The Great Big Summer Reading List

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

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. 

—Dave DiBenedetto, editor in chief

Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant

If you’ve ever fantasized about ditching your corporate job for a quieter life in the country, Mailman could be the memoir for you. Except that for author Stephen Starring Grant, it wasn’t really a choice. He got laid off from his job as a marketing consultant (“the grease in the global capitalist machine”) at the start of the pandemic and had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. So he needed health insurance and took a job delivering the mail in rural Virginia. I’m only a few chapters in, but Grant’s honesty and humor already have me hooked—not to mention the opening scene, which finds him barreling down a dirt road to deliver a two-handed sword and trading Lord of the Rings quotes with its recipient. As he writes of his time as a rural mail carrier, “It was the deepest trip into the heart of the American experience that I have ever had the grace to take.”

—Dave Mezz, deputy editor

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

Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace

“I’ve never sat down ever and said, Let’s write a novel!” the North Carolina author and G&G contributor Daniel Wallace said in a recent interview. “I have no idea how to write a novel. Or a story, really. I sit down and type and see what happens, see where it goes. Sometimes the story stops after a paragraph; sometimes after a few hundred pages. I’m always surprised.” Wallace readers would give him a bit more credit—he’s the author of six stellar novels, including the cherished Big Fish, which became a film starring Ewan McGregor. In his new collection of “flash fiction,” Wallace proves he’s just as zany and heartfelt in short story format.

—CJ Lotz Diego, senior editor

They Will Tell You the World Is Yours by Anna Mitchael

This has been a big year of growth and change for me, and a new favorite habit is waking up in the morning and fighting the urge for the morning social media scroll by flipping to a random page in the Texas-based writer Anna Mitchael’s collection of short essays, They Will Tell You the World Is Yours. I like to think the particular page I land on will set a precedent for the day—sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s serious, oftentimes it’s nostalgic. No matter the day, no matter the passage, it always resonates.

—Ally Sloway, social media director

Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

Lucky for us, the master of Southern thrillers James Lee Burke just released a new rip-through-it-read, set in early 1900s Texas. The Holland family at the center of Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie will be familiar to regular Burke readers, but this story two-steps away from the tough-guy detectives usually at the heart of Burke’s stories. With deftness and delightful details, Burke introduces a daughter of the Texas soil, the strong-willed Bessie Holland.

—CJ Lotz Diego

Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack spent the ten years since a white supremacist shot and killed nine people at Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME church interviewing more than two hundred people and writing this book. It not only aims to chronicle the lives of survivors and church members in the wake of that tragedy but the larger history of the AME denomination and South Carolina’s outsize role in it. This is my must-read of the summer.

—Amanda Heckert, executive editor

Lay Your Armor Down by Michael Farris Smith

G&G readers are familiar with the Mississippi-based Michael Farris Smith’s stories, including his stellar writing for the magazine. His new novel opens with an old woman lost in the woods who stumbles upon two men scheming around a campfire. The great Southern noir writer S.A. Cosby called this book “an exceptional exploration of the existential malaise that drives us to find our paths in a cruel and indifferent world. Not to be missed.” We won’t. —CJ Lotz Diego

Where the Rivers Merge by Mary Alice Monroe

As the author of more than thirty titles and a recipient of the Southern Book Prize for Fiction, Mary Alice Monroe is no stranger to writing about the contemporary American South. But her new novel marks her first foray deep into the region’s past, and her penchant for strong female protagonists and sweeping Lowcountry landscapes guarantee this novel a spot in the South’s ever-growing canon of historical fiction.

—Grace Roberts, print editorial intern

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

The father at the center of this novel about family lost and found is a serial deserter, who has made four families and ghosted four sensitive and insightful children in four different states. On a road trip from Tennessee to California, in search of the man who left them, these half-sisters and half-brothers make a whole. Do they find their father in California? Do they reconcile? I don’t know yet. I’m on page 172, with 50 pages to go. What I do know is that I’d follow Kevin Wilson, our bard of odd and beautiful humans, anywhere he wants to take me.

—John T. Edge, author and contributing editor

Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of my favorite books I picked up in 2024. She has such an incredible poetic voice and ability to move through memory and time, gifts that will no doubt shine in her new collection of essays, which she calls “a love letter to Black women.” I am constantly in awe of the way she grabs your hand to take you through a story in all its different forms, and I’m looking forward to learning more from her blend of personal experience and historical and cultural explorations.

—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian, digital producer

Narrow the Road by James Wade

A poignant, lyrical, often funny coming-of-age odyssey set in the East Texas wilds of a century ago. This is a tale of Dust Bowl grit and adolescent discovery from one of the Lone Star State’s best young novelists—a must-read for fans of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Portis, or Paulette Jiles.

—Taylor Brown, author and contributor

Forget Me Not by Stacy Willingham

Last year my husband and I put on our own “chillers and thrillers” summer-long movie marathon. Now I’m also seeking books that send the spine tingling, and crime novelist Stacy Willingham’s newest tops the list. In an essay for our forthcoming August/September 2025 issue, Willingham explains how a muscadine vineyard on Wadmalaw Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, inspired this sinister twists-and-turns tale.

