New This Week: November 12
This week we have books perfect for readers interested in True Crime, Southern Queerness in US Fiction, the Jargon Society, and the life of an enslaved doctor on one of the South’s largest plantations. Check out all of these new titles that, as of yesterday, are officially on-sale wherever books are sold. You can also visit our Hot Off the Press page to see everything new this month.
Death in Briar Bottom: The True Story of Hippies, Mountain Lawmen, and the Search for Justice in the Early 1970s by Timothy Silver
“[A} gritty true crime . . . . By finding the universal dimensions in a local tragedy, Death in Briar Bottom shows how a true crime story from the past says a lot about persistent national problems.”—Foreword Reviews
“Thoroughly researched . . . . An intriguing perspective on a lesser-known case. This book proves that history can repeat itself in unexpected ways, and not everyone is eager to revisit the past.”—Library Journal
All Y’all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980–2020 by Heidi Siegrist
“All Y’all examines how fiction by Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, and others depicts queerness in the American South. . . . Siegrist’s nuanced analysis . . . gives literary scholars plenty to chew on.”—Publishers Weekly
“All Y’all is an exciting and robust study of queerness in the US South and Southern literature from 1980 to the present. Siegrist shows how this body of literature refuses to adhere to any single model of Southernness or queerness and instead presents a multiplicity that both indexes and negotiates the broader complexities of this period.”—Michael P. Bibler, Louisiana State University
Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A Peripheral History of the Jargon Society as Told through Its Missing Books by Andy Martrich
“Martrich’s deeply researched investigation into Jonathan Williams’s influential and very personal Jargon Society touches on biography, hauntology, Black Mountain College, and other avant-garde communities via unfulfilled ‘lost’ projects, presenting a singular contribution to Williams, Jargon, and publishing studies.”—Jeffery Beam, coeditor of Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards
“This book makes a bold and counterintuitive argument for understanding how the failure to publish certain works allows us to understand the projects of a press. Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot lingers with the specificities and nuances of outlier projects that work to revise canonical narratives of American poetry. All of this is in addition to offering a phenomenal demonstration of the bibliographic arts.”—Daniel Scott Snelson, University of California, Los Angeles
Freedom’s Mirage: Virgil Bennehan’s Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile by Sydney Nathans
“A gripping tragedy, masterfully researched and beautifully told!”—Gregg Hecimovich, author of The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
“In uncovering a fascinating story of one man’s life, Nathans portrays the limits of Black freedom and furthers a broader commentary on race relations in US history.”—Beverly C. Tomek, author of Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania