Great Reads

After one season, The Walking Dead has become very important not just to zombie fans, but to our city.

Keri Hilson’s voice sounds sore, like a smoker (she’s not), or an exhausted cheerleader (she was), or someone who went to bed at seven this morning (she did).

Through thousands of newspaper columns and twenty books, the Georgia-born humorist forged a bond with Southern readers—whether he wrote about football-carrying Dawgs in Athens, the chili variety at the Varsity, or his beloved black Lab, Catfish. At twenty-three the UGA alum became the youngest sports editor in the history of the Atlanta Journal, where he worked alongside his idol Furman Bisher. But when the Atlanta Constitution assigned him to write a column in 1977, Grizzard became a star, syndicated in 450 newspapers and with recurring visits to Johnny Carson’s couch on The Tonight Show. He died from heart failure at age forty-seven. A portion of his ashes was scattered on the fifty-yard line at Sanford Stadium.

We live in a world obsessed with its end. The past decade has given us a litany of Revelation-scale misery, or at least the threat of it: 9/11, Katrina, nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen (hello, Kim Jong-un), monster tornadoes, blazing meteors, relentless plagues, hellacious storms.

Lance Cooper was looking for answers behind a single car crash. What the attorney found led to a recall of 30 million vehicles. Inside General Motors’ deadly ignition switch scandal—and the price one Kennesaw family paid.

The author of "Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South" discusses his research, former Governor E.D. Rivers, and the death penalty.

Through her eponymous gallery, opened in 1980, Gold brought blue-chip contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Atlanta and guided regional artists such as Radcliffe Bailey, Zoe Hersey, and Rana Rochat to national prominence. The art doyenne suffered a blow last year with the loss of husband Donald. But this irrepressibly hip grandma—who has counted bad-boy artist Robert Mapplethorpe among her buds—carries on. Hard at work on her autobiography, Basquiat’s Cat, Gold just wrapped a buying trip to NYC’s Armory Show. She’ll also be leading an art tour of Berlin this fall. Gold may be out of the gallery racket she imprinted with her épater la bourgeoisie moxie, but she’ll never be out of art.

"It sounds preposterous," the New York Times declared. “A businessman from Atlanta blows into New York and walks off with the colonnaded high temple of American capitalism. No more will New York be the master of the New York Stock Exchange.”

You have to go back almost ten years before December 9, 1938, to get to the beginning of this story. Ed Rivers was an up-and-coming politician then, serving as a state senator from Lakeland. It would be another eight years before Rivers would be elected governor, but he was trying to make a name for himself statewide, trying to lay a foundation.

Yet in a city famed for diversity, his business, Xmetrical, is a Black-owned anomaly.