Southern Literary Fiction

I never wanted to be a cowboy - living in a small town was suffocating. The military was my out. I saw every place I ever wanted and everything that nightmares are made of...until I almost lost my life and ended up back home.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as property within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, all of whom are slaves in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all.

On the Ides of March, our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes (forgetful husband, baffled father, prosperous insurance agent, and leading citizen of Thermopylae, North Carolina), learns that his father has discharged himself from the hospital, taken all his money out of the bank and, with a young Black female mental patient, vanished in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Left behind is a mysterious list of seven outrageous tasks that Raleigh must perform in order to rescue his father and his inheritance.

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds...

County Sheriff Brody Hayes is in the midst of a missing person's call - for a five-month-old baby. Deep in the mountains of his hometown, Bowie, Wyoming, Brody's desperate search for the helpless child through a worsening snowstorm leads him on an even greater journey - one through his memories of his childhood, his brother, his son, and a life for himself that he thought was lost.

Eloise hasn't quite figured out how to move on after the death of her son, Eddie. She makes good money, buys a new apartment, learns the piano, engages in an office flirtation, but nothing seems to brighten her days quite like the occasional letter from one of her accounting clients, Ed B. When, after months of correspondence, Ed invites Eloise to his country home for a visit, she finds herself overwhelmed by the "Eddies" of her life - the one she lost, the one she writes to, and the one she's eternally searching for.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

"Mon père vient de mourir." Le narrateur décide alors de revenir dans son pays natal, Haïti, dont il avait été exilé par le dictateur du moment. Et le voilà sur les traces de son passé, de ses origines. Un périple doux et grave, rêveur et plein de charme, qui lui fera voir la misère, la faim, la violence mais aussi les artistes, les jeunes filles... L'espoir, peut-être.

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage” (The Washington Post) by the celebrated author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he...

“Perceptive and witty—like a Sally Rooney novel set in Southern California.” —The Minnesota Star Tribune “It’s this author’s best work yet. A Sapphic roller-coaster ride.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A controversial Los Angeles-based author attempts to revive her career...

"This novel will grab you in the gut and hold you there. It’s absolutely outstanding. Once I entered this world I didn’t want to leave.” —Roxane Gay, author of Opinions "The cast delivers powerfully nuanced performances. [Narrator] Dion Graham’s Sabre is both cringe-inducingly unctuous...

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.... With “one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary writing” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Robert McCammon unfurls his visionary masterpiece of survival, redemption, and the astonishing transformations love...

"The tension in Hart’s story never lets up, and you’ll find yourself unable to break away — disc after disc (or page after page) — long past your bedtime." -- NJ.com This program includes a letter read by the author “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate, die...

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina. Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted 1940 Ford coupe.

"Funny, wild, witty, and profound.”―Victor LaValle "A wild and wonderful debut, teeming with music, family and art."—New York Times "Magical, lyrical, gritty, otherworldly…hype like Bayou Classic in the 90s."—P. Djèlí Clark New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2022!...

The Kingston Trio’s folk song “Tom Dooley” tells the story of the murder of Laura Foster, a simple country girl involved with returning Confederate soldier Tom Dula. But Tom was also engaged in a passionate affair with his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful - and married - Ann Melton. One May morning in 1866, Laura Foster stole her father’s horse and left home, telling a neighbor that she was eloping to Tennessee. Three months later, her body was found in a shallow grave only a few hundred yards from where she was last seen.

"Great, near-future sci-fi...A propulsive, character-driven thriller...I really love this book."—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners In the spirit of Station Eleven and California, award-winning novelist Holly Goddard Jones offers a literary spin on the dystopian...