The books Southern indie booksellers are recommending to readers everywhere!

Short Stories (single author)

The Loon Counters by Roger Sheffer

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The Loon Counters by Roger Sheffer
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Roger Sheffer had me convinced The Loon Counters was not sixteen fictional stories but a real place with a community of year-round lake dwellers as well as visitors. Every page was filled with enviable scenery that called for hours of gazing at the lakes in all seasons while watching the loons and looking forward to sitting by a fire at night. Centered around an Adirondack general store with no cell service, the stories include an Olympic torchbearer, hikers, artists, a pianist, a violinist, and more, all connected to the beauty of the region. There is danger and heartbreak and love and threats alongside the incredible silent scenery of the lakes. The stories and characters are jig-saw-puzzled together through the years with Bruce, Martha, Russ, Linda, Albert, Luke, Max, Emma, Joan, Steve, Elise, Cheryl, James, Tristan, and Jayne to name a few. Readers will not want to leave the beauty of the world created in The Loon Counters.

The Loon Counters by Roger Sheffer, (List Price: $24.95, Syracuse University Press, 9780815612001, March 2026)

Reviewed by Nancy, Bookmiser in Marietta, Georgia

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Brawler by Lauren Groff

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Brawler by Lauren Groff
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JFC. If we can’t add a new subgenre JUST for Lauren Groff’s signature style — lushly grim and invigoratingly desolate — maybe I’d best acknowledge the teeny new chamber in my book lovin’ heart that Matrix, The Vaster Wilds and now Brawler have come to inhabit. I didn’t think I could handle bleak, but in her capable hands? “Under the Wave” is the best short story I’ve ever read. Within two paragraphs of beginning “The Wind” (and hence the collection), I was *there* and terrified. I haven’t even read the last two stories yet. Stay tuned.

Brawler by Lauren Groff, (List Price: $29, Riverhead Books, 9780593418420, February 2026)

Reviewed by Kat, novel. in Memphis, Tennessee

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House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

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House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk
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House of Day, House of Night is a reversal of a common narrative structure; here, the setting, the rural Polish town of Nowa Ruda, is the main character, and the townsfolk are the setting within which the town’s legacy is formed. Each story fragment contributes to the never-ending cycle of life and death, of dreams and waking — from an old lady next door with elusive platitudes, to a gender-dysphoric monk on a journey to canonize a saint, to a knifemaking cult that worships the process of decay. Tokarczuk’s brilliant prose highlights the struggles of returning to a post-World War Poland, of feeling like a stranger in your own home, of sensing the ceaseless draw of entropy. Universal and bittersweet, this novel is a work of anthropology: a future classic in my book!

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, (List Price: $28, Riverhead Books, 9780593716380, December 2025)

Reviewed by Catherine Pabalate, Epilogue: Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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Hellions by Julia Elliott

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Hellions by Julia Elliott
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Swampy Southern Gothic at its finest. These stories are lush, each driven by magical, wicked, wholly-alive characters so deeply rooted in their surroundings—or their desires—its difficult to see where person begins and wild ends. Discerning and empathetic, Elliott’s eye for the strange wonders that bring folklore and fairytale to life is unmatched.

Hellions by Julia Elliott, (List Price: $17.95, Tin House Books, 9781963108064, April 2025)

Reviewed by Miranda Sanchez, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park

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An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park
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One thing I’ve learned from his first two books: Ed Park’s up to something. Just what it is, well that’s for the reader to stumble upon and, for me at least, love every bungling minute of. Just like the Mississippi river appears still on the surface, blanketing torrents that swallow swimmers and spit them out 25 miles downriver, don’t be fooled by his simplistic jokey style (and also kick your shoes off if you fall overboard). He’s up to something. Often oddly self-referential, often levelheadedly off-kilter, often softened by its own bite, these humorous shorts will come back to you the next day to make you say “hey, wait… ha.”

An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park, (List Price: $28, Random House, 9780812998993, July 2025)

Reviewed by Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia

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Atavists by Lydia Millet

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Atavists by Lydia Millet
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In an age of futility, where “abnormality is the new normal,” where everything feels depressing, and where rationality is not a given, the interconnected stories and characters of Atavists feel like a portrait of now. These stories are like moral litmus tests, digging into the compulsions of everyday people during this five-years-post-covid time, where regression is high and the worst base instincts of humanity are on display (jealousy, greed, fear, rage, etc.), all set among the absurd bleak backdrop of living at the end of the world among divided neighbors and messy morals. Yeah, it’s bleak, but it’s also compulsively readable thanks to Lydia Millet’s talent of getting at the granularity and nuance of what is going through people’s minds, what still makes us human, even and especially as tension is pulled to snapping points.

