This year’s roundup is a far-ranging reflection of the incredible breadth (and oh-so-diverse source points) of Southern experience. Novels, short stories, memoirs, music, pop culture, poetry, history, food – this year’s list contains the most titles we’ve ever touted, from some incredibly gifted writers. So get those book totes ready. The pickings are rich. 

Words by Alison Law

As much as I relish compiling and sharing this list with you every year, I also agonize over it. The number of books about the U.S. South or written by authors with ties to the South only increases over time — as does the caliber of their work. That’s why this year’s list features the largest number of titles in the history of The Bitter Southerner's Summer Reading Roundup!

The Roundup comes out around Memorial Day every year. We do this so you can take the list to your local independent bookstore and overload your book totes before heading to your favorite summer destination. These novels, short stories, memoirs, and works of poetry, history, music, food, and pop culture pick up where last year's list left off. All were published between the bookends of last May through today, with roughly half the titles coming out in 2023 and the other half in 2024. We’ve ordered the list by publication date.

Representation matters. Just as there's no one South, there's no one writer or story that represents contemporary Southern literature. That's why I devote so much time to ensuring we have titles from or about different Southern states. You'll find debut novelists and memoirists on the same list as Pulitzer Prize-nominated poets and James Beard Foundation foodways historians. We feature small university presses as well as prominent New York publishers. The authors recommended here represent a wide array of ages, races, sexual identities, ethnicities, economic and educational backgrounds, and life experiences. If there’s one disparity to report, it’s that we selected nearly twice as many books by women (17) as we did by men and nonbinary authors (9).

And yet, as I write and revise this introduction less than a week before the Summer Reading Roundup goes online, I’m still fretting over the books and storytellers not on the list. My colleagues and I are still debating the merits of including certain works or wondering if we should add space to preview books that are already jumping out at us from the fall catalogs.

The text on a jar candle in my office reads, “Hang on. Let me overthink this.” It is an orange-vanilla-scented reminder that human reflection can postpone creation. Still, I find joy and sustenance in the act of curation and take immense pride in the overthinking that went into this amazing list.

Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett 

Even though this beautiful novel was published at the end of last summer, we would be remiss to not include it in this year’s roundup. As Ann Patchett penned in her Letter From Home essay in Issue No. 5 of our magazine, “If you want to live in a world full of readers, you have to raise those readers up.” Patchett’s writing in Tom Lake takes the reader right to the core of family dynamics, picking at the thread between being a parent and a child and the struggle of finding happiness when the world seems to be falling apart. Tom Lake is yet another great summer read, and actor Meryl Streep won a 2024 Audie Award for fiction for her narration of the audiobook.

Alabama

By Rodney Jones

In a poem in Alabama, Rodney Jones jokes that he prefers the moniker “postmodernist outdoorsman” but also accepts when people introduce him as a “peasant poet.” The title befits one of the most honored Southern poets, whose simple, naturalist worldview details the evolution of a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a hippie, teacher, feminist, and existentialist. Whether he is developing road rage when listening to fellow Southerners call into a talk radio show, trying to make sense of a friend’s suicide, or attempting to teach a starling to eat a worm, Jones offers a candid look into the everyday, tinged with the long ago. Alabama is Jones’ eleventh poetry collection. His Elegy for the Southern Drawl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and he became the second poet inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2016.

Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina

By Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey with John M. Sherrer III

Explore the rich culinary heritage of the Jewish South that dates back to the 17th century in South Carolina. Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey, founding members of the Historic Columbia Jewish Heritage Initiative and the “Kugels & Collards” blog, collected stories, recipes, and original and archival photos from Jewish families who have made the Palmetto State their home. Authors and contributors also acknowledge the significant labor and creativity of the people of West African descent on Southern Jewish food. This edible history includes recipes for Jewish staples like latkes and challah, interspersed with modified Southern classics like pork-free collard greens, Shabbat dinner fried chicken, and modern fusions like grits and lox casserole.

Good Women

By Halle Hill

Good Women is a stunning short story collection that reveals the inner lives of 12 Black women from Appalachia and the Deep South. With vivid prose, Halle Hill explores the boundaries of gender, geography, race, and religion. Each story is a testament to the resilience and strength of these women as they navigate complex relationships, societal expectations, and personal struggles. From an ill-conceived getaway with an older stranger to a dark Tilt-A-Whirl confrontation, Hill's characters will make you carefully consider your definition of the word "good." Hill was born and raised in East Tennessee and now lives and teaches in North Carolina. The title of this remarkable debut honors poet Lucille Clifton's Good Woman.

The Caretaker

By Ron Rash

Ron Rash has quipped that The Caretaker may be his last novel. He started and stopped writing the book over the course of many drafts and about five years. While it may have been a long and frustrating experience for the writer, the result is a deeply satisfying story set in 1950s Western North Carolina, familiar terrain for Rash and his readers. That’s where a young man named Jacob has been conscripted to fight in the Korean Conflict. His wife, Naomi, is pregnant, and his family has disowned him. Jacob entrusts their care to Blackburn Gant, a disfigured friend who tends the local graveyard to avoid the living. One of our greatest American storytellers puts opposing examples of love and sacrifice under the microscope in this moving fable.

