Search results for ""hub city press""

The Columbia space shuttle and its contents rain down on the people of Kiser, Texas, in Kathryn Schwille’s imaginative debut novel set six weeks before the invasion of Iraq. What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle’s break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut’s remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor’s buried longing. In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster’s surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the novel’s unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality’s grip and a luminous book emerges—filled with heartache, beauty and warmth.

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In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023 in Fiction • One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of the Year One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2023 • Featured in People Magazine's Best Books of Fall • One of the Boston Globe's 20 Books We’re Excited to Read This Fall • One of Kirkus's 20 Best Books To Read in September • Poets & Writer's "Page One" New and Noteworthy • One of the Southwest Review's 10 Must Read Books of 2023 "A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “A fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude. With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.

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“You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.” That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds? With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.

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Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers. With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. A lovelorn and chatty euthanasia vet arrives at a couples’ house to put down their dog, Probate; a father-to-be searches his workplace—a bar—for a replacement sonogram after recording an episode of Bonanza over the original; an unlikely romance sparks between a librarian and a professional bowler while they compete to win an RV; a father takes his son to visit the many ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother. These stories bear the influence of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More showcases the body of work, hilarious and incisive, that has cemented George Singleton’s place among the South’s greatest living writers.

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One of the New Yorker's "What We're Reading This Summer" * A Millions Most Anticipated Book (June) * A Goop15 May 2020 Feature * One of Apartment Therapy's "7 Must-Read Books Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer" * One of Debutiful's "9 Books You Should Read This June" * A Publishers Weekly "Upcoming Indie Press Books" feature Hailed by Lauren Groff as “fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,” and written with “incantatory crispness,” Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. This collection takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips’ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they’ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. “The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction. Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.

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In a year when the Southern Foodways Alliance asks, “Where is the South?”, the Fall 2023 issue of Gravy examines Southern food inside and outside the region. Readers will follow traditional Southern foods as they transcend the region’s historic geographic borders. Meanwhile, newcomers to the South adapt to regional tastes and introduce new flavors to the canon. Mackenzie Martin tells of culinary entrepreneur Annie Fisher, who built a booming catering business at the turn of the twentieth century with her signature beaten biscuits—all without investors or access to a bank loan, as a Black woman in Jim Crow Missouri. In a story by Mikeie Reiland, two professional soccer players of African Muslim ancestry find a taste of home in Nashville, at iftar, the fast-breaking meal of Ramadan. Chris Jay serves up Shreveport stuffed shrimp, a dish perfected by a network of Black chefs in Shreveport, Louisiana, through five generations of restaurant ownership. Gravy columnist Hanna Raskin tracks Bojangles’ expansion into the Midwest, asking: does a fast food biscuit lose its fluff outside the South? Adrian Miller digs into the menu archives at the Carter Center to find out exactly how “Southern” the First Family ate in the White House. SFA oral historian Sarah Rodriguez shares excerpts from the new oral history project, Tapping into Richmond Beer, which chronicles craft brewing in Richmond, Virginia, through the city’s vibrant and diverse beer scene. Poet Reyes Ramirez explores Latino foodways in Texas in verse from his debut collection El Rey of Gold Teeth, forthcoming from Hub City Press. Erika Council talks biscuits and business in a Q&A about her new book, Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes.

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For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity. The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus’s speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.

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Told in the keen, honest voice of a young man growing up on the rural South Carolina coast, The Big Game Is Every Night grapples with masculinity, race, and family in contemporary blue-collar America.Grady Hayes’s whole life revolves around football. When he breaks his leg starting a game against a rival high school, his life comes unglued. As he recovers, Grady grows bored and angry. He no longer relates to his mom, his cousin, or the girl he’s been talking to, and loses interest in catfishing and eating family suppers on the weekends. When Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled, and there are rumors flying about why Coach made Grady a starting running-back in the first place.Frustrated and alone, Grady falls in with Hambone, a brooding older classmate, who takes him deep into the swamps to hunt raccoons and experiment with drugs. After an ugly confrontation with another player in the locker room, his relationship with Hambone turns dark and violent. Out of options, Grady’s mom calls in his estranged father to set him straight, and Grady realizes that his dad isn’t the man he remembers.In his debut novel, Robert Maynor delivers a literary Lowcountry Friday Night Lights that shines a harsh light on the ways American men are steeped in violence, and how hard it can be to shake loose the toxic norms that unchecked can keep us all so far apart.

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Finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity. “What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,” whispers the porous and questioning speaker of In the Hands of the River. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as “a boy made of shards.”

