Daytona Teddy Riggs is a has-been high school football star on a quest to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. 

Estranged from his oil-rich family who disapprove of his lifestyle, Daytona’s primary source of companionship is the Pat Dupree motivational speaker tapes he listens to on a loop. Dupree is scheduled to appear in Houston the same weekend as the regional Strong Man qualifier, and Daytona decides he must confront him one-on-one to take control of his destiny. 

Set in mid-nineties South Texas, Daytona Teddy Riggs is an offbeat portrayal of mental illness in the pre-internet South. At once an outrageous comedy, a biting satire of the self-help industry, and an examination of privilege and masculinity, family and relationships, Buxton’s riotous debut chronicles Daytona's struggle to discover who he is beneath all the muscles.

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.

Lolita Stewart-White's black frag/ments is a breathtaking series of narrative-lyric poems about the fragmentation of the Black body, family, and community facilitated by the historic and ongoing racism in the US healthcare system.

After her husband’s cancer diagnosis, Stewart-White finds herself haunted by the trauma Black Americans continue to face in medical settings. These poems, both brazen and tenderhearted, explore enduring love in the face of grief and hardship while drawing parallels to past injustices. Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family’s challenging journey in a broader context of how black people protest, repair, and revive.

From debut novelist Maris Lawyer, The Blue Line Down is a breakneck tale of betrayal, loyalty, and unexpected homecoming. Jude Washer wants to run: away from the coal mines where he is destined to work, away from his father’s abuse of his little brother, away from the prison-like confines of his village. Whispers of unionizing ripple through the small West Virginia mining town. When the mines take Jude’s brother away from him, Jude takes matters into his own hands. With nowhere else to go, Jude joins the Baldwin-Felts Agency, a band of violent men dedicated to stamping out unionizers across the mountains. It is 1922, and the Baldwin-Felts are poised to raid a mining town in Virginia. When the coal miners fight back against the agents, Jude, now twenty-four, and Harvey, a new recruit, take an opportunity to flee amid the bloodshed. With the Baldwin-Felts on their tail, Jude and an injured Harvey make their way down the mountains, where they are intercepted in South Carolina by a ragtag gang of bootleggers who put them to work to pay off a debt. Jude is desperate for a place to call home, but can he find it in these hardscrabble hills among strangers?

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.