Latinísimo: Home Recipes From the Twenty-One Countries of Latin America

By Sandra A. Gutierrez

In Latinísimo, Sandra Gutierrez takes home cooks on a culinary journey through Latin America, showcasing 21 countries' distinct flavors and cultures. With over 300 recipes, this cookbook offers familiar Mexican dishes and hidden gems from Central and South America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Born in the U.S. and raised in Guatemala, Gutierrez has dedicated her life to studying and educating others about Latin American foodways. Her passion and expertise infuse the introduction and headnotes, which provide detailed historical context as well as personal anecdotes. Accessible recipes and variations of essentials like sofrito and vinaigrettes make Latinísimo a must-have for anyone who believes in food’s ability to unite and celebrate differences.

Let Us Descend

By Jesmyn Ward

The novel Let Us Descend begins in 1800s North Carolina, where Annis is enslaved to her sire. Under cover of darkness, she trains to fight, inspired by tales of her warrior grandmother, Mama Aza. She also eavesdrops on her half-sisters' lessons with a tutor who quotes from Dante's Inferno: "Let us descend … and enter this blind world." This allusion foreshadows Annis’ journey, which includes losing those closest to her and being sold to work on a sugar plantation in New Orleans. Annis clings to her ancestral stories and supernatural connections to survive. Jesmyn Ward, the first woman and first Black American to win two National Book Awards, wrote this stunning first-person account of grief during a time of profound personal loss. Her late husband, Brandon Miller, died in January 2020. She dedicated the book to him.

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

By Margaret Renkl

It’s no secret that we are big fans of Margaret Renkl's essays and thought-provoking opinion pieces for The New York Times. So when she commands us to stop what we’re doing and gaze upon (never touch!) poison ivy vines, tree bark, and bird nests, we know the most extraordinary class is about to be in session. In The Comfort of Crows, Renkl invites our attention back to the natural world, contending, “We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes.” She documents the seasons of a year and the corresponding seasons of her life through a mixture of essay and verse. This winner of the 2024 Southern Book Prize for Nonfiction also features original full-color, collagelike artwork by Billy Renkl, the author’s brother.

Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice: Cocktails From Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks

By Toni Tipton-Martin

Picking up where her acclaimed cookbooks The Jemima Code and Jubilee left off, Toni Tipton-Martin earned another James Beard award nomination for this book focused on beverages. She returned to her extensive collection of Black cookbooks and found few stories of African American contributions to mixology. Tipton-Martin attributes the scarcity of recipes to stereotypes portraying Black people as excessive drinkers who squander their money in bars. While Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, & Juice traces the first Black cocktail back to an 1827 fermented wine, readers will learn how to brew, shake, or stir up modern libations. Tipton-Martin recruited her son, Brandon, a classically trained bartender, and Tiffanie Barriere, “The Drinking Coach” and a previous Bitter Southerner contributor, to test the recipes and teach the artistry of mixing drinks.

Come & Get It

By Kiley Reid

In this follow-up to her Booker Prize-longlisted Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid turns her satirical lens on the University of Arkansas. Journalist and visiting professor Agatha Paul enlists ambitious resident assistant Millie Cousins in her covert plans to publish the unvarnished lives of three coeds living in the worst dorm on campus. Reid lived in Fayetteville for a year and says it became one of her favorite cities because of its walkability, natural beauty, and distinct seasonal changes. She later chose it as the setting for Come and Get It because she wanted to see how outsiders’ snobbery and perceived freedom in a big state school “bubble” played out. This humorous examination of consumerism, race, and yearning sounded even better when I listened to actor Nicole Lewis’ stellar audiobook narration.

Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination

By Stephanie Clare Smith

Each paragraph of Stephanie Clare Smith’s Everywhere the Undrowned reads like a poem but urges you forward like the most compelling novel. As the memoir reveals, during the same summer that Michael Collins became the “Forgotten Astronaut” circling but not landing on the moon, Smith became the forgotten daughter. Her mother traveled west with a boyfriend, leaving 14-year-old Stephanie alone in their apartment in New Orleans for almost six weeks. Smith recounts the mundane – solo hours riding the New Orleans streetcars – and the traumatic events of that summer, and their repercussions on her adult life. In addition to being an award-winning poet and essayist, Smith is a social worker and mediator who helps at-risk families in North Carolina. Everywhere the Undrowned is part of the new Great Circle Books Series of literary nonfiction edited by Kiese Laymon and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.

Ours

By Phillip B. Williams

This debut novel from poet Phillip B. Williams describes the complex relationship between liberator and liberated in a community of freed Black people called Ours. The enchanted figure named Saint and her tall, dark, and mute companion sneak into plantations throughout Arkansas. Saint promises that within three days, the “self-proclaimed masters” will be dead. The formerly enslaved follow Saint to Ours, where they adapt to becoming citizens called the Ouhmey (pronounced OWE-me) and wonder if they’ve just witnessed a dangerous transfer of power. Williams’ epic travels back and forth in time, connecting present-day Missouri to Saint’s backstory in 1800s Florida, a sanctuary of the Seminoles and Maroons. This 580-page saga began as a short story inspired by Williams’ own family.

