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.

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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.

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Reading John Pritchard’s Junior Ray is like sitting in a rocking chair, on the front porch, a beer in your hand, listening to some trash-talking, sheep-screwing redneck—Mr. Junior Ray Loveblood—ramble on about, well, whatever comes to mind.  Junior Ray is the racist, rascally protagonist of this explosive little novel, which, with its roots in oral tradition, recalls Joel Chandler Harris’s The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or, more recently, Gayle Jones’s Eva’s Man.  But caveat emptor:  it’s far more profane than any of these books. (more…)

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Through the Pale Door is a coming of age story set in Columbia, South Carolina. Sarah West, the female protagonist is a recent high school graduate from Marietta, Georgia who packs up and leaves her psychotic mom to live with her dad. He gives her a summer job at the steel mill he manages so she can earn some money before going to Emory in the fall. It doesn’t take long for her to meet and fall in love with Edgewood, a fellow mill worker and artist who secretly paints murals around town and lives in an abandoned jail. (more…)

June 5 -7, 2009     Write in Oxford, Mississippi, the town that William Faulkner made famous. This summer, the University of Mississippi is hosting a three–day summer creative writing workshop in fiction and non fiction. Find out why so many authors live and write here!

The program features everything; workshops, lectures on craft, panel discussions on publishing and acquiring agents, book signings, readings, and fried southern catfish at its finest.

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Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Ashville, North Carolina.  His parents split when he was a child and he lived with his mother in a boarding house.  Wolfe’s loneliness was his greatest resource for writing, He rarely saw her as she worked to provide for her children.

He was an avid reader and an excellent student. He attended the University of North Carolina where he wrote plays and performed them.  He graduated in 1920 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, but had no luck publishing his work. (more…)

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Daniel Woodrell was born, raised and remains in the Missouri Ozarks.  He dropped out of high school and joined the marines when he was seventeen. He later realized that the military was not for him so he returned to civilian life and went to the University of Kansas then on to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s School on a Michener Fellowship. He tried other things, and lived a lot of places, but ultimately decided he had to do what he loved –write. He lives in West Plains, Missouri.

His first novel, Under the Bright Lights drew critics’ praise. Since then he has published several novels including Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, Woe to Live on, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bones (SLR’s review).

Woodrell coined the phrase “country noir” in an effort to describe the area in which he works.

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Robert Penn Warren was in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905 and remained a resident of the South until his late thirties.  It would be the South, however, that would always rise to the surface of his writing, and the spirit of the South that would evoke the passionate and poetic language that became synonymous with his name.

In 1920 the course of his life changed—Warren lost sight in one eye when his young brother, Thomas, accidentally hit him with a stone.  Prior to the accident, he was awaiting an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.  Forced to forego his aspirations for the Naval Academy, Warren enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee to study engineering.

While attending Vanderbilt, Warren’s roommate, Allen Tate, introduced him to a group of young writers, men brought together by their interest in writing poetry and a nostalgia for the culture of the South.  Also included in this group (more…)