The Southern Literary Review celebrates southern authors and their contributions to American literature.  We feature the classic writers who have defined southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors through interviews, profiles, and book reviews.

The New York Times and the Oxford Eagle are reporting that Barry Hannah passed away on March 1.  SLR always liked this quote of his, about the term “southern writer:”

No really good writer could be merely Southern. A fiction writer isn’t provincial, ever. He should be sending back news from the front, news somebody else might not know about and it should be interesting and entertaining.

In an interview with SLR, another talented writer, Cynthia Shearer, described Hannah’s role in her evolution as a writer:

For a lot of years I feared my writing and the reactions it produced in people.  So I’m one of those people who tried to outrun it for a while and then realized in my thirties I’d be a saner person if I just submitted to it. I took Barry Hannah’s fiction course at the end of grad school to try to recover the old wonder at the power of words, and he pretty much started treating me like a writer, talking to me like I was writer, and prodded me to keep going.

Check out our previous profile of Barry Hannah.  Starting today is Oxford’s Conference on the Book, which this year is dedicated to Barry Hannah.

(subscribe)

Well butter my buns and call me a biscuit because the folks at the Oxford American have done it again! Each year this literary quarterly, proudly published by the University of Central Arkansas, releases a Southern music issue. This year the editors have introduced a new theme—The Southern State Series—because, according to founding editor Marc Smirnoff (no relation to the vodka distillery so far as I know), “We now expect, if not demand, surprises.” Fittingly for a publication out of Conway, Arkansas, the first of these pleasant surprises pays homage to Arkansas natives.
The issue offers not only the printed prose of several talented writers but also a double-disc demo of foot-tappin’-fanny-shakin’-honky-tonkin’ soul and sound. Bursting with improbable yet impeccable rhythms, refreshingly low-brow lyrics, twang, strings, and ol’-timey things, the CDs feature artists like Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley, Larry Donn, Little Beaver, Maxine Brown, Sleepy LaBeef, and other notables among not-so-notables. One CD spotlights local artists (Arkansas Masters); the other, an eclectic, hand-picked mix of musicians from various Southern regions (Southern Masters).
Some of the selections will make you unbutton your shirt, loosen your belt, and flail your body from side to side. Some, though, will tug at your heartstrings. (I cried twice while listening to Southern Masters, but I’m a bit of a sap.) No one genre dominates this mélange of gospel, rock, bluegrass, and blues. Whether wailing about home-sweet-home, prison melancholy, lonesome highways, lost love or love made, these artists are sure to connect. (more…)

If you have a more scholarly interest in southernlit, or maybe  just a hankering for etouffee, head down to New Orleans April 8 to 11 for the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.  The program features a reading by Cristina Garcia, author of The Aguero Sisters.

Take a look:  http://www.loyno.edu/~bewell/SSSL2010/ssslinfo.html

(buy now from Amazon.com)

A Southern Town Echoes Cradle to Grave

And, mirrors civilization from cradle to grave as well. These stories from the South seep storied tales from the past. Vultures and buzzards abound, their leavings foreshadow early that nasty stuff is to come, as nasty as some of the hidden behaviors of the founding fathers. Snakes weave about and follow, mocking religious hypocrisy. The constellations and the muses reflect and scare by telling truth instead of some whitewashed legend.

History reflects off Deadman Mountain, shaped by flowing, constantly moving waters, yet unmoved by man until the government gets involved. All is tied to the historical founders, the Falklands. (How transparent is that?

KKK, slavery, religion, the Jeffersons and Hemmings, it’s all here. There is the journal, and the daughter who speaks of it and notes the entries are sparse when evil was afoot. Yet, Carson Falkland sings, beautifully sings on. The Gypsy finds love with the Jew. The blackest of blacks (named Tom in case the sophomores miss it again) appears when salvation is required. The danged ghosts persist. The most evil ones are silent in the silent grave of a bat and moss covered cave, leaving no visible memories.

Upstanding “leaders” hatch a plan to improve the area by destroying Concord. Poisoning the early planners doesn’t work. Like the hallowed founding fathers, the pesky critters keep coming back.

Should you ever wonder if a short story writer can create a successful novel using individual stories, here it is – a woven novel. The commonality of location runs from and through the stories. You know you are in the same place. The plot is the ground where the story lies. That plot, soon, like the black walnut that spans the decades, is sentenced to be sunken under a dam, or is it damnation?

click to buy

Yazoo Blues continues the adventures of Junior Ray Loveblood, the racist, trash-talking yarn spinning character from John Pritchard’s first book Junior Ray. Junior Ray is now a semi-retired self-described lawman, now part-time casino guard that boasts “I come from the roughest they is.” As story tellers go, he is part historian, part author of literature as well as a born philosopher as only a small town in the back woods can produce. In many respects he is Jerry Clower meets George Carlin. Junior Ray has all the flavor of the yarn spinner of Jerry Clower with the potty mouth, irreverence and politically incorrectness of George Carlin.

Yazoo Blues continues Junior Ray’s fasciation with history, as he sees himself as becoming part of history in the making. Leaving WWII behind, Junior Ray delves into the Civil War and especially the failed attempt on the part of the Union Soldiers to invade Vicksburg by ship coming through the Yazoo Pass. As the tale was described, “of course the expedition failed as the Delta is too tangled for canoes much less 200 foot ironclads and troop ships”. (more…)

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  (more…)

It was with great interest—and, perhaps, skepticism, for I myself taught English in Japan—that I read Faulkner Studies in Japan, an assemblage of critical essays written and translated by Japanese academics and edited by American Thomas L. McHaney, professor of literature at Georgia State University.  Whisking eagerly through the pages of this significant, insightful book, I learned, to my surprise, that Faulkner’s reputation in Japan has been, for six decades, mostly favorable, despite that his “works are difficult to read, even in his own country” (xiii).

Though my brief stint as sensei didn’t lend itself to instruction in unconventional, stream-of-consciousness fiction—just getting my pre-teen students to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha” would’ve been inconceivable—other sensei have taught Faulkner with relative, if not outright, success.  (more…)

Allen Mendenhall holds a B.A. in English from Furman University, M.A. in English from West Virginia University, and J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law. He is an LL.M. candidate at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the author of several publications in such journals as the The Southern Literary Messenger, the Aroostook Review, The Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, The West Virginia Lawyer, and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.  Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.