Hub City Press

Set in mid-nineties South Texas, Daytona Teddy Riggs follows a has-been high school football star on his quest to become the World’s Strongest Man.

It’s 1996 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Teddy Riggs—call him Daytona—will stop at nothing to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. He spends his days training and downing as many calories as possible. Outcast from his oil-rich family, his main companion is a tape set by self-help guru Pat Dupree that he plays on repeat.

When a Dupree seminar is set to take place in Houston just before a regional qualifying event, Teddy knows the universe is aligning in his favor. But as the seminar approaches, a new relationship with Tammy, a local bodybuilder, brings all his crushing insecurities to the forefront, and he must confront who he really is beneath the muscles.

At once an outrageous comedy, a biting satire of the self-help industry, and an earnest look at the facets of obsession, Buxton’s riotous debut novel chronicles how masculinity, privilege, and mental illness intersect.

New neighborhoods began emerging north of Main Street in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes. As the decades rolled by, they and their descendants established a string of neighborhoods encompassing hundreds of houses, stretching from modern-day Barnet Park to the edge of Spartanburg Medical Center.

North of Main is the story of how this district rose and how it disappeared. In its pages, meet the pioneering Black men and women who lived and worked in these early neighborhoods: clergymen, educators, newsmen, artisans, attorneys, physicians, activists, musicians, caregivers, and more. In the face of frequent oppression, they laid a strong foundation for those who followed them. The history of the place they built is extraordinary in its demonstration of the heroism, courage, determination, and pride of Black citizens of Spartanburg who built dynamic and historically significant neighborhoods in treacherous times.

This title is the most in-depth Spartanburg Black history book ever produced, particularly for the years post-emancipation, and a sequel to the classic 2005 Hub City Press book, South of Main. This beautiful 250-page hardcover book also includes over 150 historic photographs and maps.

Wall Street Journal's Ten Books You'll Want to Read This Spring

Indie Next Pick, April 2019

Spring Okra Pick from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance

 

In rural north Georgia two decades after the Civil War, thirteen-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father’s bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence.  Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

“I only wanted to be Lulu Hurst, the girl who captivated her brother until he could walk and talk and stand tall on his own. Then I would be the girl who could leave.”

Lulu begins to “captivate” her friends and family, controlling their thoughts and actions for brief moments at a time. After Lulu convinces a cousin she conducts electricity with her touch, her father sees a unique opportunity. He grooms his tall and indelicate daughter into an electrifying new woman: The Magnetic Girl. Lulu travels the Eastern seaboard, captivating enthusiastic crowds by lifting grown men in parlor chairs and throwing them across the stage with her “electrical charge.”

While adjusting to life on the vaudeville stage, Lulu harbors a secret belief that she can use her newfound gifts, as well as her growing notoriety, to heal her brother. As she delves into the mysterious book’s pages, she discovers keys to her father’s past and her own future--but how will she harness its secrets to heal her family?

Gorgeously envisioned, The Magnetic Girl is set at a time when the emerging presence of electricity raised suspicions about the other-worldly gospel of Spiritualism, and when women’s desire for political, cultural, and sexual presence electrified the country. Squarely in the realm of Emma Donoghue's The Wonder and Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels, The Magnetic Girl is a unique portrait of a forgotten period in history, seen through the story of one young woman’s power over her family, her community, and ultimately, herself.

The British Army turned south in 1779, expecting to sweep through the region with their Tory allies, setting the stage for victory in the American in the war for independence. Upon entering the Old Spartan District in northwest South Carolina, however, they ran up against tenacious opposition from locals and their military leaders. In a series of small skirmishes here, the southern Patriots gained confidence and valuable combat experience that led to surprising victories at Kings Mountain and Cowpens, ultimately pushing the British back north toward surrender. In Turning Point: The American Revolution in the Spartan District, historian Katherine Cann tells the compelling story of how inexperienced backcountry militiamen in the Old Spartan District bottled up the British and learned how to defeat a seasoned foe. George F. Fields Jr., a leading military heritage preservationist, provides color commentary as Fields’ Notes throughout, capturing both the emotion and the commotion of the time. As a bonus, there’s a handy guide to the Spartanburg Revolutionary War Trail, a driving tour of twelve spots in the Spartan District that were central to the American victory.

Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers.

With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. A lovelorn and chatty euthanasia vet arrives at a couples’ house to put down their dog, Probate; a father-to-be searches his workplace—a bar—for a replacement sonogram after recording an episode of Bonanza over the original; an unlikely romance sparks between a librarian and a professional bowler while they compete to win an RV; a father takes his son to visit the many ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother.

