What books should every Bitter Southerner read? This year we tossed this question to our Bitter Southerner members and to some of our editorial staff and contributors. We wanted to know the books from 2020 and early 2021 that they would urge their friends and family to read.
It was hard to whittle down all the amazing suggestions we got! Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in, and to all the writers and creators of books.
Some of the books on the list, which include novels, essay collections, nonfiction, short stories, and YA fantasy, are set in the South, while others are by writers who were born in or forever formed by this region.
Although we’ve got some delightful and inspiring books on this list, the South isn’t always an easy breezy place. But damn if it doesn’t have some of the best writers, who’ll make you want to stay rooted in and rooting for this place we call home.
Summer reading can be a great escape; it can also be a great point of entry to broaden our worlds and perspectives. This list is just a part of a great conversation that we are excited for y’all to join.
We hope you’ll head over to your favorite independent bookseller or public library — oh how we’ve missed and love them so — and pack up a stack of books (or audiobooks or e-books) that will make you laugh, think, cry, and roll up your sleeves to keep on working toward a better South and a better world. Or maybe they’ll just give you something to talk about at your next get-together, or inspire you to write (or finish) that book you keep thinking about!
—The BS Crew
Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light: Essays
by Helen Ellis
Christina Nifong, Bitter Southerner member from Roanoke, Virginia, told us, “Ellis' book of essays will be called ‘light reading.’ Many of them are set in New York City, but Ellis is from Alabama, travels with girlfriends to Panhandle Florida, and cherishes her Southern accent (even after all these years). This collection is sneaky good. At first reading, it feels like a trifle, a treat. But once you've finished, you realize how important its messages are: Friends are how we get through a punishing world; it is absolutely imperative to fully embrace who you are; never take yourself too seriously; all we can do is take the next best step for us.”
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
by Grady Hendrix
Joanna, a Bitter Southerner member from San Diego, thinks this book holds the perfect recipe for a great summer read: “Start with a ladies’ book club where the society roles they play are perhaps more important than the books they read. Add a strange young man who somehow charms his way into the group. Mix in some very bizarre attacks and disappearances in town, and things take a delightful, horrific turn. Set in the ’90s in a small Southern town, this book captures the difficulty of fitting into strict gender roles and the discomfort of feeling like you don't belong while also being funny as hell. It's also just plain good horror. I read this book cover to cover in two days.”
When These Mountains Burn
by David Joy
Victoria, a Bitter Southerner member from Erlanger, Kentucky, recommends David Joy’s fourth novel, “a story about family, addiction, and the mountains of North Carolina.” She says: “It’s a gritty, violent story, but no one writes about the real Appalachia like David Joy. I flew through it, and it stayed with me long after I finished it.”
In discussing his writing, Joy told The Mountaineer, “I spent most of my life around addicts of some kind or another. With opioids specifically, I’ve probably lost a dozen friends over the last decade or so to overdoses. ... I think maybe that’s where my work differs from a lot of other writers is that I write from the opposite side of most folks. I approach stories from the other side of the tracks.” His Bitter Southerner essay “Digging in the Trash” gives you a glimpse of his powerful writing.
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's guide to the natural world is flush with keen observations and beautiful illustrations of inner and outer life. She “coos” over mimosa pudica and “its spherical lavender-pink flowers, which bloom only in summer, and look as if someone crossed a My Little Pony doll with a tiny firework,” as she writes. “But its best and most notable feature is that when you piano your fingers over the leaves of this plant, they give a shudder and a shake and quickly fold shut, like someone doesn’t want to spill a secret.”
Jackie Bailey, a BS member from Jackson, Mississippi, says, “This book is a true wonder, an uplifting look at the South from the perspective of someone who chose to live here and then chose to stay. The stories are short, interesting, and touching. I kept my cell next to me while reading so that I could Google some of the animals and plants she writes about. I've given 10 copies as gifts. Anyone who thinks they love the South should read this book.”
