The Best Southern Books of the Year 2018
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An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org
An American Marriage is Atlanta author Tayari Jones' unforgettable fourth novel. It tells a poignant story about love, loss, and the aftershocks of a wrongful conviction, which has life-altering impacts for Celestial and Roy, a young couple with lives full of possibility before them.
Also by Tayari Jones: Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow
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American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
To buy: $18, amazon.com, indiebound.org
This essential collection from South Carolina-born poet Terrance Hayes reckons with deep personal, political, and moral realities through poetry that rings with the languages of love and grief.
Also by Terrance Hayes: Lighthead, How to be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, Muscular Music
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Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine: Stories by Kevin Wilson
To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org
These engrossing stories by Tennessee writer Kevin Wilson are bursting with humor and heart, including the title tale, which is about a narcissistic rock star who moves home after an unexpected career development, and "Wildfire Johnny," which involves a time-traveling razor.
Also by Kevin Wilson: The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
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Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
To buy: $24.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org
In this important, previously unpublished work, the late writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston travels to Plateau, Alabama, in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade.
Also by Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, Mules and Men, Seraph on the Suwanee
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Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin
To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org
James A. McLaughlin's vivid debut novel Bearskin tells the story of a man working on a preserve in the Appalachian region of Virginia who becomes embroiled in conflict with poachers, locals, his bosses, and the lurking dangers of his past.
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Boom Town by Sam Anderson
To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis is an entertaining and kaleidoscopic look at the history of Oklahoma City, from the ups and downs of the city's Thunder basketball team to the area's unpredictable weather to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
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Certain American States: Stories by Catherine Lacey
To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org
The latest from Mississippi-born Catherine Lacey is a moving collection of stories that finds ordinary people grappling with complex questions surrounding love, grief, and meaning.
Also by Catherine Lacey: The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing
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Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Anne Tyler's Clock Dance is set in Baltimore, Maryland, where Willa Drake finds herself taking care of a stranger, a nine-year-old, and a dog, while simultaneously finding a second chance at the family she's always wanted.
Also by Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Breathing Lessons
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Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil by William Middleton
To buy: $40, amazon.com, indiebound.org
This new book is the first dual biography of Houston-based art collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who traveled the world collecting art and championing artists, and whose legacy includes such storied institutions as the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel.
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Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, edited by Sara B. Franklin
To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org
This dynamic collection is a tribute to celebrated chef and author Edna Lewis, who published some of the country's most-loved cookbooks and who helped defined Southern cooking as we know it. The book is edited by Sara B. Franklin and is comprised of essays by Mashama Bailey, Patricia E. Clark, John T. Edge, John T. Hill, Alice Waters, Caroline Randall Williams, and many more.
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Florida by Lauren Groff
To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Lauren Groff's latest is a marvelous collection of stories that takes its name from the state where the author resides. It's composed of complex tales that flicker with wonder, danger, insight, and surprise.
Also by Lauren Groff: Fates and Furies, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Delicate Edible Birds: Stories
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Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro
To buy: $24, amazon.com, indiebound.org
An affair is at the center of Fire Sermon by Georgia-based writer Jamie Quatro; it's a meditation on longing, faith, and morality that is complicated by the complexities of desire and the bonds of loyalty.
Also by Jamie Quatro: I Want to Show You More
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Gun Love by Jennifer Clement
To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org
From poet and novelist Jennifer Clement comes the inventive, evocative new book Gun Love. It's set in Central Florida, where a single mother and her daughter become dangerously familiar with the world of guns, gun violence, and gun trafficking.
Also by Jennifer Clement: Prayers for the Stolen, Widow Basquiat
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Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Mississippi writer Kiese Laymon's lyrical, layered new memoir delves deeply into the complexities of his experience and explores the myriad ways that family, love, violence, weight, race, and grief have touched and shaped his life.
Also by Kiese Laymon: Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
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Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey
To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org
In Monument, poet Natasha Trethewey—former U.S. Poet Laureate and former Poet Laureate of Mississippi—has written a powerful new collection that's also her first retrospective. It investigates memory, history, and the ways in which remembering—or choosing to forget—shapes individual experience as well as wider cultural narratives.
Also by Natasha Trethewey: Native Guard, Congregation, Bellocq's Ophelia, Thrall, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
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Southernmost by Silas House
To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org
An urgent road trip from Tennessee to Key West is at the heart of this hopeful novel by Kentucky writer Silas House. It's a story about faith, morality, and acceptance that finds life changing rapidly for an evangelical preacher named Asher Sharp and his son, Justin.
Also by Silas House: Eli the Good, The Coal Tattoo, A Parchment of Leaves
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Sweet & Low: Stories by Nick White
To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Mississippi native Nick White's sublime collection Sweet & Low is filled with compelling stories set across the Southern landscape that will make you look at the world a little closer and a little more creatively.
Also by Nick White: How to Survive a Summer
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The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith
To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org
This new novel from Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith is set in the delta of his home, where a bare-knuckle fighter named Jack struggles to settle his scores, pay his debts, and find redemption in an unforgiving landscape.
Also by Michael Farris Smith: Desperation Road, Rivers, The Hands of Strangers
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The Line That Held Us by David Joy
To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org
North Carolina writer David Joy sets his propulsive new novel The Line That Held Us in his home state. It's the suspenseful story of a hunting accident, a cover-up, and a subsequent quest for revenge that puts friends Darl Moody and Calvin Hooper in grave danger.
Also by David Joy: Where All Light Tends to Go, The Weight of This World
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The Lost Country by William Gay
To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Tennessee writer William Gay's posthumous novel is a wonder of Southern Gothic storytelling; it follows Billy Edgewater as he hitchhikes home to East Tennessee, encounters a dangerous cast of characters, and navigates the perils of the road at every mile.
Also by William Gay: I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Provinces of Night, Twilight, The Long Home, Little Sister Death
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Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
To buy: $29.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org
In Unsheltered Barbara Kingsolver, a prolific writer born in Kentucky and now based in southern Appalachia, weaves a captivating dual narrative that connects two families through the home they share at different, but not dissimilar, moments in the precarious turns of history.
Also by Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, Flight Behavior, Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, Homeland and Other Stories
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Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Hannah Pittard's Visible Empire is a fictionalized account of a true event, the 1962 Air France aviation disaster at Orly, which caused the deaths of many Georgians and which left its mark on the city of Atlanta.
Also by Hannah Pittard: Listen to Me, The Fates Will Find Their Way, Reunion
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Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org
Brandon Hobson's Where the Dead Sit Talking is an absorbing novel set in the 1980s in rural Oklahoma, where a Cherokee teenager named Sequoyah is placed in foster care and forms a deep bond with Rosemary, a Native American teenager with a past as troubled as his own.
Also by Brandon Hobson: Desolation of Avenues Untold, Deep Ellum
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Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith
To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org
This moving debut novel from Kentucky native Leesa Cross-Smith is told through three distinct voices. It's set in present-day Louisville, where the lives of three people—Evi; Eamon, her husband; and Dalton, his adopted brother—are forever changed by a tragic loss.
Also by Leesa Cross-Smith: Every Kiss a War