Eradication by Jonathan Miles
Every issue, Jonathan Miles reviews a new book in the pages of G&G. This February his latest novel hits the shelves. Eradication: A Fable is his best yet (and he’s had some winners). What happens when a retired jazz musician turned schoolteacher finds himself on an uninhabited island with one job: helping balance an ecosystem that has been ravaged by invasive…goats? Well, only Miles could unspool this tale—one of love, grief, solitude, and a burning moral question.
—David DiBenedetto, editor in chief
Kin by Tayari Jones
The novelist and essayist Silas House is so excited that he says, “I don’t know a thing about the forthcoming novel Kin by Tayari Jones, except that she wrote it. That’s enough for me.” Senior editor Caroline Sander Clements adds, “Few books have gutted me like Jones’s 2018 novel An American Marriage, and her upcoming book, Kin, promises to be equally raw and beautiful. It follows the story of two childhood friends in Louisiana on paths to fill the holes left by their mothers.”
Holy the Body by Donovan McAbee
In his jewel of a debut poetry book, Belmont professor Donovan McAbee divines epiphanies in the everyday, the sacred in the profane, the profane in the sacred. Mother Teresa is espied in a cinnamon bun; an ant stuck in Caesar salad dressing reveals heart-pinging (and hilarious) truths. In the vein of Flannery O’Connor, McAbee turns his gimlet eye on the South, faith, doubt, love, death, and the microscopic (and often absurd) miracles that keep us afloat in the midst of it all.
—Amanda Heckert, executive editor
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
David Sedaris has long been one of my favorite humor writers—dry, sharp, and delightfully observant—and I revisit his essays often. His upcoming collection seems poised to deliver more of what he does best: keenly noticing the odd, the tender, and the quietly absurd in travel, family life, and everyday encounters. It’s already on my list of books I suspect I’ll read more than once.
—Emily Daily, newsletter editor
Southern Roots, Recipes and Stories from Mama Dip’s Daughter by Anita Spring Council
I have no problem saying that the book that I’m most looking forward to is Spring Council’s Southern Roots, Recipes and Stories from Mama Dip’s Daughter. The Council family has been an important part of the Southern food scene for generations, and I love that I can call so many of them friends.
—Chef Bill Smith, author and contributor
Night Owl: Poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The Mississippi poet and author Beth Ann Fennelly says, “It’s been a minute since Nezhukumatathil has published poems (her last two books were nonfiction), so I can’t wait to get my hands on this!” Senior editor CJ Lotz Diego adds, “I’m working on a piece about night-blooming gardens right now, and an advanced copy of this beautiful forthcoming book was an inspiration for it.”
The Feather Wars by James H. McCommons
I remember when I first saw John James Audubon’s illustration of the Carolina parakeet and learned the story of its demise—it was the only parrot species native to our country, and habitat degradation and hunting drove it to extinction. The story of this bird is part of the larger unfortunate tale of much biodiversity loss in our country’s history (see also the massive ivory-billed woodpecker and bright yellow Bachman’s warbler). As a bird lover, I’m hoping to learn more from The Feather Wars, a comprehensive account of the disappearance of American bird species—and the movement to understand and protect them.
—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian, digital producer
Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett
I devour anything by Ann Patchett in less than three days, and I’m sure I’ll follow suit with Whistler, her forthcoming novel about one woman’s chance encounter at an art museum with her former stepfather.
—Haskell Harris, style director
Service Ready by Molly Irani
A new reflection from the inimitable Molly Irani, cofounder of the James Beard Award–winning restaurant Chai Pani, drops this March. Part memoir, part love story, part leadership guide, it’s simply the latest bite worth devouring from the queen of hospitality herself.
—Mary Catherine McAnnally Scott, contributor
Men of Troy by Monte Burke
I had a sneak peek at Monte Burke’s upcoming Men of Troy: The Epic Afternoons, Wild Nights, and Enduring Legacy of Pete Carroll’s USC Trojans, and I promise you’ll want to join me in reading it in full. In Burke fashion, it’s chock-full of great reporting, stylish writing, and fast-moving drama.
—David DiBenedetto
Essays: On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward
Leave it to one of our greatest living writers, Jesmyn Ward, to bring back a word from the 1500s and give it fresh meaning in the title of her forthcoming book: respair, or “fresh hope after despair.” Known for her moving and award-winning fiction, this collection of essays gives readers a sense of the powerful Southern woman behind the unforgettable stories.