These stories bear the influence of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More showcases the body of work, hilarious and incisive, that has cemented George Singleton’s place among the South’s greatest living writers.

In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard. 

Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it. 

As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.

Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world. 

From Beaufort to Boone and a dozen places in between, Carolina Writers at Home is a rich collection of true stories showcasing the houses where some of the most notable Southern authors—including Jill McCorkle, Nikky Finney, Alan Gurganus, Clyde Edgerton, and Michael Parker—have forged their writing lives. The homes in these twenty-five essays range from the classic bungalow and mid-century modern ranch house to wilder locales: a church, a trailer, and a sparsely-inhabited barrier island. Alongside the essays, Rob McDonald's evocative photographs capture the writers in their habitat, preserving their distinct personalities as well as the particular character of the house and place they inhabit. From the simple pleasures of Cassandra King’s writing room, to the hilarious and sometimes terrifying intrusions of curious wildlife in George Singleton’s realm, this unique anthology invites the reader to step inside some of the South’s best loved writers’ private worlds and see what makes their houses truly their own. It shows how collections of objects can transform a simple house into Daniel Wallace's ark or Josephine Humphreys' museum, creating a sheltering place for a creative mind at work. Carolina Writers at Home pays homage to those who have taken inspiration from the beauty and singularity of the Carolina landscape and turned it into the written word.

Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the Partition of India on the lives of three generations of women.

The story begins in August 1947. Unrest plagues the streets of New Delhi leading up to the birth of the Muslim majority nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu majority nation of India. Sixteen-year-old Deepa navigates the changing politics of her home, finding solace in messages of intricate origami from her secret boyfriend Amir. Soon Amir flees with his family to Pakistan and a tragedy forces Deepa to leave the subcontinent forever.

The story also begins sixty years later and half a world away, in Atlanta. While grieving both a pregnancy loss and the implosion of her marriage, Deepa’s granddaughter Shan begins the search for her estranged grandmother, a prickly woman who had little interest in knowing her. As she pieces together her family history shattered by the Partition, Shan discovers how little she actually knows about the women in her family and what they endured.

For readers of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Parted Earth follows Shan on her search for identity after loss uproots her life. Above all, it is a novel about families weathering the lasting violence of separation, and how it can often takes a lifetime to find unity and peace.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Best Books of the Summer | SIBA Read This Next! List Pick, June 2023 | The Millions Most Anticipated (June 2023) | The Boston Globe’s Best New Books for Summer 2023 | Audiobook Winner of AudioFile's Earphones Award | Foreword INDIES 2023 Book of the Year Award Honorable Mention | Townsend Award Finalist

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.

Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby.

Twenty-five years later, Luce is a successful lawyer, and her daughter Meera now faces the same decision Edie once did. Like Luce, Meera is fiercely independent and plans to handle her unexpected pregnancy herself. Along the way, Meera finds startling secrets about her mother’s past, including the long-ago friendship with Edie. As the three women’s lives intertwine and collide, the story circles age-old questions about female awakening, reproductive choice, motherhood, adoption, sex, and missed connections.

For fans of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything, The Say So is a timely novel that asks: how do we contend with the rippling effects of the choices we've made? With equal parts precision and tenderness, Franks has crafted a sweeping epic about the coming of age of the women’s movement that reverberates through the present day.

The late, eminent scholar Clement Eaton once observed that the nineteenth- century romantic spirit, which "subtly permeated the society of the Old South," was borne out most vividly in the region's "arts and social manners." Having had its genesis in European literature and fine art, romanticism found its way into the cultural output of the young Republic, both North and South. The same ideals that imbued the canvases of the Hudson River School also colored the art of painters who found their inspiration and audience below the Mason-Dixon Line. In this study of thirty-two artists represented in the Johnson Collection, noted art historian Estill Curtis Pennington delineates the historical, social, and cultural forces that profoundly influenced their aesthetic sensibilities. Author of the award-winning books Lessons in Likeness and Kentucky: The Master Painters, Pennington examines the core concepts of the romantic movement as it unfolded in the American South: the heroic individual, an idealized chivalric code of personal honor, the sublime quality of nature, and the inevitability of change in an imperfect world. Many of the artists under consideration in this lavishly illustrated volume created works of art that have achieved iconic status in the annals of painting in the South, including William Dickinson Washington, William Thompson Russell Smith, Gustave Henry Mosler, Thomas Addison Richards, Joseph Rusling Meeker, Robert Walter Weir, and Thomas Sully. Spanning the years 1810–1896, Romantic Spirits includes insightful illustrated biographies of the featured artists, as well as extensive bibliographic resources. This inaugural publication underscores the Johnson Collection's commitment to advance interest in the dynamic role that the art of the South plays in the larger context of American art and to contribute to the canon of art historical literature.

