Visit the Flyleaf Books event page to order your book, and please indicate in the comments if you’d like 1-2 seats held for you at the event! A coconut cake is not always just a coconut cake While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition. Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship. Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. Her most recent book is Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960.

From Kwame Mbalia and Prince Joel David Makonnen comes an Afrofuturist adventure about a mythical Ethiopian empire. Sci-fi and fantasy combine in this epic journey to the stars. Yared has traveled a long way to find his place in the universe. Light years, even. Though the battle of Addis Prime is over, the spacefaring Axum Empire is still fractured. The kingdom once gave their technology away free of charge, to better humankind. Now, having been missing for over a decade, they’re returning to the planet where their galaxy-spanning civilization began—Earth. But they find the planet in disarray. Old Earth’s atmosphere is a mess of junked shuttles and satellites. This is especially true of Debris Town, an orbital flotilla where poor spacefarers—left to rot by the Intergalactic Union that rose up in Axum’s place—have taken to piracy to survive. Yared is set to speak at the opening of the Royal Trials, a competition of the best exo pilots in the Sol System. But on the day of his speech, the pirates launch an attack! The siege sets off a chain of events that will lead Yared into the depths of Old Earth—and the jaws of a cruel betrayal. There’s more to the pirates—and Debris Town—than anyone saw coming.

Jo Salter, a mathematical prodigy from the mountains of North Carolina, remakes herself from a bank teller to a nightclub owner and bootlegger when the Great Depression upturns her life. “When I’m dead and buried . . . you get the hell out of here . . . Make a life somewhere else . . . a life that I can’t even imagine.” Jo Salter, a woman from the North Carolina mountains, sets about constructing a new life for herself in Asheville in the wake of her mother’s death. A life that no one—including her mother—could have imagined. Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town. When the Great Depression brings Central Bank & Trust down in a seismic crash, Jo is forced to find a new home and job. She finds both at the Sky Club, where she strikes a partnership with the alluring Arrowood as she is drawn deeper into a glamorous and precarious life of bootlegging, jazz, and love. The Sky Club is the story of money, greed, and life after the crash from the eyes of one remarkable woman as she creates her own imagined life. Terry Roberts' direct ancestors have lived in the mountains of Western North Carolina since the time of the Revolutionary War. Many of them farmed in the Big Pine section of Madison County, a place that to this day is much as it's portrayed in The […]

Three fierce women. A Hollywood party. One explosive secret. Zanne Klein never planned to be a personal assistant to Hollywood royalty Ted and Holly Stabler. But a decade in, at thirty-eight, that's exactly how she spends her days, earning six figures to make sure the movie mogul and his family have everything they could ever dream of, and more. However, today is no ordinary day at the Stabler estate. Tonight, everyone who's anyone will be there for the Hollywood event of the season, and if the party’s a success, that chief-of-staff job Zanne's been chasing may soon be hers. Which means she can buy a house, give her girlfriend the life she deserves, pay off her student loans. Nothing's going to get in Zanne’s way—not disgruntled staff, not a nosy reporter, not even a runaway hostess. But when Ted’s former business partner, Phoebe Lee, unexpectedly shows up right before go-time, Zanne suddenly has a catastrophe unfolding before her—one with explosive consequences. As the truth comes out and Zanne realizes how deeply entangled she's become in the Stablers' world, she must decide if the sacrifices she's made for the job are worth the moral price she has to pay. Told over the course of a single day and from three fierce perspectives, The Work Wife is a richly observed novel about female ambition, complicity, privilege, and what happens when the brightest of stars aren't allowed to shine. Alison B. Hart's writing has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, The Millions, The Offing, and The Florida Review. She is the co-founder of the long-running reading series at Pete's Candy Store and received her MFA from The New School. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in North Carolina with her family. The Work Wife is her first […]

