It’s shaping up to be another outstanding year for Southern writing in 2015, with several distinctive short-story collections, powerful novels by emerging authors, three outstanding memoirs, and new books by Toni Morrison and Anne Tyler. Here’s a look at some of what’s due in the next few months. …
JANUARY
“Almost Famous Women,” Megan Mayhew Bergman
Bergman (“Birds of a Lesser Paradise”) resurrects the lives of women lost to history — Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, “Gone With the Wind” actress Butterfly McQueen, Oscar Wilde’s drug-addicted niece Dolly — in a series of short, beautifully drawn vignettes. (Scribner)
“Hall of Small Mammals,” Thomas Pierce
From an extinct wooly mammoth to the clannish fathers at a summer camp, the menagerie of characters in this South Carolina native’s dazzling debut short-story collection are linked in nuanced, often mysterious ways, connecting the present with the prehistoric. (Riverhead Books)
“Refund,” Karen E. Bender
Money — how to obtain it, give it, earn it, lose it, even steal it — unites the stories in this masterful new collection. Bender (“Town of Empty Rooms”) takes ripped-from-the-headlines subjects (9/11, foreclosures, autism, a school shooting) to show ordinary people in the process of making extraordinary decisions. (Counterpoint Press)
“See How Small,” Scott Blackwood
Blackwood’s impressionistic, incantatory novel about the aftermath of a brutal murder of three teenage girls in a Texas ice-cream shop, tells the stories of the family, witnesses and suspects, while the dead girls, hovering above their town, make visitations to connect with and heal those left behind. (Little, Brown and Co.)
FEBRUARY
“Turtleface and Beyond,” Arthur Bradford
The characters in Bradford’s second story collection (after “Dogwalker”) lean toward impulsive, borderline insane decisions — like jumping a hundred feet into a river, having an affair with a mental patient, and getting too close to a wood chipper. A trusting narrator named Georgie, looking for love in all the wrong places, soldiers through each darkly funny tale. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Single, Carefree, Mellow,” Katherine Heiny
Heiny’s debut collection contains 10 stories of women in love who are anything but carefree and mellow — in fact, more like obsessed, tense and hormonal, but in a wonderful way that will keep you snorting with laughter and wishing you could see the world through Heiny’s eyes all the time. (Knopf)
“A Spool of Blue Thread,” Anne Tyler
In Tyler’s 20th novel, a geriatric couple with four children must allow themselves to be looked after, leave their beloved home, and, finally, accept the fact that life as they knew it is over. A shrewd observer of family dynamics, Tyler has a twist in mind in this golden-age tale, so don’t get too comfortable. (Knopf)
“Welcome to Braggsville,” T. Geronimo Johnson
Johnson (“Hold It ’Til It Hurts”) skewers race and class and all things Southern in a story about a freshman from rural Georgia who’s out of step at the University of California, Berkeley. When three new friends hear about his hometown’s annual Civil War re-enactment, they pitch a great idea: Why not attend, and stage a mock lynching as protest? Riiiiight. (William Morrow)
MARCH
“Bettyville,” George Hodgman
When former Vanity Fair editor Hodgman moves back to his hometown of Paris, Mo., to care for his aging mother, his future is as uncertain as hers. In his tender, sardonic and fearless account of life with Betty — who has never acknowledged that her son is gay — Hodgman delivers an epic unfolding of his lifelong search for acceptance and love. (Viking)
“Delicious Foods,” James Hannaham
Hannaham’s second novel (after “God Says No”) opens with a teenager on the run, Eddie, who will eventually settle down as “A Handyman With No Hands.” This penetrating, surreal tale uses three narrators, one of whom is crack cocaine, to explain Eddie’s lost hands, the company of the title, and a remote Louisiana work-farm with a pre-Civil War work ethic. (Little Brown and Co.)
APRIL
“How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Lessons of a Racist Childhood,” Jim Grimsley
In this long-awaited book from Grimsley (“My Drowning,” 1995), he returns to 1966 and the integration of his eastern North Carolina school, recalling his first real exposure to black children and their culture, and its effect in years to come. At the same time, Grimsley’s closeted sexuality is just as threatening to his small Southern community. (Algonquin)
“God Help the Child,” Toni Morrison
Nobel laureate Morrison’s 11th novel promises an unsparing, contemporary story about a student’s allegation against a teacher, and “the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult.” The 192-page novel opens with a mystery: “I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.” April can’t come soon enough. (Knopf)
MAY
“Hold Still,” Sally Mann
In a memoir as confrontational, frank and searching as her best work, Mann, one of America’s most renowned photographers, serves up a surprisingly feral childhood, and a Southern gothic family history marked by “deceit and scandal,” alcoholism, domestic abuse, affairs, “racial complications” and possibly even murder. (Little Brown and Co.)
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