South American Literature

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning.

Meet the women of American Housewife: They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These 12 irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam.

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

When the barnyard animals are invited to a party by their neighbors, they dress in their Sunday best and set off for a day of merriment. But when dinnertime arrives, the famished animals are perplexed to find a simple meal of cornbread. Most of them are polite, but Rooster turns his beak up in disgust and rudely leaves the party, missing the treasures hidden for the guests.

In this glittering triptych novel, Suzette, Maple and Agnes, three Black women with albinism, call Shreveport, Louisiana home. At the bustling crossroads of the American South and Southwest, these three women find themselves at the crossroads of their own lives. A searing meditation on grief, female strength, and self‑discovery, Nobody's Magic is a testament to the power of family—the ones you're born into and the ones you choose. And in these three narratives, among the yearning and loss, each of these women may find a seed of hope for the future.

Carly Castillo has only ever known Fish Village. Her grandmother claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an indigenous Texas people once believed to be extinct, thereby tethering them to Galveston. But as Carly ages, she begins to imagine a life elsewhere, undefined by her family’s history. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop turned seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave Galveston for bigger cities with more possibilities. But he didn’t take them then, and he sure as hell won’t now.

Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea 'Knot' Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, 19th-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, when motherhood looms, Knot begins to learn that her freedom has come at a high price. Low on money, ostracized from her parents and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.

Dillinger Comes to Dinner Author Lord Toph, contributes yet another fascinating facet to the man who was feared and loved by many during the early 1930’s. He was infamously marked by J. Edgar Hoover and his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as America’s first “Public Enemy Number One.” “Dillinger Comes to Dinner” is an insightful tale that has been told and passed down through Lord Toph’s family for decades. It is an unrecorded, yet intriguing account of John Dillinger’s brief moment spent at the Muldrow home in Little Rock Arkansas before his journey back to Chicago ...

At age 23, Cullen Thomas was, like most middle-class kids his age, looking for something meaningful and exciting to do before settling into the 9-to-5 routine. Possessed of a youthful, romantic view of the world, he set off for adventure in Asia and a job teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. But he got more than he ever bargained for when an ill-advised stunt led to a drug smuggling arrest and a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

Philadelphia's South Street is a world of contradiction. The hardscrabble neighborhood is filled with prostitutes and gangsters; Working stiffs mingle with winos at Lightnin' Ed's bar. But the streetwalkers are nearing retirement, the gangsters are unemployed, and a community is thriving in and around a place written off by officials and politicians as blighted. Black poet Adlai Stevenson Brown makes his way to South Street in search of authenticity in the form of a neighborhood to save.

Six months after Paola Santiago confronted the legendary La Llorona, life is nothing like she'd expected it to be. She is barely speaking to her best friends, Dante and Emma, and what's worse, her mom has a totally annoying boyfriend. Even with her chupacabra puppy, Bruto, around, Pao can't escape the feeling that she's all alone in the world. Pao has no one to tell that she's having nightmares again, this time set in a terrifying forest.

A northern white couple has relocated to the South to operate a vineyard on a North Carolina plantation. There, they pass their idle hours listening to the stories of one Uncle Julius, who has a deep knowledge of the land. These stories, however, are more than mere entertainments. They all have their time and place, and they offer not only a quiet commentary on the events of the day but also a deeper reckoning with the plantation’s disturbing past.

When confronted by raging fires or deadly accidents, volunteer fireman Taylor McAden feels compelled to take terrifying risks to save lives. But there is one leap of faith Taylor can't bring himself to make: He can't fall in love...

Rhea's neighborhood is fading away—the mom-and-pop shops of her childhood forced out to make space for an artisanal kombucha brewery here, a hot yoga studio there. And everywhere, the feeling that this place is no longer meant for her. Because while their little corner of South L.A. isn't perfect, to Rhea and her two best friends, it's something even more important—it's home. And it's worth protecting. But as more white people flock to their latest edgy, urban paradise, more of Rhea's friends and family are pushed out. Until Rhea decides it's time to push back.

Noah and Allie fell in love as teenagers, with the purest sort of love, only to be kept apart by Allie's mother. Their feelings survived in spite of everything - and they recounted their romance in the pages of a notebook. Now, years later, Allie suffers from Alzheimer's, and her memory has been wiped clean. By reading the story of their relationship and the passion they shared, Noah hopes to break through the barrier of his wife's illness. This poignant first novel from Nicholas Sparks rivals any love story ever written.

Afice is the last of nine generations of women who have survived enslavement, sickness, and hunger. Alone at age seventeen, she sets out through the Louisiana swamps to follow the trail of her ancestors and hear their songs anew. On this journey, Afice must decide how to honor her ancestors while embracing her own future.

Growing up as a Black girl in America, Deborah Mouton felt alienated from the stories she learned in class. She yearned for stories she felt connected to—true ones of course—but also fables and mythologies that could help explain both the world and her place in it. What she encountered was almost always written by white writers who prospered in a time when human beings were treated as chattel, such as the Greek and Roman myths, which felt as dusty and foreign as ancient ruins. When she sought myths written by Black authors, they were rooted too far in the past, a continent away.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, no one knows better than Titus that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. But a year after Titus's election, a school teacher is killed by a former student. The student is then fatally shot by Titus's deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes, and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight.

Attention fans of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood! Here's a lively multigenerational tale of a family of charming, unforgettable Southern women, a story of love and laughter, pain and redemption that you are sure to treasure.

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940 when she was twenty-three and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked-about writer of the time. Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of one of America’s greatest writers, a complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured, the heart and longing of the outcast.