July is here and with it comes peak vacation reading season. If your flight and hotel are set but you’re still on the hunt for the right book for your leisure time, look no further. This month sees the release of three new books set in Georgia, each perfect for a different flavor of vacation….
The Decatur Book Festival’s last half-decade has been eventful, seeing the once-sprawling event and its coffers greatly diminished by the pandemic. Canceled in 2023, the Festival was relaunched the next year under the careful leadership of Interim Director Leslie Wingate and Programming Director Denise Auger, who reined in the explosive growth for the 2024 and…
At the age of 25, Flannery O’Connor collapsed on a train platform in Macon, Georgia. She’d been on her way from Connecticut to visit her mother, Regina, at Andalusia, the family dairy farm outside of Milledgeville. Flannery was diagnosed with lupus, the same degenerative autoimmune disease that had killed her father when she was a…
In college at the University of Maryland, Atlanta author Josh Russell used to make photocopies of poems that he read in literary magazines at the library. He couldn’t afford to buy everything he read, but, for 10 cents at the library photocopier, he could keep them forever. “I still have this three-ring binder that’s got…
Last year, Atlanta author Kylie Lee Baker released her first horror novel, Bat Eater and other Names for Cora Zeng, to wide acclaim. Nobody would have blamed her for taking a year off, but, luckily for horror fans, she didn’t. Japanese Gothic (Hanover Square Press), her newest effort in the genre, comes out April 14. …
Walking into East Atlanta’s Bookish, you’d never guess it had been closed for flooding one week earlier. The shelves were packed with books, colorful streamers hung from the ceiling and owner Kendra Lee was beaming with the kind of enthusiasm that would make any book lover feel at home. “I own a bookstore because I…
Atlanta author Elene Catrakilis’ debut novel, Under an African Sky (Belvedere House, March 10) takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the end of apartheid, following two middle-aged women as they navigate the changes to their country. Sofia is a wealthy Greek immigrant who plucked her longtime maid Grace — referred to early on as…
Lisa MacKinney, director of the Hall County Library, was a sensitive kid — so sensitive, in fact, that when the titular spider died in Charlotte’s Web, “They just about had to take me to the hospital. I hyperventilated. It upset me so much.” Afterward, MacKinney’s mother, a voracious reader herself, instituted a new rule: If any…
“Imagine how dull the world would surely be,” says a character in Atlanta author Robert Gwaltney’s Sing Down the Moon (Mercer University Press, March 3), “if we carried our histories about scribbled on our sleeves.” Luckily, it’s a sin that none of the eccentric characters in Gwaltney’s dreamlike second novel are guilty of. The story…
Rare book dealer and author Charlene Ball lights up when she talks about going to a rare book fair. “It’s a vast cavernous space, but when the booksellers are set up, it looks like 100-plus bookshops, all in aisles and rows, all facing inward,” says Ball, who owns Decatur-based Toadlily Books with her wife, fellow…
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