New & Upcoming Books from North Carolina Authors
If You Ask Me by Libby Hubscher
Violet Covington pens Dear Sweetie, the most popular advice column in the state of North Carolina. She has an answer for how to politely handle any difficult situation…until she discovers her husband, Sam, has been cheating on her. Furious and out of sensible solutions, Violet leaves her filter at the door and turns to her column to air her own frustrations. The new, brutally honest Dear Sweetie goes viral, sending more shock waves through Violet’s life. When she burns Sam’s belongings in a front-yard, late-night bonfire, a smoking-hot firefighter named Dez shows up to douse the flames, and an unexpected fling quickly shows potential to become something longer lasting.
Beyond Innocence : The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt by Phoebe Zerwick
Rene says, "Zerwick brings together the facts of the case and the people involved. I read years ago about the first man exonerated by DNA testing and tragically the conduct of the justice dept was very similar in both cases. In a horrific act of violence the police and justice dept are under extreme pressure to find the culprit and often build very flimsy threads of evidence to meet the demand. Without Zerwick's tenacious search for the truth, Hunt would not have been exonerated and an innocent man would have languished in prison for the rest of his life. She also delves into the psychological residuals of being wrongfully accused of a crime even after exoneration. The person is still a criminal in many people's mind. The victim lives every day with nightmares of treatment in prison, of losing so many years of a life because, at best, a mistake had been made. This is a powerful account of a man's life and an urgent call to everyone to become more knowledgeable about all the ramifications of decisions made by the justice system."
The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni
One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni’s world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found.
The Rooted Life : Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food by Justin Rhodes
Have you ever wanted to experiment with growing your own food but didn’t think you had the space, the time, or the knowledge? Justin Rhodes thought the same thing—until after years battling systemic illness and struggling to provide the kind of wholesome food he wanted for his family, he bought a seed packet at the grocery store and was hooked! Justin discovered the miraculous potential and empowerment of working with nature to grow food for his family, and since that discovery, he has shared his self-taught skills with hundreds of thousands of growers via his popular YouTube channel and website. Whether you're looking for greater food security, better health, tastier food, to save or earn money, connect with your food source, this book is for you. If you're looking for a different kind of life—a life focused on health and wellness—take a look down the road less traveled.
The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice by Benjamin Gilmer
Fresh out of medical residency, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer joined a rural North Carolina clinic only to find that its previous doctor shared his last name. Dr. Vince Gilmer was loved and respected by the community—right up until he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular week of work. Vince’s eventual arrest for murder shocked his patients. How could their beloved doctor be capable of such violence? The deeper Benjamin looked into Vince’s case, the more he became obsessed with discovering what pushed a good man toward darkness.
The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy : Inviting Connection, Inventing Change by Douglas Flemons
In his characteristically casual and concise way, Flemons explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unraveling of knotted strands of problematic experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labeled afflictions. The therapist gets in sync with clients so they can, together, extemporaneously facilitate changes to undesired thoughts, urges, emotions, sensations, or behaviors. This book takes you to the heart of hypnotherapy, to the respectful, playful practice of utilizing clients’ flow experience to collaboratively discover and create opportunities for embodied learning and therapeutic change.
Light at the Seams: Poems by Joseph Bathanti
Light at the Seam, a new collection from North Carolina poet Joseph Bathanti, is an exploration of mountaintop removal in southern Appalachian coal country. The volume illuminates and champions often invisible people residing, in a precarious moment in time, on the glorious, yet besieged, Appalachian earth. Their call to defend it, as well as their faith that the land will exact its own reckoning, constitutes a sacred as well as existential quest. Rooted in social and restorative justice, Light at the Seam contemplates the earth as fundamentally sacramental, a crucible of awe and mystery, able to regenerate itself and its people even as it succumbs to them. More than mere cautionary tale, this is a volume of hope and wonder.
Marse : A Psychological Portrait of the Southern Slave Master and His Legacy of White Supremacy by H. D. Kirkpatrick
Marse focuses on the white men who composed the antebellum southern planter class in the period of 1830-1861. This book is a psychological autopsy of the minds and behaviors of enslavers that helps explain the enduring roots of white supremacy and the hidden wound of racist slavery that continues to affect all Americans today. Marse details and illustrates examples of the psychological mechanisms by which southern slave masters justified owning another human being as property and how they formed a society in which enslavement was morally acceptable. Kirkpatrick uses forensic psychology to analyze the personality formation, defense mechanisms, and psychopathologies of slave masters. Their delusional beliefs and assumptions about Black Africans extended to a forceful cohort of white slaveholding women, as well as how they twisted Christianity to promote slavery as a positive good. He examines the masters' stresses and fears, and how they coped by developing psychologically fatal, slavery-specific defense mechanisms. Utilizing sources such as the vast treasure trove of slavery historiography, diaries, letters, autobiographies, and sermons, Marse describes the ways in which slaveholders created a delusional worldview that sanctioned cruel instruments of punishment and implemented laws and social policies of domination used to rob Blacks of their human rights.
The Adventurists & Other Stories by Richard Butner
Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she's become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There's the historic house, where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel under your old high school, and couldn't resist going to see where it led. Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of the way. Butner's allusive and elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life--where there are no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a tree might talk to just one person, where Death's Fool is not to be ignored.
Pizza Quest : My Never-Ending Search for the Perfect Pizza by Peter Reinhart
Peter Reinhart is on a never-ending quest to find the best pizza in the world. This lifelong adventure has led him to working with the most inventive pizza restaurants, creating a critically acclaimed pizza webseries, judging pizzas at the International Pizza Expo, and writing three books on the subject. In Pizza Quest, he profiles the most exciting pizzaiolos working today and their signature pies, sharing over 35 tribute recipes that will give readers a taste of the best of what the pizza world has to offer. From classic New York Style to Detroit Style to Bar Pies, these pizza recipes will take you on a journey around the pizza world—a delicious travelogue that will kickstart your own pizza quest at home.
The Wedding Veil by Kristy Woodson Harvey
Present Day: Julia Baxter’s wedding veil, bequeathed to her great-grandmother by a mysterious woman on a train in the 1930s, has passed through generations of her family as a symbol of a happy marriage. But on the morning of her wedding day, something tells her that even the veil’s good luck isn’t enough to make her marriage last forever.
1914: Socialite Edith Vanderbilt is struggling to manage the luxurious Biltmore Estate after the untimely death of her cherished husband. With 250 rooms to oversee and an entire village dependent on her family to stay afloat, Edith is determined to uphold the Vanderbilt legacy—and prepare her free-spirited daughter Cornelia to inherit it—in spite of her family’s deteriorating financial situation. But Cornelia has dreams of her own.
Love and Genetics by Rachel Elliott and Mark MacDonald
When a family secret comes to light, lives are changed forever in this honest, beautiful, and sometimes painful memoir. When Mark, adopted at birth, set out to find his genetic family as an adult, he found something he never expected—three full-blood siblings, including a persistent sister who would alter the course of his life. He finds himself faced with the emotional task of coming to know his entire birth family, along with the unintended impact it has on his parents and his marriage. This raises age-old questions around the understanding of his own identity and his place in the world-now framed in extraordinarily real and explicit terms: What defines family? Nature or nurture? Life rarely affords such an opportunity for self-examination.