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"A spellbinding story of witchcraft and disobedience." - NPR An NPR Best Book of 2016 It's 1939 and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent's self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie's fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband's bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie--tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt--is practicing black magic. When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to thelady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces. Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this mesmerizing debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice--stalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can't quite dispel.

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All Of Us Together In The End is a lyrical examination of transformation after loss, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing."Vollmer’s family memoir shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Soon after, flashing lights and floating orbs appear in the woods surrounding his family’s home in rural North Carolina, where his widowed father lives. Formative memories of having been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church resurge in Vollmer’s mind, hastening self-reexamination and reckoning.He corresponds with a retired geology professor about “ghost lights,” which supposedly occur more in North Carolina than any other American state. He scrolls TikTok. He contacts an eccentric shaman who lives in Spain to have transcendental psychotherapy administered over Zoom. And then Jolene emerges, a woman endeared for decades to Vollmer’s father, holding secrets to their family’s past.Amidst the turmoil and loneliness of the pandemic, All of Us Together in the End is a poignant and often humorous investigation into belief set in a time where it seems people will believe anything. It is an elegiac affirmation of the awesome, strange, otherworldly ways our loved ones remain alive to us, even when they are out of reach.

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Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers. With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. A lovelorn and chatty euthanasia vet arrives at a couples’ house to put down their dog, Probate; a father-to-be searches his workplace—a bar—for a replacement sonogram after recording an episode of Bonanza over the original; an unlikely romance sparks between a librarian and a professional bowler while they compete to win an RV; a father takes his son to visit the many ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother. These stories bear the influence of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More showcases the body of work, hilarious and incisive, that has cemented George Singleton’s place among the South’s greatest living writers.

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O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of the SummerLonglisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel PrizeSet in contemporary Louisville, Leesa Cross-Smith’s mesmerizing first novel surrounding the death of a police officer is a requiem for marriage, friendship and family, from an author Roxane Gay has called “a consummate storyteller.”One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2018: Entertainment Weekly, Southern Living, Harper's BAZAAR, The Millions, Electric Lit, Book Riot, BookBub, Chicago Review of Books, POPSUGAR, Refinery29, NYLON, and SheReadsEvi—a classically-trained ballerina—was nine months pregnant when her husband Eamon was killed in the line of duty on a steamy morning in July. Now, it is winter, and Eamon's adopted brother Dalton has moved in to help her raise six-month-old Noah.Whiskey & Ribbons is told in three intertwining, melodic voices: Evi in present day, as she’s snowed in with Dalton during a freak blizzard; Eamon before his murder, as he prepares for impending fatherhood and grapples with the danger of his profession; and Dalton, as he struggles to make sense of his life next to Eamon’s, and as he decides to track down the biological father he’s never known.In the vein of Jojo Moyes’ After You, Whiskey & Ribbons explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys. It’s a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, brotherhood and surrogate fatherhood. Above all, it’s a novel about what it means—and whether it’s possible—to heal.

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From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose. In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.

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Duncan Park: Stories of a Classic American Ballpark recounts the history of Spartanburg's oldest wooden grandstand stadium. Built in 1926, Duncan Park stadium has been home to a semipro Negro Leagues team that had a star left-handed pitcher known throughout the South; a 1966 Spartanburg Phillies team named one of the 100 Best Minor League Baseball Teams; an American Legion Little World Series Champion; high school, college, and wooden bat-league summer teams; and legendary promotions and special events. Players and their families, coaches, sabermetricians, and all fans of America’s pastime will find in these pages a rich storehouse of our cultural heritage.

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Marlanda Dekine’s debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines intergenerational traumas and calls institutions from the Works Progress Administration narratives to modern-day museums to task.Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: “I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.” Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

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Hailed by ZZ Packer as "a master of tone, detail, and imagery," Andrew Siegris's debut collection, We Imagined It Was Rain, is a love song to Tennessee. These loosely connected stories are imbued with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep understanding of the human spirit. A young man moves to the mountains and builds an heirloom chest in the wake of his son’s death; a town official must make the decision to execute a circus elephant; two siblings help their father commit suicide; a preacher picks up the pieces of his ruined church, and his marriage, after a devastating flood; locals share stories of the girl with eyelashes so long she can braid them. Siegrist demonstrates careful attention to the smallest moments, to the rain on a windowpane, to individual mementos passed down through generations, in this far-reaching and thoughtful collection. We Imagined It Was Rain is the winner of our 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

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A New York Times Books New & Noteworthy book • A Most-Anticipated Book from BookPage, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Paperback Paris • Glowing reviews and features in Garden & Gun, CNN Philippines, Chapter16, Kirkus Reviews, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more This fierce collection celebrates the incredible diversity in the contemporary South by featuring essays by twenty-one of the finest young writers of color living and working in the region today, who all address a central question: Who is welcome? Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeyes and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce's black majorettes. Assembled by editor and essayist Cinelle Barnes, essays in A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South acknowledge that from the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South's relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.

