New This Month: November

Happy November! We heard you were looking for some new books to add to your fall TBR pile so here’s all the new books we have publishing this month. Be sure to also sign up for our monthly eNews so that you don’t miss out on new titles, sales and promotions, and what’s happening at UNC Press.

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Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly edited by Sophia Houghton, Kylan Rice, and Daniel Wallace

“What a gift Sophia Houghton, Kylan Rice, and Daniel Wallace have given us with this sharply edited, ingeniously organized anthology. Wade into nature with a short story by Wendell Berry; consider the path of love with Adriana Páramo; or root yourself in place with Ha Jin. Any journey through Southern Lights rewards the reader in much the same way the Carolina Quarterly has over seventy-five impressive years: with a capacious but always specific sense of what the South was, is, and can be.”—Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting

Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America by Andrew C. McKevitt

“Illuminating, timely . . . . an original way of understanding a stunning and enduring increase in gun ownership in the US . . . . McKevitt offers a compelling argument about where the extremity of America’s permissiveness toward deadly weaponry originated and how debates on the Second Amendment’s meaning have evolved in response to shifting cultural preoccupations. He also makes a persuasive appeal for how the human costs of mass gun ownership could be mitigated.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Anyone who cares about gun violence in the United States must read this book.”—Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s

Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery: The Map, the Search, the Discovery edited by Eric Klingelhofer

Published in association with the First Colony Foundation

“Klingelhofer and his impressive roster of associates offer us a carefully documented chronicle of two decades of creative research into the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s effort to plant a permanent English colony on the Carolina coast. Unlike hundreds of previous efforts seeking that same end, these essays set forth in meticulous detail the most promising results of their documentary, cartographical, archaeological, historical, and literary investigations.”—Larry E. Tise, author of Circa 1903: North Carolina’s Outer Banks at the Dawn of Flight

Who is Muhammad By Michael Muhammad Knight

“Combining excellent scholarship with a creative, narrative-driven style, Michael Knight presents a skillfully balanced understanding of Muhammad as a stable historical figure and as a changing persona and symbol. Knight writes as an insider to the study and practice of Islam but also maintains an outside perspective to the approaches and methods of both. The book will be valuable for scholars of religion and for general readers interested in a major historical figure like Muhammad.”—Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, University of Vermont

“If someone asks you for a concise, lively, and smart introduction to the Prophet Muhammad, this is the book you must recommend.”—Edward E. Curtis IV, Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts, Indiana University, Indianapolis

Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

“Elizabeth Engelhardt vividly establishes how southern boardinghouses were crucibles and the women who kept them were agents of improvisation, ingenuity, grit, and grits. Her trenchant research and reframing allow us to see these ventures, so often born from a moment of acute personal loss and economic necessity, as the loci not only of tragedy and exigency but also of bodily autonomy, self-expression, financial stability, and even freedom.”—Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits

“Carefully researched, beautifully written, and thought provoking.”—Psyche Williams-Forson, author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

“Lydia Pelot-Hobbs presents a profound and compelling analysis that shows why neoliberal regimes of racialized security must be dissolved in Louisiana and everywhere, and her wonderfully rich accounts of grassroots prison abolitionist organizing point toward how these changes can come about and how we can, and must, participate in seeing them come to fruition.”—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

“Prison Capital is an urgent, elegant, and expert account of the making of one of the carceral capitals of the world”—Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America by Burgin Mathews

“Magic City is destined to become a crucial book in jazz history, African American cultural politics, the sonic geographies of cities, and the history of the South.”—Charles L. Hughes, author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South

“Birmingham, Alabama may seem an unlikely cradle of jazz. And yet Sun Ra was born there, and music teacher John T. “Fess” Whatley trained generations of Birmingham musicians who went on to make enormous contributions working alongside the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and more. Magic City tells an essential story of American music.”—David Menconi, author of Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music