The books Southern indie booksellers are recommending to readers everywhere!

Transgender

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen

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Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen
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Nguyen’s mix of satire, social commentary, and the story’s central relationship are impossible to deny. Hot Girls with Balls captures perfectly what it is like to be in the public eye, the myriad of positives and pitfalls that come with social media, and the pressure trans people face just daring to exist in our world. “Hot Girls” Six and Green are amazing characters that I won’t soon forget. Bold, unapologetically queer, and sharp – what a debut!

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen, (List Price: $28, Nguyen, Benedict, 9781646222476, July 2025)

Reviewed by Caleb Masters, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North 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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The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill

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The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill
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Underhill has switched to adult fiction in his new book, The In-Between Bookstore, but the heart and joy are still there, in abundance! Darby is a trans man living in NYC, but while he’s got a good group of friends, his apartment rent is rising to an astronomical level and he’s just been let go from his job. He’s been feeling adrift lately, so when his mom tells him she’s selling the house and moving into a condo, he decides it’s time to head home to Illinois and face his fast. But while he’s there, a strange thing happens. When he walks into The In-Between Bookstore, where he worked in high school, it’s still 2009…and his younger self is working behind the counter. But what does this mean?

The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill, (List Price: $28, Avon, 9780063357631, January 2025)

Reviewed by Jennifer Jones, Bookmiser in Marietta, Georgia

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Shae by Mesha Maren

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Shae by Mesha Maren
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Gorgeous and honest and heartrending. In compassionate, clear-eyed prose, Shae falls in love, gives birth, and descends into a tunnel of opioid addiction in rural Appalachia. Maren masterfully balances hope and despair on both community and personal levels, examining how identity—especially as someone who is young and queer—is shaped by place and its people as much as by the choices we make (and the ones we don’t).

Shae by Mesha Maren, (List Price: $28, Algonquin Books, 9781643755663, May 2024)

Reviewed by MIRANDA SANCHEZ, Epilogue: Books Chocolate Brews in , North Carolina

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The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy

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The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
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The Sapling Cage ushers in a strong transfeminine voice to the witch fantasy subgenre! As the reader follows the journey of Lorel, a trans girl who swaps places with her childhood best friend to join a witch coven, they are introduced to a rich fantasy world full of antagonistic knights, vicious monsters, and sinister magical rituals. The author, Killjoy, does a great job at balancing the immense conflict between the witches and their surroundings with Lorel’s personal conflict with her body and identity. This book is a rewarding read due to its captivating cast of characters, introspection on queerness, and exploration of themes such as the hoarding of wealth and power.

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy, (List Price: $17.95, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 9781558613317, September 2024)

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

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Spotlight On: Shae by Mesha Maren

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Mesha Maren, photo courtesy the author

For my generation, your coming out story was huge. Right, like when did you come out and how did it go?, and I’m sure that’s still a part of many people’s narratives, but I do have the feeling that things have shifted. The fluidity of both Cam and Shae’s sexuality and the conversations or sometimes lack of conversations around it felt very real to my sister in terms of the conversations she has had with her teenagers, and I was glad that came across as being real.

― Mesha Maren, Southern Review of Books

Shae by Mesha Maren

What booksellers are saying about Shae

  • What a gorgeous gut punch of a book! Maren has outdone herself with her third novel; I was in love from the first page. In an almost epistolary style, Shae takes us through her history with Cam – from friend to lover to – something else – in small-town Appalachia. Hints drop to show us that things go south fast even as Cam and Shae experience the rush of first love. I could tell things wouldn’t end well from the start but I couldn’t put it down until I knew what happened to Shae, Cam, and Eva. Maren’s prose will break your heart even while you stop to soak in its beauty. Readers of Karen Tucker’s Bewilderness will love this story of being young, queer, and addicted with no way out. Do not miss this book.
      ― Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia | BUY

  • Mesha Maren is a haunting writer, and I’ve long been a fan of the way she captures the changing face of the South in her pages. Shae was impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
      ― Ashley Warlick, M Judson, Booksellers in Greenville, South Carolina | BUY

  • How does someone end up falling down the whole of opioid abuse? In this tender-hearted and revealing novel by the acclaimed author of Sugar Run, she compassionately explores addiction, poverty, isolation, queerness, and family in a riveting tale that embraces complex and sometimes tragic characters with open arms.
      ― Seth Tucker, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky | BUY

About Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.

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Shae by Mesha Maren

, , ,
Shae by Mesha Maren
buy this book

Buy from your local indie.
Get the audiobook

How does someone end up falling down the hole of opioid abuse? In this tender-hearted and revealing novel by the acclaimed author of Sugar Run, she compassionately explores addiction, poverty, isolation, queerness, and family in a riveting tale that embraces complex and sometimes tragic characters with open arms.

Shae by Mesha Maren, (List Price: $28, Algonquin Books, 9781643755663, May 2024)

Reviewed by Seth Tucker, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky

Shae by Mesha Maren Read More »

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