“You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.” That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?

With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.

This full color book details fifty iconic stories in the twenty-five year history of the Hub City Writers Project, founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Each includes a double page illustrated spread. The book features short essays by local and regional writers about moments like the Lawson’s Fork Festival in 2000, the Out Loud campaign against academic censorship, all the way to the introduction of our signature event, Delicious Reads. This book celebrates the first twenty-five years and details how the Hub City Writers Project grew from an idea hatched in a downtown coffee shop among three local writers to now being one of the South’s most robust literary organizations.

Seventeen-year-old Joshua Gaines is the orphaned foster son of a failed doctor on the run from his father’s debt. In 1849, he travels to Independence, Missouri and falls in with the mysterious, four-fingered Renard, and his companion, formerly-enslaved Free Ray. Joshua offers his medical expertise to their party, and together they embark on the fifteen-hundred mile overland journey to Gold Rush California. 

Following the hardship, disease, and death on the trail, the company abandons panning the river in favor of robbery and murder. Engulfed by violence, the young doctor-turned-marauder must reckon with his own morality, his growing desire for the men around him, and the brutality that has haunted him all his life.

For fans of The Revenantand Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Child in the Valley is a gorgeously rendered tale cut from the turmoil of a fledgling America. Gordy Sauer’s careful eye and penetrating literary lens offers a modern, incisive look into the complexities of masculinity, isolation, and the impenetrable nature of greed.

A Debutiful Most Anticipated Book of 2026

Set in 1980s Kentucky, this striking debut novel is told from inside a treatment home for troubled teenagers, where lost boys become more than their pasts and dare to imagine different futures.

They came from the streets, the sticks and every place in between. They’d stolen cars, dealt dope and hurt people. They’d been hurt themselves. There’s AWOL, who won’t stop running away. There’s Karvel, who runs the place. There’s Damico, Smoove, and Peanut. Their futures promise prison or worse, but for now they’ve been brought together to live in an old home on a hill and see about getting themselves—and each other—right.

Told in chorus through the intersecting lives of a group of teenage boys, Hope House follows its ensemble cast through a five-phase program as they grapple with their pasts and search for the one thing none of them have ever really had: a family.

In his deeply honest and soulful debut, Bond crafts a coming-of-age story that sears with the anger and spirit of abandoned youth. The Nickel Boys meets This Boy’s Life, Hope House is a novel about belonging, care, and the desire in all of us to find a home.

Amidst construction of a federal dam in rural Tennessee, Nathan, an engineer hiding from his past, meets Claire, a small-town housewife struggling to find her footing in the newly-electrified, job-hungry, post-Depression South.

As Nathan wrestles with the burdens of a secret guilt and tangled love, Claire struggles to balance motherhood and a newfound freedom that awakens ambitions and a sexuality she hadn’t known she possessed. The arrival of electricity in the rural community, where prostitution and dog-fighting are commonplace, thrusts together modern and backcountry values. In an evocative feat of storytelling in the vein of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and Ron Rash’s Serena, Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place. As the townspeople embark on a biblical undertaking to harness elemental forces, Nathan and Claire are left to wonder what their lives will look like when the lights come on.

The Columbia space shuttle and its contents rain down on the people of Kiser, Texas, in Kathryn Schwille’s imaginative debut novel set six weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle’s break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut’s remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor’s buried longing.

In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster’s surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the novel’s unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality’s grip and a luminous book emerges—filled with heartache, beauty and warmth.

Nonfiction Finalist, Willie Morris Awards
Best of 2025: Top 10 Adult, Foreword Reviews

For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells’s Believers, World Without End circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.

When Martha Park’s father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes a world marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.

In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. From man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina, from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Park chronicles the ways the faith in which she was raised now seems like an exception to the rule, exploring this divide with compassion and empathy. For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells, World Without End considers the ways religion shapes how we understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel us all to work to save the places we love.

From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose.

In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award

2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist

George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.
Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.
Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.
In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

Longlisted for the Crook's Corner Book Prize
A Debutiful Most Anticipated & a Best Debut Book of 2025

“You wish to never see a plum again in your life… You think: When I am an adult, I will never have a fruit tree. I will never be like this.”

For fans of Sarah Rose Etter and Scott McClanahan, Plum is a darkly beautiful, unflinching novel about modern girlhood in the internet age, the daily toll of trauma, and the limits of love.

Told entirely in the second person, Plum follows J as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her alcoholic dad and complicit mother. Her older brother is sometimes wonderful, sometimes gross, and he’s her only hope of getting out. J’s world is one of nail polish, above-ground pools, and drive-thrus—and of violence, carelessness, and so many rules. J covets the peace that comes when she slips on her headphones, turns on her handheld radio, and dreams of how she and her brother can make their escape.