James

By Percival Everett

Language is power, helping us make meaning and even hide or protest in plain sight. Those who possess language can travel freely. Wresting a book of knowledge away from others can be deadly. In James, Percival Everett boldly reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the character Jim's perspective. In this telling, enslaved people are literate and speak their minds in private but dumb down or silence their conversations when white folks are present. The creative premise of 19th-century code-switching does not overshadow the storytelling; I quickly became wholly immersed, marveling at absurd situations one moment, then despairing when I arrived at a passage in the book about a fallen traveler. In 2023, Percival Everett's book Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction, introducing him to a broader audience.

The Woods All Black

By Lee Mandelo

In this Appalachian gothic novella, Lee Mandelo weaves a tale of horror, romance, and revenge. Though the terms “transgender” and “nonbinary” are not in use in the 1929 setting, protagonist Leslie Bruin is a nurse whose gender does not conform to the one he was assigned at birth. Many view him as a “failed woman” because his vocation allows him to wear pants and boots and move through the world in spaces often reserved for men – from the Western Front of World War I to eastern Kentucky coal mining camps. Shellshocked from the Great War and ostracized for being an outsider in the tiny town of Spar Creek, Leslie finds solace in a forbidden romance with Stevie Mattingly. The Woods All Black depicts the fear, isolation, and violence threatening those who risk everything to be themselves in a hostile world.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

By Hanif Abdurraqib

We’ve been fans of Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing for quite some time. (His masterly essay and interview with Andre 3000, published in Issue No. 7 of our magazine, is a must-read.) Basketball may be in the title of There’s Always This Year, but as Abdurraqib often does so well, his recent novel mixes his love of the game and some of the game’s biggest stars with his childhood memories and life experiences growing up in ’90s Columbus, Ohio, weaving the reader through a much broader journey – a journey that questions success, as well as the push and pull between excellence and expectation and how our culture has come to define it.

On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

By Ryan E. Emanuel

To study the intersection of environmental justice and Indigenous rights, one only has to travel the patchwork of sandy fields and dark waterways that feed the Lumbee River of North Carolina. Although the state has one of the largest Native American populations in the U.S., little has been written about how fossil fuel extraction and consumption, industry pollution, and climate change have disproportionately impacted Indigenous peoples. Ryan Emanuel is a water scientist, tenured Duke professor, and member of the Lumbee tribal nation, whose people inhabited the North Carolina coastal plain for millennia before European settlers arrived. In On the Swamp, he shares personal and professional stories to give voice to Native peoples and offer lessons for a hopeful and redemptive future.

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves

By J. Drew Lanham

A professor of wildlife and an avid birder, J. Drew Lanham finds “irrevocable joy” in the natural world. But he and the deer grow anxious when June temperatures linger into fall. He takes great pride as a Black man and father but also wrestles with the racism and injustice that threaten the lives of young Black men like his son. Inspired by his grandmother Mamatha's favorite gospel song, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a powerful call to reclaim our relationship with the land and ourselves. The collection includes “10 Rules for Going Feral” and “Some Advice,” which appear in Issue No. 6 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.

My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future

By Alice Randall

Before Beyoncé lassoed the charts with her album Cowboy Carter, Alice Randall blazed trails as the only Black woman to write both a No. 1 country song (Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”) and a video of the year for Reba McEntire’s “Is There Life Out There?” Those of us more familiar with books than ballads may remember Randall as the author of 2001’s The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone With the Wind that elicited bestselling book sales, a copyright lawsuit filed and later dropped by Margaret Mitchell’s estate, and a handwritten fan letter from Harper Lee. My Black Country is part history of the Black roots of country music and part memoir of Randall’s lifelong relationship with the genre. Audiophiles: Don’t miss Randall narrating the audiobook or the companion album featuring performances by Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Allison Russell, and more.

Rednecks

By Taylor Brown 

What if we told you that in 1921 a battle raged in Appalachia and a million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped, and 10,000 Rednecks fought for their rights? In this riveting historical novel, Taylor Brown introduces us to the gritty characters, both real and imagined, who waged the largest labor uprising in American history: union miners vs. King Coal. This story is a wow. (In fact, we liked this novel so much, we published the first few chapters in Issue No. 7 of our magazine.)

Shae

By Mesha Maren

Shae reminds us in the most essential ways that becoming our truest self is a lifelong pursuit, first practiced on the wobbly legs of adolescence. The novel’s 16-year-old title character reminisces about seeing Cam, an older “shiny” teenager who stands out in her small sphere of Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Mesha Maren’s sparse prose quickly delivers us to Cam and Shae falling in love, getting pregnant, and living together with the baby in Shae’s parents’ home. Complicating matters are Shae’s increasing insecurities, amplified by substance use; she questions herself more and more as Cam steps confidently into her identity as a transgender woman. Maren explores identity and addiction with remarkable depth in this bingeable queer love story.

by Kate Medley

by Kyle Tibbs Jones