Transcendent Kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
Sarah Taylor-Barkley, a Bitter Southerner member from Little Rock, Arkansas, sent us this review of the latest from the author of the 2016 novel Homegoing: “Transcendent Kingdom is Gyasi's extremely personal, but fictional, story of Gifty, a neuroscience candidate at Stanford's School of Medicine, as she reckons with her childhood in Alabama as a Ghanaian immigrant. It is a reflective, compassionate account of themes that haunt the South: family, racism, depression, addiction, and faith. It reminds the Southern reader that even if we find ourselves outside of the South, our experiences there have shaped us deeply — for better or for worse.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger: A Memoir
by Lisa Donovan
This memoir by James Beard Award-winning writer and Southern pastry chef Lisa Donovan was lauded by Bitter Southerner member Katie from Nashville, Tennessee:
“Lisa Donovan has a no-nonsense vibe, even when she's lost and trying to figure out how to move forward. I loved reading about her journey as a mom, a developing chef, and a woman deciding what mattered most and how she wanted to design her life.”
The Orchard
by David Hopen
Emily Pomeranz Keith, a Bitter Southerner member from Arlington, Virginia, writes, “As a Southerner with Jewish heritage, representation in Southern literature, movies, TV, etc., is rare. The Orchard is about a Jewish boy from Brooklyn whose family relocates to a Modern Orthodox community in Miami. Just like many Southern novels where protagonists wrestle with questions of Christian faith, the adolescents in The Orchard question their own dedication to Judaism as the modern world pulls at them from all directions. It's a look at a Southern community we often don't think about.”
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
by Deesha Philyaw
In this engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in the South, Deesha Philyaw takes readers deep into the hearts, heads, and homes of the women who populate the pews of the proverbial Black Church, in all its complexities and contradictions. The good girls and church ladies in this collection prove to be more complicated than they appear on the surface, as they struggle with faith, sexuality, and their intriguing intersections. They also find joy in themselves, in each other, and in divine connections. Philyaw largely avoids the unevenness that sometimes stymies short story collections, and she introduces us to some unforgettable women — like the title characters in “Eula” and “Jael” — whose stories put them in literary conversation with characters created by such iconic Black women writers as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, all clearly inspirations for Philyaw’s impressive fiction debut.
— Valerie Boyd, Senior Consulting Editor
Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant
by Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano
Bray Hayden, a Bitter Southerner member from Seattle, recommends this brilliant “conversation between the co-owners of a beloved Savannah restaurant about creating The Grey and grappling with issues of race, identity, and friendship that they faced during that process.” The audiobook, read by the co-authors, conveys the emotion and thoughtfulness of New York transplant Morisano and the gifted chef Bailey, a James Beard Award winner who spent part of her childhood in Georgia and part in New York. She returned to Georgia in 2015 to co-helm The Grey, which is located in a formerly segregated Greyhound bus station, across the street from the courthouse where her parents were married in the 1980s. Listening to the audiobook is its own treat, but you may want to spring for the print copy so you can try out the recipes at the end of each chapter, including a cocktail called the Paper Plane and a Salted Honey Chess Pie.
Blacktop Wasteland
by S.A. Cosby
Chris O'Donnell, a Bitter Southerner member from Richmond, Virginia, loved reading this winner of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize by rural Virginia writer S.A. Cosby. “Beauregard, or ‘Bug,’ is a retired professional getaway driver,” O’Donnell explains. “After his last big score three years ago, he bought a double-wide, some land, and an auto shop and settled down to be a legit businessman with his wife and kids in rural southeast Virginia. Unfortunately, business isn't going so well, and he is behind on rent and bills. His kids need braces and college money. Then opportunity knocks, and he has a shot at a jewelry store heist that will catch him up. Unfortunately for him, the jewelry store is really a front for organized crime, and they are not happy about $2 million in diamonds vanishing in a robbery. The book is fast-paced, exciting, violent, profane at times, and almost impossible to put down. Underlying all the action is a current of institutional racism as Bug (a Black man) tries to run a legit business in rural Virginia, where the Confederate flag flies freely.”
How Lucky
by Will Leitch
Journalist and sportswriter Will Leitch takes readers on an entertaining, suspenseful, and moving journey in his first work of fiction, How Lucky, set in Athens, Georgia. The novel’s main character, Daniel, works to solve the case of a missing University of Georgia student, while also battling spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative disease that requires him to use a wheelchair and renders him unable to speak. As a fan of Leitch’s writing for years, and a fellow Athenian, I enjoyed seeing him tackle this first work of fiction. How Lucky is great company for time on the road this summer or a weekend camping trip.