—Amanda Heckert

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

In Cynthia R. Greenlee’s profile of S.A. Cosby for G&G’s June/July 2025 issue, 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, inclusive of the breakneck pace and ruthless conflict that has cemented Cosby as one of the greats.

—Grace Roberts

The Antidote by Karen Russell

I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, since I first picked up the electrifying, haunting gem of a novel in college. Her Dust Bowl–era second novel promises to be just as beautiful, bizarre, funny, and profound.

—Caroline Sanders Clements, associate editor

House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home by John T. Edge

John T. Edge has proven to be a deft and insightful chronicler of Southern ways and foodways, often in this magazine. Now he turns his probing eye on his own life in a moving memoir that sees him reckoning with growing up in a fascinating but difficult (and sometimes violent) environment, in a fraught South. He journeys away from home and back again in order to better understand where he came from—and better understand himself.

—Beth Ann Fennelly, author and contributor

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

The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders by Joshua Sharpe

Sharpe, a native of Waycross, Georgia, practices Journalism with a capital J. Among other crucial print and audio stories, the investigative reporter’s work has played a pivotal part in freeing two innocent people from prison. Here, he dives deep into the story of one of them, Dennis Perry, a Georgia man wrongly accused of walking into a church in 1985 and shooting and killing a Black couple—while the real murderer remained at large.

—Amanda Heckert

Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine by Jessica B. Harris

Three is a magic number for the food historian Jessica B. Harris. In her gorgeous new cookbook, she weaves together a trio of major culinary influences: Native American, European, and African, plus many subgroups within them. “Each brought much to the bubbling cauldron of cultures that would spawn the nation’s food,” she writes. “The result, as we all know, is savory and varied indeed.”

—CJ Lotz Diego

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman

I prefer my summertime novels to be a heaping main course of murder mystery, with a side of suspense and a dash of humor—all of which seem to be on the menu in Laura Lippman’s new novel, Murder Takes a Vacation. The Baltimore-based best-selling author’s new mystery follows a widow (and former detective’s assistant) who books a spontaneous Parisian getaway, only to be caught in the middle of mayhem when a man she befriends on her cruise is found murdered.

—Danielle Wallace, editorial assistant

The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things by Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni’s The New Book promises to be a powerful send-off from one of the world’s most celebrated poets. Blending poems, letters, and reflections, it draws on her family history, her fierce political voice, and a life richly lived. Giovanni, who passed away last December, spent thirty-five years teaching in the English department at Virginia Tech, where I had the privilege of studying under her. I can’t wait to read this final work from a true literary giant.

—Emily Daily, newsletter editor

I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally

On a flight back to New York from Nashville, where the restaurateur Keith McNally is opening a location of his brasserie Pastis this summer, he snapped and shared a picture of a passenger reading his superb new memoir. “Seriously, what are the chances?” McNally wrote in the Instagram caption. “Though I affected indifference to this (minor miracle) on the OUTSIDE, I was dancing naked on all of Manhattan’s restaurant tables on the INSIDE.” Someone you know is likely also reading—and talking about—I Regret Almost Everything, McNally’s life-story-so-far that ambles from the East End of London into the worlds of theater, art, love, his heralded restaurants (such as Pastis and Balthazar in New York), celebrity gossip, and the stroke that upended everything. Genuine and wryly funny, this book is one to tear through and then share with a friend so you can talk about it over dinner.

—CJ Lotz Diego

American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham

Catnip for any football fan: ESPN senior writer Seth Wickersham goes long on the most revered position in sports, chronicling what it takes to go from kiddie pads in Pop Warner to the NFL Hall of Fame, thanks to access to college standouts like Arch Manning and best-of-all-timers like John Elway, Johnny Unitas, and Arch’s uncle Peyton.

—Amanda Heckert

People Like Us by Jason Mott

Occupying the no-man’s-land between fiction and memoir is Jason Mott, who writes about familiar realities and dreamscapes with equal dexterity. His latest novel follows the intersecting storylines of two Black writers, and the back cover copy leads me to believe that tears will be involved—though from laughter or heartbreak I have yet to find out.

—Grace Roberts

The Wanderer’s Curse by Jennifer Hope Choi

While it’s technically a memoir, that label barely scratches the surface of Jennifer Hope Choi’s debut, The Wanderer’s Curse. This sweeping, genre-blurring narrative is part personal history, part cultural archaeology as Choi traces the parallel lives of herself and her mother—two Korean-American women marked by yeokmasal, a so-called inherited affliction compelling them to wander far from home (including to South Carolina). The result is a propulsive, deeply touching book that had me in tears while flying home myself on a recent trip. Ugly crying on an airplane? That’s the mark of a good book in, well, my book.