When her brother leaves home and disappears, so does J’s best chance to flee her parents’ chaotic orbit. Alone and angry, J reaches through her computer screen for the life she wants: blonde hair, glittering nails, attention, freedom. As she stumbles into adulthood with no template to follow, J must figure out how to build a family for herself full of the love she deserves. In her brutally compelling debut, Anderegg turns her singular gaze on the generational patterns of addiction and abuse.

Set during the swampy summer in 1982, this stunning debut novel follows eleven-year-old Sunshine Turner and her troubled father Billy as the secrets of their family’s past swirl around them in the one-road town of Fingertip, Louisiana. 
During a hot summer of June moods, grubworms, and dark storms, Sunshine discovers stones in her chest – and learns the dangers her coming-of-age will bring about in the yellow house she shares with her father. Without the vocabulary to comprehend Billy’s actions or her own changing body, Sunshine turns to an apocryphal story passed down from her grandmother: in the dark waters of the Black Bayou lives a crocodile with an insatiable appetite and a woman with a mysterious healing gift. As Sunshine’s summer unspools, she turns to the one person who will need no explanation of the family secrets she carries—the crocodile bride.  
The Crocodile Bride is at once a heartbreakingly tender coming-of-age tale and a lyrical, haunting reflection on generational trauma. Reminiscent of Jesmyn Ward and Helen Oyeyemi, Ashleigh Bell Pedersen is a promising new voice in American fiction.

2024 Florida Book Awards General Fiction, Bronze

Part coming-of-age summer romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern novel exploring subculture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb.

Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their “mother-sage” Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island’s namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb. 

This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle’s commune—and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad’s place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she’ll stay there with him. But they still can’t find Nutzo, the tiger’s behavior has become increasingly erratic, and everyone’s summer is about to take a strange, dark turn. 

Narrated by an ensemble cast of uniquely independent outsiders who have chosen counter-culture lives informed by their desires and past traumas, Bomb Island takes a rollicking journey through the weirds and wilds of Coastal Georgia. Stephen Hundley has crafted a spirited, zany novel with a big heart that examines the strength it takes to live freely and without shame.

Foreword Book Awards, Finalist
Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Distinguished Service to Southern Letters
New Mexico Book Awards, Winner in Historical Fiction

From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.

It’s 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory (“Mem”) is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.

While Mac’s wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac’s “guest,” he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem’s life. Now, an adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left in her teenage years, confronting her culpability in the disastrous events of that final summer.

Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.

In this “unjustly neglected” masterpiece, Nancy Lemann gives an atmospheric account of the New Orleans trial of the Governor of Louisiana for racketeering, fraud, and bribery. This 40th anniversary edition features a new introduction by critic James Wolcott and an afterword by the author.

New Orleans-born novelist Nancy Lemann returned to her hometown from Manhattan in 1985, tasked by renowned editor Tina Brown to cover Governor Edwin Edwards's two corruption trials for Vanity Fair. The work that emerged from this trip was less a straightforward account of the court proceedings and instead a masterful portrait of the politicians, their families, the lawyers, and the other reporters covering the trials, rendered in sparse, wry vignettes. Championed and edited by Gordon Lish, The Ritz of the Bayou is Lemann’s sole book of nonfiction and has attained lost classic status in the decades it has languished out of print. 

In hazy, atmospheric scenes of cigar smoke-laden bars, heaping plates of oysters, and unchecked eccentricity and chaos, Lemann observes both the proceedings and a glamorous Gulf Coast gone shabby from humidity and time. She captures New Orleans’s particular “tropic zone,” where “the two great enemies of Louisianians are boredom and lack of style,” and its citizens choose charismatic leaders over ethical ones, writing, “Politics is not the place to look for saints.” 

An account of government corruption and Southern character that transcends its moment, The Ritz of the Bayou is Lemann at the height of her powers. This edition reestablishes a classic of Southern literature, rewarding its longtime fans and introducing her talent to a new generation of readers. 

One of our city’s most creative young artists has captured an extraordinary view of home. During a period of rapid change in this growing post-industrial Southern city, Kavin Bradner quietly moved among us, his drone hovering above. He knew that rooftops tell stories we can’t see from the ground. Waiting for just the right light and weather conditions, Bradner reframed Spartanburg with photographs both simple and powerful. His images illuminate patterns below we hardly knew existed. From our parks to our parking decks, from our freight trains to the Fr8yard, Above Spartanburg will transform the way you look at this city.