— Eric NeSmith, Publisher
Milk Blood Heat
by Dantiel W. Moniz
Alexandra Tammaro, a Bitter Southerner member from Washington, D.C., sent us this recommendation: “Milk Blood Heat is a billowing set of short stories exploring how corporeality connects us to friends, family, and our environments and how, by the nature of our embodiment, we’re unknowable yet so vulnerable. Moniz’s lush language gets into the dark corners of what defines, constructs, and sustains our relationships, their complexities and contradictions, set against stifling Florida heat, languid north Florida suburbia, and the pulse of Jacksonville. The book is dripping with the Florida gothic feel I love.”
Memorial
by Bryan Washington
Anton, a Bitter Southerner member from Austin, Texas, was blown away by this debut novel by Kentucky-born and Texas-raised writer Bryan Washington, whose short story collection Lot won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence last year, the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. Washington’s new book, Memorial, is “a love story set in Houston and Japan, full of queerness, family complications, personal failures, and trying to find the way,” our BS member writes. “Beautiful, just so beautiful.”
The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
by Charles M. Blow
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, a Louisiana native who now calls Atlanta his primary home, is encouraging young Black people to leave Northern cities and consolidate economic and political influence in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, states where African Americans once were the majority.
Blow writes: “Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.”
The great reverse migration has been taking shape for several years now, but this manifesto urges a focused intention in reclaiming and deepening Black roots in Southern soil (and of course, connecting with the ones who never left). If you are new to this conversation, reading Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns might help build a framework for understanding what makes Blow’s argument so compelling and redemptive.
— Josina Guess, Managing Editor
Gold Diggers
by Sanjena Sathian
Frank Reiss, owner of A Cappella Books, recommends this magical realism novel: “Brilliant concept, brilliantly executed by a shining new star from the Indian diaspora of metro Atlanta.” Spanning decades and continents, Sanjena Sathian’s book centers around Neil Narayan, a second-generation Indian American who grows up in the Atlanta suburbs. The story begins while he’s in high school as he struggles under the expectations of his parents and community. Soon, he discovers that his neighborhood crush, Anita Dayal, has a secret to her success: an alchemical potion — a “lemonade” made of stolen ambition — and he is determined to get some. Later on in life, a struggling Neil finds himself craving just one more taste of that sweet, gold lemonade.
Legendborn
by Tracy Deonn
Kathy Randall Bryant, a Bitter Southerner member from Kannapolis, North Carolina, recommends this YA fantasy novel by fellow North Carolinian Tracy Deonn, winner of the 2021 ALA Coretta Scott King John Steptoe Award for New Talent. Bryant writes: “Deonn tells a story with excellent characters and fascinating non-triangle triangles. It’s about people who can actually just be friends and what it means to carry a legacy in your skin. And in the midst of all that, she tackles multifaceted grief with PTSD and a sustained blocking of grief that intensifies it. … Because this story is about magic and power, woven into the legend of King Arthur and the history and complicated past of chattel slavery in the U.S. and how that system continues to have repercussions today, we see how … colonization twists power into consolidation and how people in power will do ANYTHING to maintain it. She invites me, a white woman from North Carolina, to see what it feels like to be in her skin and in places not designed with Black lives in mind. Her setting, UNC-Chapel Hill, is alive and textured and full of detail.”
If or When I Call
by Will Johnson
Brad, a Bitter Southerner member from Reidsville, North Carolina, loved this debut novel set in rural Missouri by musician, painter, and songwriter Will Johnson, who has performed with Centro-matic, South San Gabriel, and Monsters of Folk. Brad wrote, “Johnson, a Missouri native living in Texas, captures the people and place well. A marriage dissolving, addiction, struggling to find light in the darkness. The blurb on the front of the book by Wiley Cash says it best: ‘Lives in small towns are not small.’”
In a conversation for The Austin Chronicle, author Johnson said, “I suspect I’m like most any other writer – trying to find new ways to see the room; trying to find new voices to work with, and with that, maybe some better understanding. I’m trying to keep myself turned on by melody, character development, predicament, language, and interaction. I’m trying to remain unafraid of conflict, discomfort, and the notion of hurting my characters no matter how much I might come to love them.”
The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half is a beautiful story of the bonds twin sisters share and the forces that drive them apart. Bennett’s novel tells the story of the Vignes twins, who run away from their small Southern Black community at 16. Over the next two decades, the twins — once inseparable — leave each other to lead completely different lives and raise their own daughters, who have to reckon with their mothers’ choices. This book left me ruminating on the ways in which people of color often have to abandon much of their identity to survive in a white society and what it means to embrace that culture, that sense of self.
