The books Southern indie booksellers are recommending to readers everywhere!

Literary

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

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Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
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Told via a fairytale pitch-perfect unreliable narrator (who continues to shift the story in acquiescence to the ghost chorus), Sour Cherry brings the reader along to witness the hauntings and the haunted, complicit women trapped in violent cycles, and the rot and decay that are apparent when the stories are stripped away. If Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado were trapped in House of Leaves, you’d be holding this book in your hands.

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou, (List Price: $17.95, Tin House Books, 9781963108194, April 2025)

Reviewed by Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina

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Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
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It is late on a Thursday evening, and I just finished this absolutely exquisite book. If I could give the author a hug right now, I would. I loved the highly detailed history. I was gripped by the family drama. I was seduced by Luella and William and Robert! I embraced the poetry of the cry-inducing ending. This book is truly exquisite storytelling. In a case of purely delightful coincidence that made this book feel so personal and special, there is a post-Civil War community near my hometown called The Promised Land that had been settled by formerly enslaved people. As I read this book, I kept imagining the story taking place there. If anyone reading this would like to know more about these communities, check out the nonfiction book titled The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson!

Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, (List Price: $29, Berkley, 9780593337721, April 2025)

Reviewed by Thomas Wallace, Reading Rock Books in Dickson, Tennessee

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Tongues, Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen

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Tongues, Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen
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Tongues is a masterpiece, and with it Anders Nilsen fulfills the most ambitious possibilities of the graphic novel as a medium. Rarely have images and words, form and function, been married so beautifully; his pages and panels bursting with innovative, jewel-like complexity and cascading, organic beauty. The story marries the erudite and the bawdy, political and mythical, violent and meditative, in ways that you find only in literature’s greatest: Utopia, Candide, Gulliver’s Travels, The Plague, The Castle, Cosmicomics, The Master and Margarita, White Noise. This book belongs in the pantheon.

Tongues, Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen, (List Price: $35, Pantheon, 9781524747206, March 2025)

Reviewed by Jonathan Hawpe, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky

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Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller

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Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller
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All the feelings for Red Dog Farm! Mr. Miller tells a beautiful story of family, landscape, and the way you can never truly know either. It’s a tale of fierce love, harsh wind, and a really good dog. It’s one of those books I wish I could experience for the first time again and again. It’s oh so good!

Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller, (List Price: $28, Little, Brown and Company, 9780316575140, March 2025)

Reviewed by Susan Williams, M Judson Booksellers in Greenville, South Carolina

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Book Buzz: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

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Torrey Peters, photo credit Hunter AbramsWhen I first conceived of these stories, around 2016, a lot of trans writing was very sure that it had to be a specific thing: In order to capture the trans experience, we have to invent a totally new narrative for this wild and different style of life that has strange punctuation and asterisks and parentheses in it! And I was very resistant to this because I was like, I actually think that trans lives are built out of the exact same things that any other life is built out of. The emotions that are operative for a trans person are the exact same emotions that are operative for anybody else. It may be arranged slightly differently or with slightly different balances, but 99 percent of them are all the same. And so, there was a way in which I was like, You know what? I’m going to just write trans stories to show that you don’t need to invent some othering form to explain a trans life. You can explain a trans life in a teen romance. Then, I just started finding them fun.

― Torrey Peters, Interview, The Cut

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

What booksellers are saying about Stag Dance

  • Peter’s is really pushing the bounds of everything gender and sex in such a unique and weird literary experience. I was pretty confused some times but it spoke to me, even as a cis, straight woman. Because who the hell tells us we are only on thing? Gender experience isn’t just this or that, it fluctuates through life and experiences.
      ― Meghan Haile, The Lynx in Gainesville, Florida | BUY

  • Stag Dance presses against the fringes of humanity, asking characters to confront the limits of their knowledge and their self-concepts. Moving between genres with ease, what links these four stories is the way that Torrey Peters asks her audience to reconfigure their attitude towards shame and fear.
      ― Mikey LaFave, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia | BUY

  • Erotic and quietly touching, instinctive and temperamental, this novella and added short stories delight as much as they disturb. Lumberjack jamborees, dehumanizing skin suits, the shrieks of baby pigs, and a world wracked by a hormone famine come together to make an unsettling experience highlighting the complexities of the queer/femme experience.
      ― Joshua Lambie, Underground Books in Carrollton, Georgia | BUY

  • The risks are high and outcomes are brutal in STAG DANCE, all circling around big questions of is it worth it? Survival, masking, and the consequences–and you feel the punch in every direction each time. Torrey Peters captures the nuances of these spiraling feelings so well, but allows them to play out in painful but satisfying ways.
      ― Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina | BUY

About Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters is the bestselling author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Award, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. Torrey rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.

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Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky

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Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
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Marcy Dermansky is that girl!!! Hot Air is, well, a breath of fresh air. This is a comedy of errors, a mother-daughter love story, a Rashomon-style cast of unreliable narrators, and the best portrayal of the horrors of Universal Studios I’ve seen in print. I love a book that makes me learn how to read it, and Dermansky’s prose is wry, funny, and laser-sharp. I loved Hurricane Girl, her last novel, and Hot Air delivered on its weird, loving promise. Stunner!

Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky, (List Price: $27, Knopf, 9780593320907, March 2025)

Reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Bad Nature by Ariel Courage

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Bad Nature by Ariel Courage
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From the start, I was sucked into this story of a woman hitting a milestone birthday and a cancer diagnosis. Faced with her mortality, she sets off across the country to tie up loose ends. Along the way, she ponders the meaning of life as well as the state of affairs in the US. There is so much to relate to in this debut novel.

Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, (List Price: $28.99, Henry Holt and Co., 9781250360885, April 2025)

Reviewed by Alexandra Bender, Fonts Books in McLean, Virginia

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Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian

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Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian
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I really enjoyed this novel and found the themes of womanhood and motherhood intriguing. The main characters struggle with her own self-identity, and what it means to be a woman who is not interested in being a mother, which I think is something many women can relate to. It is easy to find parts of yourself in Sanjana and her struggles.

Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian, (List Price: $29, Penguin Press, 9780593489772, March 2025)

Reviewed by Baldwin Bookseller, Baldwin & Co. in New Orleans, Louisiana

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The Antidote by Karen Russell

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The Antidote by Karen Russell
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A master class in character development and working with multiple perspectives. Karen Russell in top form. I really needed a novel about how to piece together a future when it seems like the world is damaged beyond repair.

The Antidote by Karen Russell, (List Price: $30, Knopf, 9780593802250, March 2025)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Goodrich, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy

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O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy
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Nicole Cuffy seamlessly and masterfully interweaves three vastly different storylines and kept me engaged from start to finish. Faruq is a dynamic character that I enjoyed getting to know, and his descent into the depths of The Nameless made my true crime-loving brain anxious for the outcome. Cuffy has fantastic range as a writer.

O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy, (List Price: $28, One World, 9780593597446, March 2025)

Reviewed by Annastasia Williams, The Bottom in Knoxville, Tennessee

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Milk White Steed by Michael Kennedy

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Milk White Steed by Michael Kennedy
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Michael Kennedy’s comix are somewhere between jazz, surrealism, Greek tragedy and Krazy Kat. Suffused with the grain and pain of hard luck life, these strange tales dot along the timeline of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora like messages from the Gods drawn in blood and fruit juice.

Milk White Steed by Michael Kennedy, (List Price: $24.95, Drawn and Quarterly, 9781770467590, February 2025)

Reviewed by Jonathan Hawpe, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky

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Book Buzz: Soft Core by Brittany Newell

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Brittany Newell, photo courtesy the author

I think of San Francisco as a main character in the book, exactly like you say. The book is about all the different sorts of intimacies that fill up Ruth’s life, from easily recognizable relationships like her romance with Dino to her intensely emotional and sometimes libidinal friendships with Mazzy and Ophelia. Also, the intimacies that are harder to name but just as impactful, i.e. her intimacies with different johns. All this is to say, a hugely intimate relationship in her life is the relationship she has with San Francisco, especially as she wanders around in her unraveling fugue state and revisits all the different places where special things have happened to her…Grace Cathedral, China Beach, the bus where she met Dino…She traces the city like you might trace a lover’s sleeping face.

― Brittany Newell, Interview, Chicago Review of Books

Soft Core by Brittany Newell

What booksellers are saying about Soft Core

  • I love a messy FMC making terrible choices, and Ruth did not disappoint. Ruth is chaotic and seeing things in this story about a stripper/dominatrix who is looking for anyone or anything to love her. However, things aren’t always what they seem, and Ruth makes poor choices based on what she thinks she sees..
      ― Jackie Davison, The Lynx in Gainesville, Florida | BUY

  • Soft Core sinks it’s teeth in and doesn’t let up. It’s a beautiful, fun, and at times devastating novel that unveils the inner life of sex worker Baby as she deals with the aftermath of her ex disappearing. It’s raw and honest and a wild ride from start to finish!
      ― Hallee Israel, Pearl’s Books inFayetteville, Arkansas | BUY

  • This novel mixed humor, nihilism, sex, and mystery to create one of the most interesting books I’ve read. It is engaging and explorative and you fall into the story as the narration goes on. It was easy to get caught up in the narrative since the blunt descriptions allowed you to feel what Baby, the main character, is feeling. I was both shocked and delighted while reading Soft Core since I became entrapped in Baby’s world.
      ― Ashton Ahart, Page 158 Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina | BUY

  • What is a word for feeling despair but also feeling hot? The vibes are feverish, dancing till we die even though we are missing something inside. Think Euphoria (but it’s adults) with Heavy themes of envy, daddy issues, obsession, and low self-esteem. This was impossible for me to put down, the way that the main character found herself emotionally fulfilled by dancing and working in BDSM was STUNNING. Truly a one of a kind reading experience.
      ― Shelby Barnett, Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, Louisiana | BUY

About Brittany Newell

Brittany Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Joyland, Dazed, and Playgirl. She published her debut novel, Oola, at the age of twenty-one. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as a professional dominatrix.

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Rosarita by Anita Desai

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Rosarita by Anita Desai
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Setting out on a journey, one often sees the path forward as clear and straight, but when that journey intersects with the past, ghosts, sideways pathways, and surprising intersections may appear. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and dive straight into fiction master Desai’s brief and powerful journey into the pathways both forward and back into a world of family, country, art, and possibility.

Rosarita by Anita Desai, (List Price: $22, Scribner, 9781668082430, January 2025)

Reviewed by Angie Tally, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina

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The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica

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The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica
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Dread-inducing. Bazterrica knows how to craft a story that keeps you on edge. Her narrators are always so untrustworthy, leaving the reader unsure what information is being withheld and what information is only half-true. This horror novel, featuring cultish nuns in the midst of a post-climate apocalypse, leaves a lot to reflect on.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, (List Price: $28.99, Scribner, 9781668063705, March 2025)

Reviewed by Sarai Rivera, Spellbound Bookstore in Sanford, Florida

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Inverno by Cynthia Zarin

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Inverno by Cynthia Zarin
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Elegant and beautiful prose. This books reads like memory, floating from thought to thought and back again. Looping ideas and theories, childhood revelries and desires. A slender and stunning example of literary experimental fiction where love and life coincide.

Inverno by Cynthia Zarin, (List Price: $17, Picador, 9781250338174, January 2025)

Reviewed by Rachel Brewer, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky

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