14 Southern Books You Need To Read In 2016

A poetry collection that draws from all nine of Young’s previously published books. (January)

Hazzard details his decade as an EMT in Atlanta, making daily and nightly runs into city’s meanest streets. (January)

21 offbeat essays find the exceptional in the everyday. (January)

Pieces together one of the grisliest crimes in Georgia’s history: the 1912 lynching in Hamilton of four blacks. (January)

Uses interviews with family and friends to tell the story of a musical force of nature as tormented as she was brilliant. (February)

Lena Horne's daughter reconstructs her family's lives in Atlanta and New York during the Harlem Renaissance through the civil rights era. (February)

Offutt discovers that the man he knew as a tyrant, workaholic and virtual shut-in was the author of nearly 375 books of pornography. (February)

Sarah “Salt” Alt, a newly minted APD homicide detective, works on a cold case about a musician who OD’d. (February)

Smith's memoir-in-essays touch on her family’s history of mental illness, including her son's schizophrenia. (March)

Set in 1870, Jiles' tale follows a war veteran from Georgia who makes a promise to return a 10-year-old girl to her family. (March)

Psychotherapist Wylie “Coyote” Melville and his magician friend investigate a questionable suicide. (April)

A compassionate investigation of the Godfather of Soul that includes candid interviews bandmates and friends. (April)

Introduces many statistics, advocates, and history aimed at restoring faith in this much maligned, misunderstood breed. (May)

The first full-length biography of Harry Crews, the author who created his own uniquely gritty, outlaw South. (May)