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.
“Undead Souths,” edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner
September 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Joshua S. Fullman This volume follows countless others in their earnest curiosity about Southern identification and expression. For many Southerners, their region represents all that is/was great about the American heritage. For many others, it is something un-American, anti-American, or sub-human. Efforts to understand the South by both her defenders and detractors have […]
Ryan Guth
September 22, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Ryan Guth is the author of two full-length mixed-genre collections, Home Truths (Alsop Review Press, 2006) and Body and Soul (Lummox Press, 2015). Individual poems of his have appeared in such journals such as Lummox, Iron Horse, Bryant Literary Review, River City, and Third Coast Review. He studied Creative Writing with poets Andrew Hudgins, Don […]
“The Pink House,” by Trish MacEnulty
September 20, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Trish MacEnulty’s smooth delivery of four very different female viewpoints in The Pink House creates a rich reading experience to savor like a tasty casserole. Each narrator has a compelling story and unique problems that meld into a riveting whole. The action centers around a women’s prison in North Florida, a […]
“Don’t Date Baptists—and other things my mother told me,” by Terry Barr
September 15, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Walter Bennett Terry Barr’s Don’t Date Baptists is foremost a book of stories—an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative—about a boy’s coming to manhood and moral awareness in the deep South of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a propitious time and place indeed to be the son of a Jewish father and Methodist mother. And that […]
Walter Bennett
September 13, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Walter Bennett is a former civil rights attorney, judge, and law professor who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is the author of The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and the novel Leaving Tuscaloosa (Fuze Publishing, 2012). He is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
September Read of the Month: “Book of the Beloved,” by Carolyn Haines
September 6, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro The amazing Carolyn Haines is at it again. The compelling, complex and darkly fascinating Book of the Beloved illustrates all over again just how talented and versatile the award-winning Haines is as a writer. Beloved is a book you won’t be able to put down, Southern to the core, and […]
“Miss Julia Inherits a Mess,” by Ann B. Ross
August 31, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl About a decade ago a television series began its run: Gossip Girl. It was a teen drama based on a novel series by Cecily von Ziegesar. Fictional lives, then, of a batch of adolescents, queen bees in their gossipy chess games. It takes little imagination to add, say, fifty gossipy […]