— Rachel Priest, Content Editor
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev
by Dawnie Walton
This wildly entertaining novel tells the story of Opal Jewel, a literal rock star from the 1970s whose bold protest of a Confederate flag at a concert changes the world as she knows it. First-time novelist and longtime journalist Dawnie Walton — a Jacksonville, Florida, native — reconstructs the fictional story of Opal’s rise to fame as if it is a journalistic oral history in a major music magazine. This approach is inventive and exhilarating, a thrill ride from start to finish.
— Valerie Boyd, Senior Consulting Editor
Mississippi Prison Writing
edited by Louis Bourgeois of the Prison Writes Initiative
Written by 30 incarcerated men, women, and youth, this raw collection of narratives and poetry reveals the inner lives, anguish, dreams, and stories of the contributors, who live in several prisons throughout the state of Mississippi. This is the third book from the Prison Writes Initiative, a creative writing program led by Louis Bourgeois. One prisoner serving a life sentence writes, “When does the correctional aspect turn to punitive and retributive?” For these writers, some of whom are veterans, disabled, elderly, or on death row, writing is their lifeline and their only hope to have a voice beyond the prison walls. Reading this book will bring you close to the humanity of a segment of our population that mass incarceration tries to deny. You can order a copy from Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
— Josina Guess, Managing Editor
The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID
by Lawrence Wright
Frye Gaillard, a Bitter Southerner contributor from Alabama, sent us this review of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright’s “riveting, meticulously researched account of 2020.” Gaillard writes: “Wright examines these fateful months through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic, a time of malfeasance by multiple governments around the world, most notably our own. As he did with his seminal work The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker living in Austin, Texas, sets out to explain a defining moment in the history of the country. The Plague Year is in part a story of science — the frantic, and in many ways heroic, search for effective treatments and a vaccine — and the story of frontline healthcare workers in New York City and other places, cheered by their neighbors at the end of every shift.
If Wright’s book is not a polemic, it is inevitably an indictment of former President Donald Trump and an administration that, as other leaders in the country would discover, had no real plan for confronting the virus — leaving the nation swimming in a sea of uncertainty as the virus raged and the death toll soared toward half a million and counting. Not surprisingly, the nation grew angrier and more divided, more violent.
In the end, we are left to hope that the memory [of 2020] might include some of the best of who we are, as well as — perhaps more inevitably — a deeper understanding of the worst.”
Pride of Eden
by Taylor Brown
Carolyn, a Bitter Southerner member from Charleston, South Carolina, loved this book, which came out, in an uncanny stroke of timing, shortly after the Netflix series “Tiger King.” “Brown's book is a work of fiction diving into the strange and fantastic world of the exotic animal trade. Set in an animal sanctuary, it tells a story of love, hate, misfits, and the passion of conviction. As with all of his books, you are completely transported to the Southern landscapes in which his stories are told.”
While Justice Sleeps
by Stacey Abrams
You probably know by now that before she ran for governor and led the charge for Georgia voting rights, Abrams wrote romance thrillers under the pen name Selena Montgomery. In her latest novel, While Justice Sleeps, Abrams uses her own name to deliver a complex legal mystery set in the U.S. Supreme Court. There is so much that we admire about Stacey Abrams, and this new book demonstrates that great leaders have great imagination and can pull together multiple threads to keep people thinking and entertained. We can’t wait to see what Abrams does next!
— The BS Crew
Hungry for More Book Recommendations?
Scroll our archives for stories like Rachel Lord Elizondo’s intimate conversation with Natasha Trethewey about her Anisfield Wolf Award-winning memoir, Memorial Drive, or Wiley Cash’s profile of Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, author of Even As We Breathe. Did you read Kelundra Smith’s review of J. Elle’s YA fantasy Wings of Ebony or Eleanor Stern’s conversation with Stephanie Soileau about her short-story collection Last One Out Shut Off the Lights? Be sure to subscribe to The Bitter Southerner newsletter or follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so you don’t miss a single review or Q&A about Southern books and writers. And don’t forget to visit the BS General Store, where you can fill a tote with a bundle of Bitter Southerner Readers, Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story, Micah Cash’s Waffle House Vistas, or a Wildsam Guide to help you plan your next road trip!