—Kinsey Gidick, contributor

Hot Wax by M.L. Rio

M.L. Rio’s debut, If We Were Villians, a murder mystery surrounding a Shakespeare conservatory, has enjoyed a prolonged state of fame, but I’m eager to see how her upcoming novel trades villainous theater students for gritty eighties rockstars. Promising a high-octane road trip shot through with hazy dives and vintage cars, this feels like the kind of book where it’s appropriate to listen to Aerosmith while reading.

—Grace Roberts

Sing Me Home to Carolina by Joy Callaway

In a piece for G&G that’s an ode to both a North Carolina hardware store and the unlikely spaces that foster friendship, Callaway writes that her “heart’s always yearned for a smaller place, a slower pace, and a community that feels like family.” It’s no surprise, then, that her upcoming novel centers on all the ways a small town fights to win back one of its own—now a big-city businesswoman—aided by an eccentric cast of characters and a good old-fashioned love triangle.

—Grace Roberts

The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian

A real-life Civil War friendship inspired this powerful novel, told in gorgeous prose by Bohjalian. A Virginia woman missing her soldier husband befriends, against all odds, Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade in the Union army. The Jackal’s Mistress is a sure-bet for fans of Cold Mountain and The Red Badge of Courage, both of which Bohjalian cites as influences in his author’s note.

—CJ Lotz Diego

Dominion by Addie Citchens

I’ve been hankering for this novel since I first read Addie Citchens in the Paris Review—a new voice as fierce and lucid as the Delta sun in August. A family saga about love and violence by this searing talent? Yes, please.

—C. Morgan Babst, author and contributor

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers

This debut novel about a young painter who inherits her late grandfather’s apple orchard has some serious buzz, and I’m excited about it for a few reasons. One, Wohlers is a musician and a novelist, like me, and I’m interested in musician novelists. Two, I like her music (she’s in the band Tomato Flower, but I like her solo stuff even better, especially the super beautiful music video for her song “Bodymelt in the Garden of Death,” which is basically a showcase for different flowers in radical lighting). And three, the novel is being published by Hub City, out of Spartanburg, the best little press going these days.

—Nic Brown, author and contributor

World Without End by Martha Park

A master class on how sharing the most particular and personal details can have the ironic effect of revealing universal truths. Martha Park does so through beautiful essays and illustrations: a pastor father; a Tennessee upbringing; a Kentucky husband; a fascination with the powers of water, electricity, growth, and loss. By narrowing in on her childhood memories and questions about motherhood and then zooming out to gorgeous observations of the South’s mountains and coasts, she asks, as perhaps we all do, how to find a foothold in the wilds of life.

—CJ Lotz Diego

Mississippi Blue 42 by Eli Cranor

Eli Cranor, who made his bones writing crime fiction about Arkansas, takes aim at the folks next door in this romp of a book, set in Waffle Houses and college bars, on football fields and lonely blacktops. If you’ve followed the volleyball stadium funding scandal in Mississippi, or the political career of a certain former football coach in Alabama, you’ll recognize some of the plot lines that Cranor sets in motion to tell a story of sports payola in the years before NIL money began to flow, a novel that reads as funny as it does true.

—John T. Edge

Lullaby for the Grieving by Ashley M. Jones

Jones is just coming off serving her four-year term as Alabama’s poet laureate. Her term was vibrant and energetic, just like her poetry. Lullaby for the Grieving, her fourth book of poetry, will be published in September, and I eagerly anticipate it.

—Beth Ann Fennelly

With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Nehrig 

During my time at G&G, I’ve learned so much about the rich traditions of fiber and textile art in the South, and as an artist, this has cracked my world open. I admire and often look to the work of women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and Kentucky for visual inspiration, and I’m excited to discover more communities and stories in Nehrig’s book on global textile makers.

—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

An American Girl Anthology edited by Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler and KC Hysmith

Loving the American Girl brand was one of my core personality traits as a child (I played with the dolls, read the books and magazine, had an AG-themed birthday party when I was seven, “performed” the Samantha play on repeat with my best friend in her basement, you get it). So I’ve been loving reading through the new American Girl Anthology, which compiles thoughtful, nostalgic, and often critical essays on what the brand means to a generation of women, covering topics like food history, consumerism, and the question of who gets to be called an American Girl.

—Caroline Sanders Clements

Shedding Season by Jane Morton

My favorite mornings are those when I make the time to read outside on the porch with a poetry book and a mug of coffee. Jane Morton is a new-to-me poet whose lyrical rhythms draw from Southern landscapes and the cycles of nature—even the ugly and hard parts. I’m planning on starting the day with Shedding Season when it comes out in late summer.

—Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

Gabba Gabba We Accept You, The Wondrous Tale of Joey Ramone by Jay Ruttenberg, illustrated by Lucinda Schreiber

The best children’s books can be enjoyed just as thoroughly by the adults. Ruttenberg’s fantastic tale of Joey Ramone describes his path to punk, and the bravery required to be oneself, with equal parts wisdom and humor. Schreiber’s impressive illustrations complement the book’s gently subversive vibe.

—Hunter Kennedy, contributing editor