An Exercise in Uncertainty by Jonathan Gluck and Rivers Always Reach the Sea by Monte Burke
I love a good fish story, and two G&G contributors have delivered a couple of whoppers this summer. In An Exercise in Uncertainty, Jonathan Gluck recalls how he got on with life after receiving a typically fatal diagnosis. Gluck not only defies the odds as he faces cancer head on, he also goes fly fishing. Meanwhile, the stories in Monte Burke’s collection Rivers Always Reach the Sea take you from the Florida flats with arguably the world’s greatest tarpon guide to a Russian outpost where the salmon are thick and the oligarch elusive.
—David DiBenedetto, editor in chief
Forget Me Not by Stacy Willingham
For every high-brow literary novel or historical nonfiction I finish, I have to sprinkle in a thrilling mystery. There’s an art to writing a great one that goes beyond the puzzle—the prose itself must intrigue. Agatha Christie, John la Carré, and Anthony Horowitz often fit my bill, and lately, Stacy Willingham. My friends and I usually pass around her latest and discuss the whos and whys and what fors. This year’sForget Me Not, set at a muscadine vineyard on Wadmalaw Island near Charleston, South Carolina, didn’t let us down; the plot twisted as artfully as a grapevine curling on a trellis. (Bonus: Willingham wrote about the inspiration for the setting here.)
—Amanda Heckert, executive editor
Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke
This year, the master of Southern thrillers James Lee Burke released a new rip-through-it-read, set in early 1900s Texas. With deftness and delightful details, Burke introduces a daughter of the Texas soil, the strong-willed Bessie Holland. I recently asked the eighty-nine-year-old Burke what his favorite read of 2025 was. “I did some re-reading of The Sound and the Fury,” he says. “Mr. Faulkner is still as good as Shakespeare.”
—CJ Lotz Diego, senior editor
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs
The new Baldwin biography by Nicholas Boggs is something that should be on all bookshelves. It’s long but it’s riveting and a fascinating read about one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. It’s Southern because James Baldwin is universal and without geographical boundaries.
—Jessica B. Harris, author and contributing editor
The Antidote by Karen Russell
With brilliant storytelling and captivating prose, Karen Russell turned her attention from her native Florida to Dust Bowl–era Nebraska in her second novel, The Antidote. I’m already a huge fan of anything Russell puts out—her style is weird, funny, heartbreaking, and poignant—and I was unsurprisingly spellbound by this book.
—Caroline Sanders Clements, senior editor
Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
I came to Kevin Wilson’s brilliant string of familial novels in a catawampus way. First, I read Now Is Not the Time to Panic from 2022. Now, I’m reading The Family Fang, published in 2011. This summer, I read his newest, Run for the Hills, which puts the dysfunctional family of the moment in a PT Cruiser, headed west out of Tennessee on a road trip that ends in California with a subtle and telling reckoning.
—John T. Edge, author and contributing editor
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
After stumbling upon an early edition of The Wizard of Oz in a Highlands, North Carolina, antique store (on what happened to be the 125th anniversary of the first book being published), I’ve scoured bookstores and antique shops for the rest of the fourteen-book series. So far, I’ve found four—the latest being Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz in Asheville. They’ve been just as whimsical to read as they’ve been to track down.
—Ally Sloway, social media director
King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
In Cynthia R. Greenlee’s profile of S.A. Cosby for G&G, she notes the Shakespearean influences on the Virginia-raised author’s work, where “preventable tragedies” make for books nearly impossible to put down. Cosby’s latest thriller is full of messy family dynamics, Lear-like father figures, and characters of dubious morality. It’s also got a breakneck pace and the ruthless conflict that has cemented Cosby as one of the greats.
—Grace Roberts, contributor
Art Work: On the Creative Life by Sally Mann
“My particular place has been Virginia, and the South in general,” writes the photographer Sally Mann in her raw and stirring memoir Art Work. “The collapsing farmhouses, ruinous outbuildings, parishless churches, kudzu-claimed telephone poles, long-forgotten cemeteries, and, all around us, hillsides and mountains greenly serene…This is my landscape, beating inside me like a second heart.”
—CJ Lotz Diego
Only Son by Kevin Moffett
Magical, profound, hilarious, microscopic, unusually structured, impossible to stop reading: This novel about fatherhood will break your heart and do so without once ever relying on sentimentality. Moffett—Florida native, UVA professor, celebrated short fiction writer—is I guess what you call a “writer’s writer,” as in, the people who know know. But this book just got nominated for the National Book Award, so I’m hoping maybe more people are going to know now.
