The books Southern indie booksellers are recommending to readers everywhere!

Literary Figures

Traversal by Maria Popova

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Traversal by Maria Popova
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Maria Popova once again illuminates how science and poetry have reckoned with “the bewilderment of being alive” while reconnoitering truths of the body, soul, spirit, and space, all through the intertwining loves, lives, and labors of visionaries like Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ruth Benedict, and others. Popova writes brilliant, fluid, lively nonfiction—like floating down a river of science, poetry, history, and stars.

Traversal by Maria Popova, (List Price: $36, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 9780374616410, February 2026)

Reviewed by Megan, The Underground Bookshop in Carrollton, Georgia

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Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris

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Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris
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Weaves together Butler’s own words with a well-researched, illuminating background to produce an excellent biography of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and all in under 300 pages. Masterful.

Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris, (List Price: $29.99, Amistad, 9780063212077, August 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera

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The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera
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An examination of an author’s life like no other, Jazmina Barrera reveals the impossibility of truly understanding the motivations and choices of another. Researching documents on Elena Garro’s life and reading her writing for over two years, Barrera succeeds in bringing Garro’s complexity to light, illustrating her creativity, brilliance, impulsiveness and instability. Barrera also portrays Elena’s humor and imagination as she fights against a society that limits women’s opportunities. Using a completely original form, Barrera has honored Garro’s life and work while still acknowledging the answers she never found. After reading this book, I added titles by Elena Garro to my to-be-read list.

The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, (List Price: $24, Two Lines Press, 9781949641875, November 2025)

Reviewed by Lera Shawver, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

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Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
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When I moved to the US, I brought only two boxes of books with me, forcing me to choose only the most essential from the many that lined my shelves: my well-thumbed copy Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things was one of the precious few that made the cut. So it’s fair to say that I was predisposed to love Mother Mary Comes to Me. This extraordinary memoir is a portrait not only of Arundhati Roy’s life – from childhood in Kerala, to architecture school in Delhi, and from there to becoming an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction – but also of her formidable mother, who defied convention but whose cruelty shaped her daughter’s life. Vivid, intimate and revelatory, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an absolute masterpiece, one that will stay on my shelves for years to come.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, (List Price: $30, Scribner, 9781668094716, September 2025)

Reviewed by Jude Burke-Lewis, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

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Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

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Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney
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Your favorite author’s favorite authors are here rediscovered, read, and collected by America’s favorite rare bookseller, Rebecca Romney! For centuries, we’ve hailed Jane Austen as the sole woman literary genius of her era…so why have we been spurning her favorite books by fellow women writers for nearly as long? Romney invites readers on a thrillingly feminist literary adventure as she searches for the books Jane Austen had on her shelf, the women who wrote them, and how they disappeared from the literary canon. Along the way, Romney offers her guidance as a rare bookseller, and, as a reader and collector herself, shares her delight in discovering new favorite authors, new depths to Austen’s novels, and desirable editions of both, ultimately showing, as she builds a bookshelf of her own, how you can develop your own distinct collection too.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, (List Price: $29.99, S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books, 9781982190248, February 2025)

Reviewed by Megan Bell, Underground Books in Carrollton, Georgia

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Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

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Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
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Geraldine Brooks’s memoir of her life with writer Tony Horwitz and the aftermath of his sudden death in 2019 is an intimate, gut-wrenching, funny, and inspiring tribute to their life together and to his writing. It will take its place alongside other powerful memoirs of love and loss, like Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (about which the two of them strikingly disagreed). With her well-honed journalistic skills, Brooks describes the brutally bureaucratic way America handles sudden death alongside her own journey through grief’s landscape while capturing Horwitz’s exuberant personality and adventurous spirit. Having read and loved most of her work, I now can’t wait to read his.

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks, (List Price: $28, Viking, 9780593653982, February 2025)

Reviewed by Sarah Goddin, McIntyre’s Books in Pittsboro, North Carolina

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Gather Me by Glory Edim

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Gather Me by Glory Edim
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Heartbreaking and heartwarming, this is a powerful tale of the power of the right book at the right time and of perseverance. If you love books, this is a must-read. Edim’s Well Read Black Girl clubs are a gift to the world, and her memoir makes that gift even more meaningful.

Gather Me by Glory Edim, (List Price: $28, Ballantine Books, 9780525619796, October 2024)

Reviewed by Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books in Davidson, North Carolina

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Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki

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Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki
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This pocket-size book takes just an hour or two to read, structurally spans a day and a night, but holds half a century’s wisdom about bookselling. Paul Yamazaki has been the principal book buyer at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s iconic City Lights bookstore in San Francisco for 50 years. This brief but complex and consequential collection of interviews with a venerable bookseller of color who’s experienced so much is a gift to all who love bookstores.

Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki, (List Price: $13.95, Ode Books, 9781958846698, May 2024)

Reviewed by Megan Bell, Underground Books in Carrollton , Georgia

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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler

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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler
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The myths of Shakespeare are so deeply ingrained that I didn’t realize how many of the things I "know" may not be correct. Winkler makes an excellent case that the Shakespeare we read may not be the Shakespeare of Avon, and she makes it very clear that not every anti-Stratsfordian is a crank. I am not convinced but I am intrigued, and I will keep digging for myself. To me, that makes this book successful–I am hooked and I want to know more.

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler, (List Price: 29.99, Simon & Schuster, 9781982171261, May 2023)

Reviewed by Tracy Bailey, Oxford Exchange in Tampa, Florida

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Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun

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Also a Poet by June Gervais
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Calhoun had a complicated relationship with her famous art critic father Peter Schjeldahl. This book started as an attempt to write a biography of poet Frank O’Hara that her father never finished. Having inherited his obsession with the poet, the author wrestles with creating a narrative with answers when obstacles (time, fire, other people) keep them hidden. I felt the frustration of her and her subjects as it infected me with its incessant whispers of almosts and near misses. Ultimately, the author gifts us with wise lessons of kindness and acceptance. An extraordinary, raw read!

Also a Poet by June Gervais, (List Price: $27, Grove Press Books, 9780802159786, June 2022)

Reviewed by Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia

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Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

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Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit
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A Fall Read This Next! Selection

Jumping off from a mention in a 1946 essay by George Orwell about fruit trees and roses he had planted ten years earlier, Solnit begins a meandering path through a garden of antifascism, art, and the ways in which they intertwined in Orwell’s life. In the span of about 270 pages, coal mining and climate change, mass rose production in Columbia and the invisibility of capitalism’s machinations, Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and his ancestral connection to the slave trade are all explored deftly and, in the ususal Solnit style, with lines beautifully drawn to our current condition. Whether you are deeply interested in Orwell and his milieu or just a fan of Solnit’s incisive writing, you will find this biography/essay collection bears flowers scented with hope, resistance, and pleasure.

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, (List Price: $28, Viking, 9780593083369, October 2021)

Reviewed by Hannah DeCamp, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia


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Books Promiscuously Read by Heather Cass White

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Books Promiscuously Read
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Because I work in the book world, sometimes I forget that not every person is a reading-obsessed nerd. This book put into words what I’ve never been able to: reading takes you to another place. Reading changes your entire world in a literal way and in figurative ways. I loved reading quotes from my favorite writers about how reading transformed their worlds.

Books Promiscuously Read by Heather Cass White, (List Price: 25, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 9780374115265, July 2021)

Reviewed by Sissy Gardner, Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee

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