—CJ Lotz Diego, senior editor
Wolvers by Taylor Brown
I’ve been a fan of Taylor Brown’s work for a long time and I’m excited to read the latest. It’s about a dispossessed rancher hired to hunt a legendary she-wolf who joins forces with unlikely allies to protect the Dark Canyon pack and the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico from a ruthless assassin.
—Joy Callaway, author and contributor
(Editor’s note: Check out Brown’s piece about the adventures behind this new book in the forthcoming April/May issue of G&G.)
How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell
David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen was one of my early forays into environmental nonfiction when I was studying at Sewanee, the University of the South, where he teaches, and I was immediately taken with his mingling of precise science with beautiful narrative writing. Knowing how his other works have shifted the way I look at trees and use my ears, I know I’ll be in for a fascinating deep dive into the evolution and beauty of roses, magnolias, sea grasses, and more in his new book, due in March.
—Lindsey Liles, digital reporter
The Hadacol Boogie: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke never stops delighting his legion of fans all over the world. The master of Southern noir and thrillers grew up in Louisiana and Texas and recently turned eighty-nine. In February he’ll return with the twenty-fifth (!) book in his beloved Dave Robicheaux series. Bravo, Mr. Burke, we’re cheering you on.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Maybe the Body: Poems by Asa Drake
A radiant collection full of flora and fury, plums, and caterpillars by an up-and-coming Florida writer. These poems are a field of inheritance where language, history, and lineage collide, and in Drake’s capable hands, the body becomes both question and altar.
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author and professor
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be a Man by Tom Junod
I’ll admit to reading a galley of the book already, and recommend it to the magazine’s readers as a must for 2026. A longtime friend and one of my favorite writers, Junod spends more than a decade unearthing his father’s past.
—Justin Heckert, contributor
(Editor’s note: Read Junod’s Good Dog essay in the February/March issue of G&G.)
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly
There’s a lot of buzz building for this one. As contributing editor John T. Edge says, “The generous essays in Beth Ann Fennelly’s The Irish Goodbye remind me of the photographs of William Eggleston. Both artists see what others are blind to. A poet by education, Beth Ann illuminates the meaning hidden in the evanescent, the everyday, and the heartbreaking.” Aimee Nezhukumatathil adds, “Beth Ann Fennelly’s writing flickers and shimmers like minnows just below the water’s surface―quick, sharp, and radiantly alive. Each of these pieces is a marvel of compression and care, where humor sidles up next to heartbreak and ordinary moments are cast in an enticing, golden light.”
The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer
I’m extremely excited for this sophomore novel by the same author of one of my favorite horror stories of 2025 (We Used to Live Here). Following a part-time caretaker as she embarks on a three-day gig in a stranger’s house surrounded by the Oregon Coast wilderness, The Caretaker seems to promise the same mind-bending terror, paranoia, and strangeness as Kliewer’s previous work.
—Stacy Willingham, New York Times bestselling author and contributor
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
After her 2009 mega-hit novel The Help became a mega-hit movie, Kathryn Stockett went off the radar for a bit. Now, Southern lit fans are rejoicing, as she returns more than fifteen years later in May with her second novel, set in Depression-era Oxford, Mississippi and again starring a dynamic cast of funny, complicated women.
—CJ Lotz Diego
A Way Home: A Memoir of Losing Yourself, and the Beauty of Returning by Cinelle Barnes
June can’t come fast enough. That’s when Cinelle Barnes’s A Way Home comes out. If you haven’t yet read Monsoon Mansion, Barnes’s poignant and riveting account of her traumatic childhood in the Philippines and her journey to America as an undocumented migrant, start there. It sits prominently on my shelf of astonishing memoirs. A Charleston resident, Barnes is a gorgeous writer and tireless cheerleader for the literary community, unstoppable even when a brain aneurysm in 2023 upended her world. She wrote this while recovering—a daunting undertaking, to say the least—and I’m certain it will be one of those books that resets my sense of what it means to be human, and to be a writer.
