Later this month, Spartanburg’s Hub City Press will publish the debut novel The Crocodile Bride, by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, as part of its Cold Mountain Fund Series, in partnership with Charles Frazier. If you don’t know about this series, you’re missing a hand-selected reading list of exciting new Southern voices. Fans of Dorot forhy Allison and Kaye Gibbons will instantly love 11-year-old Sunshine Turner, a resourceful girl coming of age in a house full of trauma and secrets at the edge of the Louisiana bayou—where her grandmother tells her, there lives a woman married to an insatiable crocodile. Her power over that crocodile gives her the power to heal. As the novel’s long hot summer unfolds, Sunshine reckons with her troubled father’s “indoor storms,” the shadow and light of her family mythology, and the search for a story all her own.
We caught up with Ashleigh, who lives in Austin, Texas, to see what she’s been reading lately.
Book Recommendations from Ashleigh Bell Pederson
Paradise by Toni Morrison
I am pretty much in love with everything Toni Morrison has ever written (not to mention her vibrant personality and the wit and humor she brings to interviews recorded in the latter years of her life). If I had to rank my favorites of her novels, Beloved and The Bluest Eye are probably at the top of my list, but I read Paradise fairly recently and I find myself marveling at the uneasy tone she creates throughout so many of the scenes in this book, and at the different ways the women in this novel try to carve out space in the world. I find myself remembering the ending of this novel often—and feeling puzzled, saddened, and deeply moved by it.
Senseless Women by Sarah Harris Wallman
Short-story lovers: buckle up! This collection was released just as the pandemic was rearing its head and we were all lost in our respective freak-outs. It’s worth rediscovering. Wallman’s writing is dark, hilarious, whip-smart, incisive, and feminist. I love the story “The Dead Girls Show” in particular, a satire that plays on our society’s exploitation of the female body through the violence enacted against it. (I have a feeling Wallman has a lot to say about shows like Law and Order: SVU.)
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Like Wallman’s Senseless Women, Machado’s collection explores the often unspoken aspects of what it means to be a woman in this world. Her stories are unflinching in the truest sense of the word. They are dark and weird and supernatural and rich and delightful. “The Husband Stitch” in particular stuck with me long after I finished reading it. Machado makes her own rules, and every story in this collection is a unique, polished gem.