Atavists by Lydia Millet, (List Price: $27.99, W. W. Norton & Company, 9781324074410, April 2025)

Reviewed by Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, 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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Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson

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Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson
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I read most of these perfectly-crafted stories in a single evening alone in a bedroom far from home. In the midst of reading one story I found particularly horrific, I glanced up at the wall. There was a painting of a moonlit lake next to a rocky shore limned entirely in blue. In my current headspace, I felt what can only be described as an “Evensonian impulse” creeping up my spine—to get out of my bed and walk toward the painting until I had passed through the canvas interstice into that sad navy wilderness. That’s the power of Evenson’s stories: not that he merely tells you about the squishy places in the membrane between our world and worlds beyond, but that he plants within your mind the certainty—which all children feel but adults tend to doubt—that you have already fallen through. Get lost in these stories. I hope you make it back.

Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson, (List Price: $19, Coffee House Press, 9781566897099, September 2024)

Reviewed by Charlie Monroe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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Vague Predictions & Prophecies by Daisuke Shen

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Vague Predictions & Prophecies by Daisuke Shen
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A dazzling, surreal debut short story collection, Vague Predictions & Prophecies reads like an indrawn breath. Each story is sprawling and languid, crumbling the barriers between the real and the imagined. An angel falls in love with a cosmic other and is banished from heaven. Long-distance partners shack up with cyborg copies of each other, then start to lose their memories. Teenage bullies find a field full of hypnotized women, tip them like cows, and are eaten alive. Shen’s writing is a narrative compulsion, drawing you ever deeper into worlds you didn’t know you wanted to inhabit. Hypnotic, disturbing, breathtaking. I’ve never read anything like it.

Vague Predictions & Prophecies by Daisuke Shen, (List Price: $18.95, CLASH Books, 9781960988133, August 2024)

Reviewed by Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia

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The Body Farm by Abby Geni

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The Body Farm by Abby Geni
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Abby Geni’s short stories in The Body Farm are each deliciously different in scope, subject matter, tone, and voice. What they have in common is an exploration of being human, of having feelings that are confusing, and the physical manifestations these emotions can trigger. Being alive is messy and examining the complications of loving, aging, and simply living are some of the things Geni writes best.

The Body Farm by Abby Geni, (List Price: $27, Counterpoint, 9781640096264, May 2024)

Reviewed by Rachel Watkins, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia

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Green Frog by Gina Chung

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Green Frog by Gina Chung
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This short story collection sparkles in its deft explorations of womanhood, identity, and family. Gina Chung interweaves the fantastical with the mundane throughout these stories that invite you to contemplate girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood in new and unique ways. I am taken with “Attachment Processes,” a meditation on grief, motherhood, and AI and “Mantis.”

Green Frog by Gina Chung, (List Price: $17, Vintage, 9780593469361, March 2024)

Reviewed by Mikey LaFave, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia

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Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall

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Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall
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I’m happy to report that Women! In! Peril! lives up to its obsession-worthy title and cover. This short story debut is full of smart, fresh fiction that I wanted to savor. Marshall brings a hilarious voice to inventive literary stories about women whose struggles range from divorce to the destruction of the human race. Singular characters like a former ballerina with memory loss and a lesbian whose girlfriend thinks she’s carrying the baby Jesus make up this exciting and unabashedly queer collection!

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall, (List Price: $17.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639732272, April 2024)

Reviewed by Julia Lewis, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia

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I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López

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I'll Give You a Reason by Annell López
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These beautiful stories fill my heart with hope and longing. Annell Lopez weaves powerful portraits of women just trying to be. Be happy, be important, be heard.

I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López, (List Price: $16.95, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 9781558613126, April 2024)

Reviewed by Rayna Nielsen, Blue Cypress Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle

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Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle
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Jill McCorkle has a heart the size of her beloved North Carolina and nowhere is that more evident than in the pages of her writing. Old Crimes is a story collection drenched with her perceptiveness of the human condition. Each story is as strong as the one before, telling of past mistakes shaping lives. These are absolutely fulfilling, engrossing, and brilliantly crafted.

Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle, (List Price: $27, Algonquin Books, 9781616209735, January 2024)

Reviewed by Damita Nocton, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina

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The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy

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The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy
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Jaw dropping collection of short stories! The difficult situations women find themselves is front and center here. Come for the characters, stay for the prose.

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy, (List Price: $28, Penguin Publishing Group, 9780593540923, December 2023)

Reviewed by Teresa Dampier, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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