—Stephanie Hunt, author and contributor
Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff cemented her place as a short-fiction master with 2018’s Florida, then went on to write two novels and open a bookstore, the Lynx, in Gainesville. She returns with Brawler, a gorgeous collection of stories traversing time, class systems, and the country.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Godfall by Van Jensen
Van and I worked on the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine years ago and now he’s written this sci-fi detective story about a gargantuan alien life form that appears in a field outside a small town in Nebraska. He’s an incredible storyteller and I can’t wait to read it before the TV show (!) directed by Ron Howard (!!).
—Rachael Maddux, author and contributor
Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks by Benjamin Hale
“…A book of rabbit holes: fascinating, maddening, maundering, and often electrifying…The literature of fairy tales is one rabbit hole Hale doesn’t explore in Cave Mountain, but I kept hearing its echoes as I read.”
—Contributing editor Jonathan Miles, in his review in the February/March issue
Football by Chuck Klosterman
For a dyed-in-the-wool Southern boy who grew up close enough to UGA’s Sanford Stadium to hear it on Saturday mornings, I don’t much care about sports. But Chuck Klosterman, the voice of Gen X angst and obsessiveness, cares deeply about football and since 2001’s Fargo Rock City, Klosterman has made me care about whatever he cares about because he writes about those things so damned well.
—Russell Worth Parker, contributor
Cook Out: Recipes and Tips for the Great Outdoors by Rashad Frazier
The adventure company Camp Yoshi made waves in the outdoor world with its post-summit watermelon granitas and buttermilk pancakes served tentside, so I couldn’t be more stoked to see their founder and chef, North Carolina native Rashad Frazier, announce a cookbook. Both an accessible introduction and a love letter to outdoor cooking, it’s a field guide to everything from outfitting a camp kitchen to mastering fish and grits in the backcountry—and proves camp food and soul food are exactly the same thing.
—Grace Roberts, contributor
Biltmore House: The Interiors and Collections of George W. Vanderbilt by Darren Poupore and Laura C Jenkins
We’re huge fans of the photographer William Abranowicz here at G&G (it was a career honor when he photographed this piece I wrote about a stunning Louisiana property). I can’t wait to see his lens on one of the most important estates in the country, Asheville’s own Biltmore, which he photographed for this forthcoming book.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Five years after it was published, I still haven’t recovered from Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (nor the film, which destroyed me all over again. Go see it!). So the author’s forthcoming novel about Ireland before and after the Great Hunger has me very excited.
—Kinsey Gidick, contributor
Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns
Numinous and unforgettable, Wait for Me thrums with the heart of a songwriter and the soul of a gifted storyteller. From the lush mountains of Appalachia to the neon of Nashville, Elle and Marijohn’s entwined lives are a full-bodied immersion into story, song, and the human heart. Burns proves once again that women can reverse the order of the world.
—Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling novelist
Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno
Like thousands of readers, I became a Melissa Faliveno fan after reading her debut essay collection, Tomboyland, then even more so after meeting the UNC Chapel Hill creative writing professor and hearing her read at a Charleston literary event. Her forthcoming novel, Hemlock, is billed as a gothic family tale about alcoholism, loss, and supernatural goings-on, but I’m mostly looking forward to Faliveno’s searing insights and potent storytelling.
—Stephanie Hunt
Life Expectancy by Rachael Maddux
Years ago Rachael Maddux wrote one of my favorite Our Kind of Place essays for G&G, about the kitschy joy of Rock City at Lookout Mountain, Georgia, just outside Chattanooga. I love her dryly funny and relatable writing, and she’s a millennial like I am, so I imagine I’ll groan and chuckle along during her memoir of growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the kaleidoscopic South.
—CJ Lotz Diego
Down South + East : A Chinese American Cookbook by Ron Hsu
Ron Hsu pinpoints a delicious intersection of Chinese and Southern flavors in his first cookbook, Down South + East: A Chinese American Cookbook. Hsu, the chef behind Atlanta’s celebrated Lazy Betty, twists together shared ingredients between two different cultures and dishes up imaginative but approachable recipes within the pages: cornmeal-crusted fried Chinese eggplant, collard green fried rice, pimento cheese wontons, pickled gulf shrimp with coconut milk. My mouth is watering at the dessert section, which includes blueberry and lemongrass pie and rice pudding with summer-ripe peaches.