We're pleased to present a special dining event on Wednesday, July 27th. Our Coastal Wine and Dine will feature a menu hand selected by our chef to highlight tastes of the sea, and only available on that night. Amuse: Champagne pour, Shrimp toast with uni and avocado First Course Choice Of: Tuna Niçoise lettuce cup Shrimp and grits Lamb-stuffed calamari with couscous Scallop ceviche with corn pudding and peach salsa Main Course Choice Of: Grilled half lobster with “Paella” style risotto, Red pepper emulsion and Prosciutto crisps +$20 Sauteed scallops with truffled cream corn, wild rice Herb crusted grouper, Maque choux, fingerling potatoes Whole grilled Snapper for 2 stuffed with herbs, spicy peanut relish, coconut rice and citrus-cumin carrots Intermezzo: Watermelon, tequila, mint granita Dessert Choice of: Lemon pudding cake, macerated berries, meringue Smores pot de crème, graham cracker crumble, house made marshmallows $100 per person, with wine pairings $135 📅Mark your calendars and grab a reservation now. Reservations are limited and will be available from 4-8:30PM. TO RESERVE, PLEASE E-MAIL [email protected] OR CALL (919) 704-8731

Get ready for a Sip And See sneak peek and our first GIVEAWAY! Giveaway details below. Winner will be announced at the Sip And See so make sure you’re there! Giveaway instructions: ✨Follow us on Instagram ✨Tag 3 friends in the comments below ✨You’re tagged friends must follow @theguildatmosaic as well! Good luck! — at The Guild Apartment Homes.

In Serena Kaylor's sparkling debut, a homeschooled math genius finds herself out of her element at a theater summer camp and learns that life—and love—can’t be lived by the (text)book. Growing up homeschooled in Berkeley, California, Beatrice Quinn has always dreamed of discovering new mathematical challenges at Oxford University. She always thought the hardest part would be getting in, not convincing her parents to let her go. But while math has always made sense to Beatrice, making friends is a problem she hasn’t been able to solve. Before her parents will send her halfway across the world, she has to prove she won’t spend the next four years hiding in the library. The compromise: the Connecticut Shakespearean Summer Academy and a detailed list of teenage milestones to check off. If Beatrice wants to live out her Oxford dream, she has to survive six weeks in the role of “normal teenager” first. Unfortunately, hearts and hormones don't follow any equations. When she's adopted by a group of eclectic theater kids, and immediately makes an enemy of the popular—and annoyingly gorgeous—British son of the camp’s founders, Beatrice quickly learns that relationships are trickier than calculus. With her future on the line, this girl genius stumbles through illicit parties, double dog dares, and more than her fair share of Shakespeare. But before the final curtain falls, will Beatrice realize there’s more to life than what she can find in the pages of a book? Serena Kaylor likes to write about that first flush of summer love, whispered conversations at midnight, and endings happy enough to make your toes curl. She grew up running wild as a changeling through North Carolina swamps, and as an adult, has wandered from libraries into medicine. When she’s not writing, she can be found experimenting in her kitchen, […]

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Bestselling author Natalie Lloyd returns with her most personal book to date, a story about a girl who—armed with her trusty, snazzy wheelchair—refuses to let her brittle bone disease stand in the way of adventure. Twelve-year-old homeschooled Olive is tired of being seen as “fragile” just because she has osteogenesis imperfecta (otherwise known as brittle bone disease) so she’s thrilled when she finally convinces her parents to let her attend Macklemore Elementary. Olive can’t wait to go to a traditional school and make the friends she’s always longed for, until a disastrous first day dashes her hopes of ever fitting in. Then Olive hears whispers about a magical, wish-granting hummingbird that supposedly lives near Macklemore. It’ll be the solution to all her problems! If she can find the bird and prove herself worthy, the creature will make her most desperate, secret wish come true. When it becomes clear that she can’t solve the mystery on her own, Olive teams up with some unlikely allies who help her learn the truth about the bird. And on the way, she just might learn that our fragile places lead us to the most wonderful magic of all . . . Natalie Lloyd lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She collects old books, listens to bluegrass music, and loves exploring quirky mountain towns with her dog, Biscuit. She is the author of A Snicker of Magic and The Key to Extraordinary.