—Nic Brown, author and contributor
We Don’t Talk About Carol by Kristen L. Berry
An astonishing debut about a woman investigating the disappearance of her Aunt Carol, one of six Black girls who went missing in North Carolina in the 1960s. We Don’t Talk About Carol is so much more than a twisty mystery; it’s an examination of “the rot at the roots of our family trees,” as well as an honest portrayal of the disproportionate treatment given to missing Black girls in the media, and one of my favorite reads of 2025.
—Stacy Willingham, contributor and New York Times best-selling author
House of Smoke by John T. Edge
House of Smoke is one of the most reflective and unsparing memoirs I’ve read in a long time. In trying to disentangle the complex, often painful reality of his Southern upbringing from the myths he once believed, Edge holds everything up to the light—including himself.
—Bronwen Dickey, author and contributor
Awake by Jen Hatmaker
Often slapped with the “influencer” label, Hatmaker is above all a gifted writer; I’d read about the search for lost car keys if her name was on it. Here, though, it’s the search for self-love she chronicles in the wake of her pastor-husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce. To get there, she must turn an unflinching eye on Southern Baptist purity culture (the story of how her son learns about porn will break your heart), though there’s plenty of wit to balance the wisdom.
—Elizabeth Florio, digital editor
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
There’s a reason that Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina–native Grady Hendrix tops the horror bestseller lists and takes the Goodreads Choice crown. His latest, the bestselling Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, set at a St. Augustine, Florida, home for unwed mothers in 1970, is equal parts hilarious and haunting, rippling with a disturbing Margaret Atwood prescience. Horror is not my genre, but Hendrix’s delightfully wayward Southern gothic imagination and his propulsive storytelling definitely cast a spell.
—Stephanie Hunt, author and contributor
This Dog Will Change Your Life by Elias Weiss Friedman
As a longtime Dogist fan who can’t resist the daily flood of pups on his Instagram, I loved diving into This Dog Will Change Your Life, Elias Weiss Friedman’s most personal work yet.In the book—which he chatted about in an interview—Friedman traces the lessons dogs have taught him, from resilience to pure, ego-free joy, while spotlighting the rescuers and characters he meets along the way. It’s a warm reminder of why life with dogs is richer, messier, and infinitely better.
—Emily Daily, newsletter editor
Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack
Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times, this is a meticulous history of the Charleston church and a humane explication of the tragedy that happened there more than ten years ago. A professional work of art.
—Justin Heckert, contributor
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
This novel, a National Book Award finalist, shows how climate collapse reshapes ordinary lives, and how love tries to bloom even in scorched or flooded ground. It’s a haunting, necessary story for anyone who cares about the earth and the people who depend on it.
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, contributor, author, and professor
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson
British writer Adam Nicolson blends my two favorite genres—memoir and ecoliterature—into one delightful, poetic story on the lessons we can learn from birds. Over the course of more than two years, Nicolson becomes intimately familiar with the songbirds, owls, ravens, and buzzards flitting around in the woods by his small shed, dubbed the “absorbatory,” where he studies visitors at his nesting boxes and feeders. Beautiful photos of the wild countryside, visiting passerines, nests, and maps of the property complement the detailed field guide vibe of the book. It’s a special, personal treasure in my library.
—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian, digital producer
Braided Heritage by Jessica B. Harris
Jessica B. Harris needs no introduction. As a pioneering culinary historian (and longtime G&G contributor), Harris has penned an expansive canon of work over her forty-year career. Braided Heritage, the most recent addition to her oeuvre, is a treasure trove of story-forward recipes, three of which she shared here: brown sugar pound cake, pickled peaches, and summer succotash. The book beautifully weaves together tales and traditions from three cultures that are foundational to American cuisine: African, European, and Native American.
—Grace Roberts, contributor, in her interview with the author
Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints by powerHouse Books, copublished by Edwynn Houk Gallery
Coming on board as G&G’s photo editor this year made me revisit work like Mike Disfarmer’s The Vintage Prints, which is now a well-worn fixture in my personal canon of great photography. These studio portraits, made in rural Arkansas nearly eighty years ago, still feel startlingly alive and show that simplicity can hold profound psychological depth. They remind me that the most personal images often become the most universal and that even the quietest portraits have a story to tell. This is the spirit at the center of every story we tell at Garden & Gun, distilled to its essence: a celebration of life.
—Kathryn Hurni, photo editor
Next of Kin by Gabrielle Hamilton
I am so excited that Gabrielle Hamilton wrote a second memoir. Next of Kin is a tender and sharply written account of her family. Inspired as ever, this book is also yet one more way Hamilton has created a pathway for people who have written in the “chef food” space (all the world loves a tidy category) to step fully into the literary nonfiction world. Her writing is more exquisite than ever, which is saying a lot for someone who pretty much nailed it in her first book [2011’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef].
