Hometown Glory highlights the backgrounds of your favorite booksellers through the literature they love. For this series, we have selected books which represent our histories and remind us of home. First, is Aatia.

I’m from North Carolina. These days, it’s the first thing people learn about me. With one foot in the sprawling Appalachian mountains and another on the coast, it’s a beautiful and complicated place. Some of these books represent the communities that surrounded me or my mom’s family growing up and some just depict girlhood in a way that spoke to me. All of them feel like a little piece of home for me. - Aatia

Let The Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is a collection of interconnected short stories which take place in the fictional town of Tim’s Creek. The world of Kenan’s fiction is unapologetically black and southern. Like the best southern writers, he captured our voices, the color and cadence in our speech, and it makes his writing feel wonderfully and, at times, darkly familiar. Kenan was invested in documenting Black life in its many forms, all over America, publishing 1999’s Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. For that project, he conducted hundreds of interviews over the course of six years, with people all over America, an impressive effort that serves as an ethnography of our people.

The author passed away in 2020, but I hope that his work will be canonized and celebrated for years to come.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

This book captivated and disturbed me when I was 18 and firmly not squeamish. It follows a little girl named Bone. Born to a teen mom and with no father, Bone is labeled a bastard at birth. Her mother and herself are in the care of their community, some of which are family, all of them poor, white and struggling in one way or another. Bone’s mom has troubled relationships with men which leaves Bone vulnerable to some horrific abuse. As auto-fiction, I think of this story as Allison’s heart on the page. As a poor, queer southern writer, Dorothy Allison has an unforgettable voice, she’s a feminist and an advocate for the working class. I love the honesty in her work and I love the way she portrays her community.

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

Orringer’s stories in this collection capture girlhood in its blissful, angsty and rawest form. I read this at the perfect time. I was out of high school and girlhood felt like it was ending. In many ways, I was glad to be leaving it behind, and I felt ready to step out into the world! Still, I had doubts about the future–college, career, my own social standing and relationships all felt uncertain. I wanted things, I yearned for things, just like the girls in these stories. Plus the cover image reminds me of the creek behind my granny’s house, the path through the woods where she taught me to ride a bike. If you want a hit of nostalgia while weaving through many stories and characters, pick this one up. It’s beautiful.