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. In an effort to back independent bookstores and to encourage creativity in the publishing world, SLR is an IndieBound supporter.
“Specter of Seduction,” by Carolyn Haines
April 18, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro In Specter of Seduction (KaliOka Press, November 2017),” the third book in Carolyn Haines’s Pluto Snitch series, human villains, living and dead, and a demon from another sphere collide with force and sparks. At the center of the storm, a talented young girl child appears to be possessed, or merely […]
“Blake, or The Huts of America” by Martin R. Delany and “The Hindered Hand” by Sutton E. Griggs
April 11, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Even though their works were created some forty years apart, two early American black authors recognized the power of fiction to engender social change. Both men came to believe the Back-To-Africa movement, or colonization, offered the most viable way to achieve social justice. Prior to the Civil War, Blake, or The […]
April Read of the Month: “Fixing Boo-Boo,” by Pat Stanford
April 4, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro Ultimately a story of grace and transcendence, Fixing Boo Boo (Southern Yellow Pine Publishing, 2017) details a reluctant caregiver’s journey with her brain-damaged older sister, Barb. It gets messy along the way, and Barb is often her own worst enemy. But Pat Stanford tells the story with a deft and […]
March Read of the Month: “Dancing to an Irish Reel,” by Claire Fullerton
March 14, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Johnnie Bernhard Hans Christian Anderson wrote, “To travel is to live.” His words suggest the underlying theme of Dancing to an Irish Reel by Claire Fullerton. Living, instead of existing, is exactly what protagonist Hailey Crossan does on the west coast of Ireland. Leaving the “soullessness of Los Angeles” and her job in […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Colleen D. Scott, Author of “Everybody Needs a Bridge”
March 7, 2018 by Leave a Comment
AM: Thanks for doing this interview, Colleen. Your first novel is Everybody Needs a Bridge, which you describe as a “work of fiction inspired by actual events.” It follows the story of Erin, a young girl in Alabama who’s growing up roughly a generation after the Civil Rights Movement. You might call it a bildungsroman […]
February Read of the Month: “Gradle Bird,” by J.C. Sasser
February 28, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Kathleen M. Rodgers Can a savior come in the form of a sixteen-year-old girl in a green prom dress and cat-eyed glasses? A phenomenal debut novel by gifted storyteller J. C. Sasser, Gradle Bird flips southern gothic fiction on its head and turns ghosts stories inside out. Forget everything you thought you knew […]
Kathleen M. Rodgers
February 22, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Kathleen M. Rodgers’s stories and essays have appeared in Family Circle Magazine, Military Times, and in anthologies published by McGraw-Hill, University of Nebraska Press / Potomac Books, Health Communications, Inc., AMG Publishers, and Press 53. In 2014, Rodgers was named a Distinguished Alumna of Tarrant County College / NE Campus. Three of her aviation poems […]