—Lisa Donovan, chef, author, and contributor
Paper Girl by Beth Macy
The Virginia reporter Beth Macy describes in Paper Girlhow the delivery route she biked in Urbana, Ohio, shaped her curiosity for what can divide or unite neighbors. This is a powerful memoir from one of the modern greats of journalism, who brought the world the deeply reported Dopesick, which became a Hulu miniseries about the opioid epidemic’s origins.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Good Hair Days by Grace Helena Walz
A modern twist on Steel Magnolias, heavily influenced by the queen herself Dolly Parton, this novel follows two sisters determined to save the family salon, June’s Beauty Shop. Dripping in the charming atmosphere of a small Southern town, the story navigates loss and disappointment, romance and humor, until it settles on the truth—that love always conquers all.
—Joy Callaway, author of Sing Me Home to Carolina
Custom Made Woman, A Life In Traditional Music by Alice Gerrard
A lot of my reading this past year came from a big pile of books sitting on my desk that were written by friends, so it would be hard to choose a favorite one in public. I will, however, recommend one: Custom Made Woman, A Life In Traditional Music by the remarkable Alice Gerrard. It’s both a cool memoir and a cultural document.
—Bill Smith, chef and author
Black in Blues by Imani Perry
“I close my eyes and conjure up our home house, a term Black Southerners use for the dwelling where the family gathers,” writes Imani Perry in Black in Blues, which poetically quilts her Alabama youth and family with such subjects as indigo dye and blues music.
—CJ Lotz Diego
It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley
This memoir was published by my then-employer ESPN in 2007 and for whatever reason I only excavated it from my bookshelf this year, in my mid-forties, and tore through it during the course of a single evening. Turns out it was the perfect book for this time of my life, about a man considering his legacy, his family, his work as a journalist, and where he’s from.
—Justin Heckert
True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard was the first serious book I ever read for pleasure and not to appease my high school English overlords. His Killing Mr. Watson remains a re-read for me and never fails to produce fresh facets of the Everglades that give me no choice but to return and discover them anew.
—T. Edward Nickens, contributing editor
Dominion by Addie Citchens
Addie Citchen’s debut tells the story of one family’s failure to reckon with the monster in their midst. This polyvocal Mississippi novel is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, touching and terrifying—made all the more thrilling by the knowledge that you’re reading only the first novel by an audacious Southern genius.
—C. Morgan Babst, author and contributor
Joyride by Susan Orlean
The longtime New Yorker nonfiction writer Susan Orlean takes readers along for an adventurous journey through her epic reporting career. The common threads are her curiosity and natural instincts for a good story with even better characters, such as a rare orchid poacher and animals of all sorts. For G&G this past summer, Orlean wrote about the hundredth anniversary of theChincoteague Pony Swim in Virginia (a joyous career highlight for this editor).
—CJ Lotz Diego
Heart Life Music by Kenny Chesney
[Country superstar] Kenny Chesney really only began to reflect on his success during the year he spent working on his just-released first book, Heart Life Music, with journalist Holly Gleason. “It’s a love letter to the creative part of my life…to how I grew up, to the people who shaped me,” he says, “to the music I heard, from childhood into adulthood.” The book begins with a youthful memory: lying in the grass and staring at the stars, wondering what life had in store.
—Silas House, author and contributor, in his recent piece about Chesney
Cutting Up in the Kitchen by Duane Nutter
Our favorite Southern cookbook in 2025 was Duane Nutter’s Cutting Up in the Kitchen—easily the funniest cookbook we’ve ever read. Nutter started doing stand-up comedy in Atlanta early in his career to relieve the stress of being a busy chef at the Four Seasons, and his stories of the journey from his native Louisiana to Seattle as a teenager and back to the South as an adult are hilarious. But it’s his crave-tastic recipes for Southern comfort food with global influences that kept us coming back to the book: Nutter’s berbere-spice fried chicken and the decadent tagine-meets-lasagna mashup he calls “lamb burger helper” have become go-to staples in our kitchens.
—Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors and contributors
Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up by Dave Barry
What feels like a hundred years ago, teenage-writer me screwed up the courage to send a letter to syndicated funnyman Dave Barry asking how on earth one becomes…well, him. Miraculously, the Miami Herald legend wrote back. I’ve since managed to lose that sacred artifact (a crime), but the gist was simple: Don’t quit, keep going. And somehow, that tiny spark stuck. In his entertaining memoir, I was reminded of that sage advice again and again, with additional hysterical lessons in pushing boundaries, learning from failure, and always unapologetically looking for the humor in everything.
—Kinsey Gidick, contributor
The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
The poems in this collection don’t dawdle: Calvocoressi knows all the shortcuts to your heart. It’s a finalist for the National Book Award this year, and I’ve never read a more human book—lovely, funny, desperate and dark and hopeful. It will speak to you. Promise.
