Hardback

In our house, we are massive Eve Ewing fans and can’t wait to read every book her visionary mind gifts us. Original Sins reveals how our schools have their foundation in efforts of forced cultural assimilation, reinforcing racial hierarchies, and indoctrination with the emerging worker/consumer ethos. While this is a bleak and heavy history, it couldn’t be more timely a read than our current deeply reactionary political moment. Ewing, known as much for her poetry as for her scholarship, brings it home at the end with an inspiring call for a future education that braids together values of love, empathy, care, imagination, and creativity in place of obedience, punishment, and order.

Hardback

This eye opening true history of the Nazi plot to overthrow American Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s reads like a page-turning spy thriller novel! Tracking the historical strain of American far right politics that longs for an authoritarian ruler, Maddow draws astonishingly relevant parallels to our current political moment in America. Meticulously researched, this well told story is one I wish all Americans knew more about.

Hardback

Josh recommends this year's National Book Award winner for Nonfiction: Soldiers & Kings by Jason de Leon. At a time when both major political parties are demonizing immigration at our southern border, it's more important than ever to have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex forces at work behind this painfully topical issue. Jason De Leon is a McArthur Genius Fellow and he has spent many years embedding himself among migrant communities to better understand them and to powerfully share impactful stories that just might change how you think about painful realities underlying the increasingly toxic politics of immigration in the United States.

Hardback

Fans of letterpress printing and book arts may already be famliar with the joyfully rebellious work of poster artist and social activist Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. Citizen Printer, the first book length collection of Kennedy's decades of output, is sure to delight fans as well as those just discovering him. I personally love how many of his posters celebrate books, reading, libraries, and bookstores as well as his emphasis on both historical and contemporary social justice movements. I think this is the first art/coffee table book to ever be featured in an Underground shelf-talker, and I'm thrilled to get to highlight the work of this legendary printmaker!

Hardback

Can a book be cozy, loving, encouraging, compassionate AND a threat to the brutal and cutthroat consumer capitalism of our era? I present to you Robin Wall Kimmerer’s first book since her surprise mega bestselling sleeper hit Braiding Sweetgrass. The Serviceberry is a bushy, underappreciated fruit tree native to Eastern North America that Kimmerer uses as inspiration to muse broadly on “abundance and reciprocity in the natural world.” The tree embodies the values of gratitude, interconnectedness, and mutual aid. Strikingly, the Serviceberry’s broad and generous distribution of its wealth ensures its own flourishing! Let’s all read this small, beautiful, and powerful little book and talk about how we can reimagine modern economic life to be a little more sane and humane.

Hardback

The thrilling academic breakthroughs, tense rivalries, and workplace crushes of the scientists on Anjiin suddenly seem petty when the Carryx, terrifying and powerful insectoid aliens, invade and nearly wipe out humanity. But when the scientist team, reunited on the Carryx home planet in a puzzling captivity, are forced to resume similar research, mysteries abound and old fault lines re-emerge. Set against the backdrop of a vast intergalactic war we are only beginning to understand, The Mercy of Gods serves up a smart and thrilling space opera that I couldn’t put down! Surely this is the launch of an epic new series from the brilliant world-building minds behind the Expanse series.

Hardback

Fifteen short essays on science and nature, intended to inspire a sense of awe and wonder, are each paired with the work of a brilliant poet and a beautiful illustration. Popova's extraordinary collection is a poignant, beautiful little gift book perfect for reminding us of how strange and wild it is that we get to exist and perceive this most mysterious universe at all!

Hardback

Kate McKinnon (Weird Barbie, SNL) brings her delightfully offbeat sense of humor to her first children's novel! I could almost hear her voice when I was reading it. Part Mysterious Benedict Society, part Wednesday Addams, but with kid mad scientists who have to solve a mystery to save their town. It's a gross, strange, action packed good time!

Hardback

How is it that Richard Powers can take the most pressing and urgent issues of our era, and turn them into epic, breathtaking novels? Playground resumes the author’s powerful literary explorations at the intersection of humanity, nature, and technology. This time the world’s oceans are the vital background protagonist, through which our four main characters’ lives unfold in a brilliant, immersive, and ultimately hopeful journey. Hands down one of my top books of the year!

Hardback

This adorably quirky picture book features a Wednesday-Addams-like Millie Fleur settling in a new neighborhood with her family, and growing a big garden of delightfully strange and macabre plants in the yard. When the local HOA garden group finds out, they try to put a stop to it, but Millie rallies her school mates to help save her strange and wonderful garden. An eccentric ode to flying your freak flag and staying true to who you are, even if it is a little (or a lot) out of the norm.

Hardback

Moonbound is a fantastically imagined epic adventure, with wizard geneticists, dragons made of code living on the moon, and talking beaver ecologists who commune with sentient plants, to cite a few wild examples. Did I mention this madcap tale is also a sideways Arthurian sword-in-the-stone retelling? Moonbound is a great story -- fun, smart, and a little mind bending in the very best way, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Hardback

Mary Reynolds is most well known for her dramatic outsider win at the 2002 Chelsea Flower Show (the olympics of the landscape design world), the story of which is immortalized in the 2016 film Dare To Be Wild. We Are The ARK is her manifesto, an inspiring call for us to transform our relationship to any land that may be in our care. Reynolds' beautiful book gives us practical steps on how to turn our home gardens or yards into a thriving oasis for native plants, pollinators, and wildlife. But more than just another home gardening book, We Are The ARK is a visionary glimpse into the future of home landscape design.

