Click on a cover pic for order information.
Bodock: Stories
Robert Busby
Robert Busby’s considerable genius is that he sees what the rest of us are unwilling to see and says what we are unable to say. Bodock: Stories is an ambitious and radiant debut collection that reminds me of the hilarious and heartbreaking stories of Lewis Nordan and Flannery O’Connor, and it doesn’t get better than that. Busby writes with energy, savvy, poise, and tenderness. When I finished Bodock: Stories, I walked around for days seeing the world through its lens. Do yourself a favor, buy this book and get in on the secret before everyone else knows what you soon will: here is the future of Southern fiction. –John Dufresne, author of My Darling Boy
The Devil’s Done Come Back:
New Ghost Tales from North Carolina
Edited by Ed Southern
Ed Southern, executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, assembled this anthology of new ghost tales, often about old haunts and old injustices. From Blair Publisher: “North Carolina ain’t what it once was: forests and fields have given way to suburbs and vacation homes, textile mills to high tech, tobacco farms to tourism. That doesn’t mean, though, that the ghosts of the Old North State have gone away.” Contributors include Wiley Cash (and his daughters), Michele Tracy Berger, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Tyree Daye, Jeremy B. Jones, and many more.
Brother Brontë
Fernando A. Flores
Listed as a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, this new novel by Tamaulipas-born, South Texas-raised author Fernando A. Flores rounds out a gritty border fiction trilogy of sorts with this dystopian yet magical novel. “The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of its mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets.”–MCD, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hometown Mississippi
Melody Golding
The University Press of Mississippi brings us this “intimate glimpse into thirty Mississippi towns through the lens of author, photographer, and artist Melody Golding. In this stunning collection, Golding captures the essence of her state in the summer of 2024, blending photography and personal exploration to create a colorful and contemporary portrait of Mississippi. From the hills in the north to the sandy shores of the south, from the Piney Woods to the Mississippi River towns and the storied Mississippi Delta, Golding’s journey takes readers off the beaten path, away from interstates, and along the winding back roads and highways that once served as the main thoroughfares for these unique small-town destinations.”
The Whistler
Nick Medina
Many cultures believe whistling at night can attract evil spirits, such as Navajo “Skinwalkers” and Appalachian forest haints. Indeed, author Nick Medina (a member of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana) also contributed to 2023’s Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. In his third novel, when the pandemic interrupts Henry Hotard’s music career, he takes to making viral ghost-hunting videos on a nearby reservation. He defiantly whistles—and later has a debilitating accident, then is haunted by a mythological specter. There’s a lot more to it, but Henry has to learn to confront his troubled past and the mysterious stalker.
Come Again No More
David Wesley Williams
Available for pre-order for its November 10 release, Memphis author David Wesley Williams’s “Come Again No More is Southern literature with shades of Charles Portis (like Charley Hull, and the author, a former Memphis newspaper reporter), but also with a whiff of the Irish to it—think the playful language and place-as-character of Joyce’s Ulysses (“Good puzzle would be cross Memphis without passing a barbecue joint.”) or the riotous blasphemy of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown books.” -Jackleg Press