks his leg starting a game against a rival high school, his life comes unglued. As he recovers, Grady grows bored and angry. He no longer relates to his mom, his cousin, or the girl he's been talking to, and loses interest in catfishing and eating family suppers on the weekends. When Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled, and there are rumors flying about why Coach made Grady a starting running-back in the first place. Frustrated and alone, Grady falls in with Hambone, a brooding older classmate, who takes him deep into the swamps to hunt raccoons and experiment with drugs. After an ugly confrontation with another player in the locker room, his relationship with Hambone turns dark and violent. Out of options, Grady's mom calls in his estranged father to set him straight, and Grady realizes that his dad isn't the man he remembers. In his debut novel, Robert Maynor delivers a literary Lowcountry Friday Night Lights that shines a harsh light on the ways American men are steeped in violence, and how hard it can be to shake loose the toxic norms that unchecked can keep us all so far apart.

A short story collection exploring the bounds of contemporary family and how we move forward in a world so often changed by loss. Lauded by Kevin Wilson as "an exceptional collection that introduces us to an exciting new voice," The Great American Everything orbits the experiences of relationships, be it brother-to-brother, sister-to-sister, patient-to-caregiver. Rendered with tenderness and a keen eye, these ten stories cut into the ways families approach questions of aging, adoption, loss, and class. A young woman hired to provide accompaniment services to an elder confronts the borders of complicity and friendship; two brothers search for details of their recently deceased grandfather in the desert; a college student faces her friend's abuser during a door-to-door fundraising campaign. For fans of Amy Hempel and Rick Moody, these stories, spread over varied landscapes of the South from Memphis to New Orleans, contend with the ways in which the places we live dictate the way we trust and protect our own. Scott Gloden has assembled a precise and moving collection that considers what makes a family, however makeshift or impromptu its design. Scott Gloden is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

All Of Us Together In The End is a lyrical examination of transformation after loss, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing."Vollmer's family memoir shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Soon after, flashing lights and floating orbs appear in the woods surrounding his family's home in rural North Carolina, where his widowed father lives. Formative memories of having been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church resurge in Vollmer's mind, hastening self-reexamination and reckoning. He corresponds with a retired geology professor about "ghost lights," which supposedly occur more in North Carolina than any other American state. He scrolls TikTok. He contacts an eccentric shaman who lives in Spain to have transcendental psychotherapy administered over Zoom. And then Jolene emerges, a woman endeared for decades to Vollmer's father, holding secrets to their family's past. Amidst the turmoil and loneliness of the pandemic, All of Us Together in the End is a poignant and often humorous investigation into belief set in a time where it seems people will believe anything. It is an elegiac affirmation of the awesome, strange, otherworldly ways our loved ones remain alive to us, even when they are out of reach.

Marlanda Dekines debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. Whatdoes it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nations founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekinespoems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas.Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past,Thresh & Holdoffers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

';You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.' That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.

Hailed by ZZ Packer as "a master of tone, detail, and imagery," Andrew Siegris's debut collection, We Imagined It Was Rain, is a love song to Tennessee. These loosely connected stories are imbued with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep understanding of the human spirit. A young man moves to the mountains and builds an heirloom chest in the wake of his son’s death; a town official must make the decision to execute a circus elephant; two siblings help their father commit suicide;  a preacher picks up the pieces of his ruined church, and his marriage, after a devastating flood; locals share stories of the girl with eyelashes so long she can braid them. Siegrist demonstrates careful attention to the smallest moments, to the rain on a windowpane, to individual mementos passed down through generations, in this far-reaching and thoughtful collection.We Imagined It Was Rain is the winner of our 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras. Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie's closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby. Twenty-five years later, Luce is a successful lawyer, and her daughter Meera now faces the same decision Edie once did. Like Luce, Meera is fiercely independent and plans to handle her unexpected pregnancy herself. Along the way, Meera finds startling secrets about her mother's past, including the long-ago friendship with Edie. As the three women's lives intertwine and collide, the story circles age-old questions about female awakening, reproductive choice, motherhood, adoption, sex, and missed connections. For fans of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything, The Say So is a timely novel that asks: how do we contend with the rippling effects of the choices we've made? With equal parts precision and tenderness, Franks has crafted a sweeping epic about the coming of age of the women's movement that reverberates through the present day.

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award FinalistGeorge Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

A New York Times Books New & Noteworthy book • A Most-Anticipated Book from BookPage, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Paperback Paris • Glowing reviews and features in Garden & Gun, CNN Philippines, Chapter16, Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome?Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce's black majorettes.Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South's relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.

For fans of The Mothers Leesa Cross-Smith's anticipated novel following a contemporary African American family caught in the wake of a tragic police shooting

It's 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent's self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie's fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband's bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie-tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt-is practicing black magic. When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to the lady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces. Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this mesmerizing debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice-stalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can't quite dispel.