The 2025 Fall Arts Preview: Our picks in Books

ArtsATL staff

August 20, 2025

Book lovers in Atlanta will be busy this season exploring novels and true stories.

Boom Town, the adult fiction debut from best-selling YA author Nic Stone opens with a bang — or a body — when retired exotic dancer Lady Josephine, now homeless and living on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, stumbles upon a corpse in the water. Set in the green-drenched back rooms of one of Atlanta’s largest (fictional) strip clubs, the novel follows stripper Lyriq as she searches for two missing colleagues — one her protégé and the other her former lover. What unfolds is a fast-paced thriller populated with traumatized but likable Black women doing their best to get by and finding, over and over, that they can rarely count on anyone to help them — except, perhaps, other Black women. The plot is exciting and absorbing, and if it is at times, predictable, this does not detract from the momentum Stone builds in her dark, twisty feminist mystery.
–Rachel Wright

Georgia Tech professor Susana M. Morris’ meticulously researched Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler traces the iconic writer’s climb from lonely, working-class child to award-winning literary sensation. The biography portrays Butler as a fiercely determined artist whose study of human behavior, history and politics helped her produce some of the most insightful, prescient science fiction of her era — all as the only Black woman then writing in the genre. Throughout her career, Butler faced obstacles that might have discouraged a lesser writer, including financial insecurity, low self-esteem and lack of community support. With clear admiration for both the writer and the work, Morris illustrates the single-mindedness and focus that kept Butler writing, always with love for humanity and hopes that her work might help build a better future.
–-Rachel Wright

In prose as crystalline as the mountain air of Kathmandu, Like Water on Leaves of Taro: A Himalayan Memoir meditates on family, grief and resilience. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Himalayan Mountains, it explores a season of loss when the narrator’s mother-in-law dies and her husband falls ill. Dr. Tulasi Acharya, who teaches literature at South Georgia State College, is a native of Nepal, where he is a best-selling author. The cadences of his sentences can feel formal and occasionally stilted, but English, which he learned in college, is his second language, making this book, his second in this tongue, that much more remarkable. Once your ear acclimates to the Eastern rhythms, the book casts a quiet, heartfelt spell. The love among Acharya, his wife, Kripa; his newborn daughter, Krisha; and his kindhearted in-laws is downright palpable. And the occasional Nepali word only adds to the poetry. Kripa, who likes to sleep, resembles lajjawati jhar, the “shame-laden shrub.”
–Candice Dyer

More Book highlights …

Author Danny Blue’s inspirational children’s book, Coalie and the Great Mystery, will resonate with readers young and old.
Creative writing hub LostintheLetters will host a grand opening for their new writers space and bookstore on October 4.
Musician and author Austyn Wohlers recently released the fiction novel Hothouse Bloom.
The Decatur Book Festival returns October 3 and October 4 with a keynote by Saeed Jones and the People’s Project.
Burnaway will host Book // Zine, its inaugural art book and zine fair, October 11 at The Goat Farm.