—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
Summer State of Mind by Kristy Woodson Harvey
Summer doesn’t really start until Kristy’s books come out, and I can’t wait to read this one! It’s about a burnt-out NICU nurse, an injured baseball star, and an eccentric Southern aunt who find themselves unlikely allies when an abandoned baby thrusts them into one another’s lives.
—Joy Callaway
Getting to Know Death by Gail Godwin
Does Gail Godwin know I’m her biggest fan? Gail, I love you! Sometimes I Google “new Gail Godwin book” just hoping for news. After sixteen novels, two story collections, and four volumes of memoir, this eighty-eight-year-old legend is still giving fans like me reason to hope. Her newest—Getting to Know Death, which came out in 2024 but is only just rising to the top of my pile—is a taking-stock-of-life work and an exploration into what it looks like to write the end of your own story. I hope Godwin’s goes on for a long time yet.
—Nic Brown, author and contributor
Roads & Kingdoms
I am currently holding a fresh copy of issue number one from the new print publication of Roads & Kingdoms. R&K has a longer history than this inaugural print edition, which goes way back to its founders Matt Goulding and Nathan Thornburgh creating it as a major player in the independent media world alongside dear Tony Bourdain. These boys, along with their brilliant editor, the Berlin-based Charly Wilder, are taking a major leap toward reviving dynamic journalism to help save us all from our over-exposed-short-attention-spanned-tripped-out-content-exhausted selves. It is such a good read (and it feels good in your hands).
—Lisa Donovan, chef and contributor
Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef by Brigid Washington
I am insatiable for culinary memoirs. Julia Child, Bill Buford, M.F.K. Fisher, Jessica B. Harris, Gabrielle Hamilton, Lisa Donovan, Michael Twitty, Ruth Reichl, Anthony Bourdain, Dwight Garner—I’ve devoured them all. The April release from Raleigh writer Brigid Washington, Salt, Sweat & Steam, lives up to the best of the genre. The native Trinidadian takes us along for the ride as she escapes the frying pan of heartbreak by jumping into the fire of the blue-ribbon (and mostly white) Culinary Institute of America. Knives out!
—Amanda Heckert
Three recs from chef Vishwesh Bhatt
(Editor’s note: These are three great 2025 reads that chef Vishwesh Bhatt is just now getting to. We’ll forgive his delay, as he has been quite busy opening the D.C. outpost of Chai Pani alongside Asheville chef Meherwan Irani. Happy reading, chef!)
I’m currently reading Sagamore by my dear late friend, the musician and raconteur Jack Sonni. Michael Farris Smith sums it up beautifully: “Jack Sonni writes like he lived, full of heart and with attention to all the small things that make this world such a complex, frightening, and beautiful place.” I was very fortunate to come into Jack’s orbit, and for those of you wanting to know what a truly magical person he was, get a copy of Sagamore.
Speaking of Michael Farris Smith, his latest work, Lay Your Armor Down, is the book I will be reading next. Michael has a way of drawing you in and weaving a web that makes you want to read more and more of his brilliant work. His characters come alive and mesmerize you. I can’t wait to see what he has conjured up next.
On a food note, I just picked up a copy of Katie Parla’s Rome. Anyone who knows Katie is aware of the time and effort she has put into making the city of Rome her home and showing it and sharing it with folks. Her latest work is described as a culinary history and a field guide to flavors that built an Italian city. It is that and so much more. If, like me, you are planning to visit Rome anytime soon, get your hands on this outstanding book, please.
—Vishwesh Bhatt, chef
The Enchanting Interiors of Bunny Mellon paintings by Snowy Campbell, foreword by Charlotte Moss
I already love the design work of the late Virginia tastemaker Bunny Mellon, whether a beautiful rose garden or a cozy sitting room. But seeing each space rendered in paint by the artist Snowy Campbell brings a whole new way of seeing the beauty within.
—CJ Lotz Diego
The Butter Book by Anna Stockwell
You didn’t know your cookbook shelf was missing a book that looks like a stick of butter, complete with a wax-paper-like jacket, blue text, and creamy yellow pages, but Anna Stockwell did. Credit her years as a food stylist, recipe developer, and editor at Bon Appetit and Epicurious for showing her what the people want, which is more butter. I look forward to reading her kitchen wisdom and trying her favorite recipes (starting with the grown-up buttered pasta!) when the book drops in March.
—Elizabeth Florio, digital editor
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