Tag: books

Spring is here, and with it, a new selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books to check out. Here are six from Atlanta authors to add to your reading list.

When Sabrina Orah Mark began to delve into the world of fairy tales, it was Geppetto—who carves his own son from a block of wood—whom she connected with most. “Pinocchio lies to him, steals from him, runs away from him, comes back, saves him, and breaks his heart,” Mark says. It’s a tale as old as time: The things that we create—that lie to us, steal from us, and break our hearts—might be the things that save us in the end.

The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women challenges regional stereotypes and paints a complex, vivid picture of life in the mountains. Here, a passage Anna Tutt (1911–2008), who was born in Columbia County, Georgia.

"Waffle House is much like the South itself,” says Ty Matejowsky—a straightforward enough observation, on its face. Everybody knows Waffle House is a Southern icon. But why?

Dan Immergluck’s new book, Red Hot City, describes an Atlanta that’s a good place to do business—but increasingly out of reach for many of its longtime residents. In his book, out this month, he details paths taken—and not taken—by policymakers that he says have resulted in a housing crisis that is forcing lower-income, and often Black, families further and further out from the transit, hospitals, and jobs in the city’s core.

As Dr. Julia Skinner writes in her new book, Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods Have Shaped Cultures & Communities, few food-preparation techniques are as rich in meaning and as ripe for metaphor as fermentation. I visited Skinner at her house on the Southside—yard wild and overgrown, chickens somewhere out back—to ask what she found so alluring about the subject.

A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, a poem about complacency called “We Lived Happily During the War” went viral. Its opening lines read, "And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough." It’s the first poem from Deaf Republic, which tells the story of people living in an occupied town who begin communicating in sign language to protest the killing of a deaf child. Deaf Republic is the second collection of poetry by Jewish Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky, who is hard of hearing.

In 1867, naturalist John Muir embarked on a 1,000-mile “botanical journey” across the South, walking from Kentucky to Florida. Five years ago, former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Dan Chapman decided to retrace his route, albeit in a car: In the century and a half since Muir’s trek, his path has been chopped up by interstates and highways—“not a lot of fun hiking terrain,” Chapman says.

At first glance, the two central characters in New York Times best-selling Atlanta author Emily Giffin’s 11th novel, Meant to Be, may feel familiar for those of us who remember the super-secret 1996 Georgia coastal wedding of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island. But this being an Giffin novel, the writer creatively crafts a fresh flight plan for her star-crossed couple.

Gathering Blossoms, Boyd’s second book, consists of half a century of Walker’s journal entries from more than 65 notebooks. Sifting through thousands of pages must have been a daunting task for Boyd and Walker. But the Georgia natives were kindred spirits whose partnership seemed fated—they both share a love for another Black woman author, Zora Neale Hurston.