—Daniel Wallace, author and contributing editor
A Toad in a Glass Jar by Stan Lake
Poet and Army veteran Stan Lake pours light into the shadowy country of the human heart, contrasting the sweetness of nature and the horrors of war, a deep longing to remember and a desperate urge to forget. One of the most honest and courageous poetry collections I’ve read in some time.
—Taylor Brown, contributor and author of Rednecks and Wolvers
Secrets of Southern Gardening: Pro Tips for Success by Jenks Farmer
Through his latest beautiful book, Farmer can be your go-to plant pal. The book begins with a beautiful cover photograph of his crinum lily farm near the Georgia/South Carolina border, and then zips through like a fascinating conversation, covering soil health, pests, propagating plants, and my favorite chapter—an ode to nighttime gardening and evening pollinators.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Georgia’s Historical Recipes by Valerie J. Frey
Anyone who holds a creased and stained recipe handed down from a grandparent or favorite aunt can feel its connection to family and history. Valerie J. Frey, a foodways researcher based in Athens, Georgia, takes that connection deeper and wider in her new book, Georgia’s Historical Recipes, which spans the state’s culinary evolution from the colonial era to World War II. Frey dove into tattered community cookbooks and faded newspapers and surfaced with illuminating stories and throwback kitchen tips that might be worth revisiting.
—Steve Russell, contributing editor, in his interview with the author
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
In a time when connection feels the most needed, this tender novel by North Carolina’s Virginia Evans was my surprise read of 2025. An epistolary work that captures the heart with witty writing.
—Patti Callahan Henry, best-selling author
Bless Your Heart: A Field Guide to All Things Southern by Landon Bryant
When interviewing internet sensation and Mississippi native Landon Bryant, G&G writer Kinsey Gidick asked, “What’s your signature Southern saying?” “Might could,” Bryant replied. “I love might could. I think it’s so fun because it means so much: You might; you could; you have the option to, and you might.” Find more of Bryant’s anthropological commentary—delivered with humor, heart, and plenty of Southern charm—in this self-described field guide.
—Grace Roberts
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
In the novelist Anne Tyler’s latest, the central family is small: mom, dad, and adult daughter, or three people in June. The emotional terrain the eighty-three-year-old Tyler covers, however, is anything but small. Beneath the tidy crust of her plainsong sentences, as ever, seethes the lava of familial and marital relations: regret, fear, resentment, surrender, wounds healed and unhealed with more, inevitably, yet to come.
—Jonathan Miles in his G&G review
World Without End by Martha Parks
I loved how Memphis-based essayist, illustrator, and author Martha Park delved into deeply personal questions about faith, family, ecology, climate change, and wacky religious theme parks in her essay collection, World Without End, published by the South Carolina–based Hub City Press.Her prose is smart, probing, and lyrical and never feels preachy.
—Stephanie Hunt
Startlement: New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón
Ada Limón, who recently completed her tenure as U.S. poet laureate, conveys the natural world’s beauty and delights in this gorgeous collection. Isn’t it a joy that one of our finest wordsmiths knows talk has its limits, that phrases can’t precisely convey the chatter of birds or how wind hums? As she writes in “Mortality”: “Language, I love it, but it is of the air / and we are of the earth.”
—CJ Lotz Diego
Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow has always been drawn to larger-than-life emblems of Americana: Washington, Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Hamilton (his bio of whom laid the foundation for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical). Reviewers tend to call his books “magisterial” because they are. With Mark Twain, Chernow set his sights on, in his words, “the biggest literary personality that America has produced,” with one of the most eventful, hurly-burly lives of any American author.
—Jonathan Miles in his G&G review
The Blue Food Cookbook by Andrew Zimmern and Barton Seaver
Andrew Zimmern, of Bizarre Foods fame, crafted a gorgeous sustainable cookbook that challenges eaters everywhere to eat one more seafood meal per week—but not just tuna and salmon. Instead, Zimmern offers an alternative that is both educational and entertaining: incorporating small fish, seaweed, and food harvested through aquaculture in globally inspired dishes.
—Madison Powers
Dig Me a Grave, by Dick Harpootlian
Dick Harpootlian is a state senator and trial lawyer, most notably representing infamous Lowcountry lawyer Alex Murdaugh in his 2023 trial for the murders of Murdaugh’s wife and son. Forty-some years before that, however, Harpootlian was the deputy prosecutor who sent Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins [the South’s most prolific serial killer] to the electric chair. Dig Me a Grave, cowritten with Shaun Assael, is Harpootlian’s account of that prosecution intertwined with a victim-by-victim chronicle of Gaskin’s life and crimes. It’s a haunted and haunting read.
—Jonathan Miles, in his G&G review
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