Paperback

The wild opening scene of this book, with its shocking revelation at the funeral of the beloved family patriarch, had me howling with laughter and absolutely hooked from the first chapter. Set in the imaginary small town of Eulàlia, Georgia, you’ll come to love the Williams family as they stumble through the beautiful mess of their grief and new understandings of each other. Cat Shook has written a charming, big-hearted, and infectiously satisfying family dramedy.

Hardback

In this hopeful and deeply compelling travelogue, journalist Jennifer Grayson documents her visits and conversations across the country with a new generation of American farmers working to transform our badly broken industrial food system. As the older generation of American farmers retire over the next decade, 400 million acres of farmland will become available. Will this emerging movement for sustainable and regenerative agriculture be able to overcome the daunting challenges that accompany this opportunity? Thoughtfully clear eyed, yet inspiring and cautiously optimistic, Grayson begins to connect the dots showing how the reimagined farm models she visits (including the "agrihood" Serenbe, where one of our bookstore locations are located!) are pointing us toward a more just and sustainable food future.

Hardback

Before reading this, would I have said we needed a madcap queer romantic historical adventure about based on the true story of an earnest monk and a rakish pirate stealing the sacred bones of Saint Nicholas? No, I wouldn't have, but it was delightfully unpredictable, witty, and fun! Based on real historical events, with a touch of whimsy added, this playfully strange heist novel defies easy categorization.

Hardback

This adorable picture book experientially demonstrates what looks like mind reading, but is actually a simple math magic illusion! As a kid who loved stuff like stage magic and chess, this delighted me.

Hardback

If I could ask you to read one book about our food system this year, this would be it! Will Harris is a fourth generation Georgia farmer who owns White Oak pastures, a large cattle ranch in southwest Georgia. Harris -- a lovably profane curmudgeon and delightfully down to earth radical -- tells the incredible story of transforming the massive industrial cattle farm he inherited into a vibrant, diverse, organic, and regenerative family farm. Harris is a brilliant storyteller and even though I am well read on the topic, I learned so much from this book!

Hardback

Olivetti is an antique typewriter with a quick wit and a heart of gold. His family is going through a hard time, but can the secrets only he knows help unlock a hopeful future? Twelve year old Ernest is determined to find out. This charming, big-hearted debut novel from Atlanta author Allie Millington is a moving tale of family, friendship, acceptance, and resilience in the face of hardship.

Hardback

The chilling mass murder of eleven black farmhands in rural Georgia in 1921 (“The Murder Farm Massacre”) made major national news, exposing the South’s widespread use of the peonage system, or legal debt slavery, and its accompanying cruelties. Mostly forgotten today, the story of the crime and its media and legal aftermath is nothing short of cinematic, with a heroic undercover NAACP agent, a white supremacist governor striving for redemption, federal investigators struggling against local prejudice, and an enigmatic black field hand standing up as the courageous lone witness, despite the grim implications for his own future. Hell Put To Shame sheds light on a vitally important and little understood corner of American history, with important lessons for understanding the ongoing racial strife that continues to haunt our society today.

Hardback

This unputdownable 21st century take on The Princess Bride was five out of five stars for me. Tress and her unlikely band of misfit pirates are as lovable as they come. If you’re looking for your new favorite cozy fantasy adventure, this is the one!!

Hardback

My favorite book of 2023! Kingsolver’s Appalachian retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is nothing short of an epic masterpiece. Even as it grapples with heavy emotional themes and complex social problems, the plot races by and I could not put it down. Demon Copperhead moved me like very few novels ever have. Don’t be afraid to let this story devastate you in the very best way. 5/5 Stars!

Hardback

North Woods is a phenomenal novel that I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. Daniel Mason’s tells the story of a single plot of land in western Massachusetts over the span of centuries, through the eyes of its many varied inhabitants, and the ways that their choices reverberate — one might say haunt even — throughout the ages. Equal parts Richard Powers and Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Mason delivers a unique and compelling storytelling experience.

Hardback

Fire Weather is a gripping masterpiece of climate change journalism. On its face, it tells the haunting story of the burning of Fort McMurray in British Columbia in 2016, and the frantic evacuation of 80,000 people from the region’s largest tar oil boom city. The deeply personal stories he unearths about the fire are terrifying, but Vaillant artfully connects these specific tales of woe and hubris to the larger story of our world’s tragic climate somnambulism. His deep dive into the new scientific understanding of the emerging generation of wildfires in the increasingly hotter and dryer climate of North America is deeply disturbing, and he doesn’t shy away from the grim implications it has for the coming century.

Hardback

One thing I love about being a bookseller and getting sent so many books to review is that I often read things I might not otherwise pick up. While I'm likely not the target reader for this as a 45 year old hetero cis white man, it has really stuck with me and made me think about topics I don't often spend much time considering, such as the identity crises that can accompany menopause, the complexity of middle aged desire and sexuality, and autonomy in romantic intimacy. Overall I found All Fours to be a funny, weird, wild, boundary-pushing romp of a novel and I'm so glad I read it!

Hardback

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin has written a book on creativity that will take its place among the best of its kind. This is like bottle inspiration for leading a creative life! Rubin's advice on creativity is inspired by eastern/Buddhist tinged philosophy and his long career mentoring some of the modern era's most influential musical artists. An exceptional book, highly recommend!