Southern reading list––Delta Magazine’s top 5 must-read new releases

1. Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest
By Teresa Nicholas
(University Press of Mississippi)

Raised in Yazoo City in a wildly divergent family of Lebanese Catholic immigrants and Baptist sharecroppers, Teresa Nicholas eventually leaves Mississippi. But as her writing proves, she never truly escapes.

Her memoir begins with childhood days near much-loved grandparents, both in their comfortable house and behind counters filled with potted meats and fruit pies at her grandfather’s store. Then, without explanation, her father moves the family to a condemned duplex, run-down and awful. Here he often shifts, without warning, from the daddy who makes them laugh to someone as fierce as “one of the afternoon thunderstorms that crisscrossed the Delta.”

As a rebellious teen, Teresa Nicholas lived in Mississippi during history-making events. Her school desegregated, the town changed, and she and her father often disagreed. Remarkably, after his death, she yearns to discover who he really was: what’s behind his obsession with monkey calendars plastered in his bedroom, derelict cars, the coin collection.

Readers are in for a treat as Nicholas, together with her mother, peel back the deep layers to get at the truth behind family secrets. A surprisingly humorous and wonderfully detailed story, Buryin’ Daddy is one readers won’t quickly forget. (Augusta Scattergood)

2. Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi
By Dean Faulkner Wells
(Random House)

In Every Day by the Sun, Dean Faulkner Wells tells the story of her upbringing, her special relationship with her uncle and the struggle to find herself in a highly scrutinized family with its share of “thieves, adulterers, sociopaths, killers, racists, liars, and folks suffering from panic attacks and real bad tempers”—the Faulkners of Oxford, Mississippi.

Dean Faulkner was named after her father, the youngest brother of the best-known Faulkner, William. Her dad was killed in a plane crash while she was still in the womb, placing her in the unique situation of being raised by all of her father’s family, with her uncle William taking on the role of Pappy. The memoir is a deeply personal account of her life among one of the first families of Oxford, painting a historic view of the town as well as how her uncle’s fame shaped the lives of his loved ones.

With the prowess of a great observer, Dean reveals a different view of her famous uncle—not a perfect man but one strongly dedicated to the ones he loved and more accessible than previous biographers have depicted. Certainly there will be many Faulkner fans who will search the pages of this memoir for insight into his genius, and they will not be disappointed, but it is her own story that is the heart of this book and will ultimately captivate the reader.

In the prologue Dean candidly admits, “By the time I reached seventy, I expected to be transformed into Miss Habersham, Aunt Jenny, Granny Millard, or, if I was lucky, Dilsey. I believed with all my heart that to grow older was to grow wiser. I am living proof that this aint so.”  This graceful and eloquent memoir provides its own humble evidence to the contrary. (Kelly Kornegy)

Anyone who knows Richard, or has read his fiction (The Ice at the Bottom of the World, Fishboy), knows there is something different about him—something special. He is a man of character and kindness, and like the most interesting people, is not without flaws or a clever wicked streak. [He’s the guy you hope to sit next to at a dinner party, as Jackie Onassis requested after his impressive acceptance speech at a PEN/Faulkner Award’s dinner.]

But being special wasn’t always easy for Richard. He was born with a hip defect in rural Virginia, which meant being handicapped without any distinction between mental or physical. He spent his childhood in and out of the hospital. Everyone assumed Mark would be relegated to a special school until a teacher noticed his advanced reading skills.

From a precocious child DJ at a local radio station to a young wanderer, seizing life through a series of odd and fascinating jobs, Richard lived life to the fullest and sometimes roughest.  In the midst of his career as a professional writer and teacher (he served a year in the Grisham writer-in-residence post at Ole Miss), he was struck by what he describes as “the Call.” While acting as visiting writer-in-residence at Sewanee he contemplated seminary until a bishop convinced him that he would reach more people through his writing.

If that is true, then Richard has crafted something which may endure as a classic of Southern literature. It moves briskly, relates the author’s life in incredible, often surprising detail, and describes a spiritual quest filled with stumbles, obstacles and the occasional thrilling triumph. Faith is not easy, he tells us, in the least presumptuous and most entertaining of ways, but if we’re lucky, we just may find salvation in the journey. (Kelly Kornegy)

4. The Dry Grass of August
By Anna Jean Mayhew
(Kensington Books)

Jubie’s is like a lot of white families in the segregated South of the 1950s. Her beloved maid cares for them, cooks for them, even travels with them. Long days at the pool, a well-run house, a beach vacation—her summer is safe. But her father’s shadow life and her mother’s distance confound thirteen-year-old Jubie Watts. As the young teen watches her world unravel, the black woman who holds the family together becomes a much-loved confidant.

In this amazing book by a first-time novelist, unanticipated events rock the very foundation of the family and the community. A terrifically told story about race, family, and first love, Mayhew’s novel is hauntingly realistic, hard to believe and above all, not to be missed. (Augusta Scattergood)

5. The Tender Mercy of Roses
By Anna Michaels
(Simon and Schuster)