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Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the Partition of India on the lives of three generations of women.The story begins in August 1947. Unrest plagues the streets of New Delhi leading up to the birth of the Muslim majority nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu majority nation of India. Sixteen-year-old Deepa navigates the changing politics of her home, finding solace in messages of intricate origami from her secret boyfriend Amir. Soon Amir flees with his family to Pakistan and a tragedy forces Deepa to leave the subcontinent forever.The story also begins sixty years later and half a world away, in Atlanta. While grieving both a pregnancy loss and the implosion of her marriage, Deepa’s granddaughter Shan begins the search for her estranged grandmother, a prickly woman who had little interest in knowing her. As she pieces together her family history shattered by the Partition, Shan discovers how little she actually knows about the women in her family and what they endured.For readers of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Parted Earth follows Shan on her search for identity after loss uproots her life. Above all, it is a novel about families weathering the lasting violence of separation, and how it can often takes a lifetime to find unity and peace.

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South Carolina is a state of incredible African American history: from the lunch counter in Rock Hill where the Friendship Nine began their "Jail, No Bail" protests, to the site where the freedom song "We Shall Overcome" was first sung; our nation’s very first school for the formerly enslaved, to a monument to the Middle Passage championed by Toni Morrison. Visitors and residents alike will find the Palmetto State rich in remarkable places that played a part in some of our nation’s most significant moments. The Green Book of South Carolina, compiled by the WeGOJA Foundation (on behalf of the SC African American Heritage Commission), is a first-of-its-kind travel guide to the most tourist-friendly destinations offering visitors avenues to discover intriguing African American history as they travel the state.Organized by region and illustrated with more than 80 color photographs by Joshua Parks, this guidebook presents a curated selection of over 200 museums, monuments, historic markers, schools, churches, and other public lands. Features a foreword by Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, Distinguished Professor Emerita at Michigan State University where she served as the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History. The South Carolina Green Book is a collaborative release by Hub City Press, the WeGOJA Foundation, and the International African American Museum. Sponsored by the City of Spartanburg.FEATURES More than 180 historic markers, structures, and landmarks for a diverse audience Includes popular sites as well as hidden gems Organized by region for easy travel planning and discovery. Includes suggested day trips for each region. Compact accessibly-priced book Beautiful full-color photography

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Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter. Michel Stone s harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system. Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating. In the end, The Iguana Tree is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.

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In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories. Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories. Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question. Reyes Ramirez’s debut poetry collection plays in spaces of both elegy and joy, and introduces a vibrant new talent.

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Part coming-of-age summer romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern novel exploring subculture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb. Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their “mother-sage” Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island’s namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb.  This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle’s commune—and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad’s place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she

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A short story collection exploring the bounds of contemporary family and how we move forward in a world so often changed by loss.Lauded by Kevin Wilson as “an exceptional collection that introduces us to an exciting new voice,” The Great American Everything orbits the experiences of relationships, be it brother-to-brother, sister-to-sister, patient-to-caregiver. Rendered with tenderness and a keen eye, these ten stories cut into the ways families approach questions of aging, adoption, loss, and class. A young woman hired to provide accompaniment services to an elder confronts the borders of complicity and friendship; two brothers search for details of their recently deceased grandfather in the desert; a college student faces her friend’s abuser during a door-to-door fundraising campaign.For fans of Amy Hempel and Rick Moody, these stories, spread over varied landscapes of the South from Memphis to New Orleans, contend with the ways in which the places we live dictate the way we trust and protect our own. Scott Gloden has assembled a precise and moving collection that considers what makes a family, however makeshift or impromptu its design.Scott Gloden is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

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From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby.Twenty-five years later, Luce is a successful lawyer, and her daughter Meera now faces the same decision Edie once did. Like Luce, Meera is fiercely independent and plans to handle her unexpected pregnancy herself. Along the way, Meera finds startling secrets about her mother’s past, including the long-ago friendship with Edie. As the three women’s lives intertwine and collide, the story circles age-old questions about female awakening, reproductive choice, motherhood, adoption, sex, and missed connections.For fans of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything, The Say So is a timely novel that asks: how do we contend with the rippling effects of the choices we've made? With equal parts precision and tenderness, Franks has crafted a sweeping epic about the coming of age of the women’s movement that reverberates through the present day.

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Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award FinalistGeorge Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

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