New Stories from the South, Resurrected

 New Stories from the South

As the book review columnist for the erstwhile Chapel Hill News, I reviewed a decade’s worth of the original Algonquin series of New Stories from the South. Fifteen years later, the resurrection of the series by Blair, edited by friend and colleague Robin Muira, was therefore doubly welcome. The just launched 2026 edition spans a wide range of voices and geographies. For example, a through line runs between two deceptively dissimilar stories: one narrator is a young girl growing up in Bangladeshi slum, the other a girl of the same age raised in the rarefied atmosphere of American academia. Both girls strive for attention and approval from a selfish, emotionally distant father; both girls are ultimately disillusioned.