The Southern Literary Review celebrates Southern authors and their contributions to American literature. We feature classic writers who have defined Southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors with interviews, profiles, and book reviews. We support independent bookstores. If you subscribe to our newsletter, please add southernliteraryreview@comcast.net to your email contacts list so that the newsletter doesn’t […]
“Everything Is Ghosts” by Tyler Robert Sheldon
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Perhaps it was no accident that I finally had a chance to read Tyler Robert Sheldon’s latest poetry collection, Everything Is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2024), at Christmastime. Just like the Christmas Eve of Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ immortal Christmas tale, this book is populated by ghosts of past, present, and future. The poems […]
“Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder” by Brandi Bradley
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder (Rumor Mill Press 2025) is not your mama’s police procedural, folks. In this sequel to Local Monsters, author Brandi Bradley has crafted a particularly riveting mystery by going heavy on character development instead of hitting the reader—boom, boom, boom—with chronological facts and forensics. Told from alternating points of […]
“The Welcome” by Hubert Creekmore edited by Philip “Pip” Gordon
April 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pip Gordon calls The Welcome (UMiss Press 2023), Hubert Creekmore’s “most radically significant work,” and both terms seem important to understanding what makes this novel noteworthy. Gordon discovered that, perhaps because the novel went so completely out of print, there was surprisingly little academic work on it, despite its recognition as an important example of […]
Ed Davis
April 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Ed Davis has immersed himself in writing and contemplative practices since retiring from college teaching. Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His novel The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014) won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Many of his stories, essays and poems […]
Read of the Month: “Upon the Corner of the Moon” by Valerie Nieman
April 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pagan rituals, visions and prophecies; commingling of myth, religion and history; poets, princes and perpetually plotting monarchs; sibling rivalry; siege and conquest. In her new novel Upon the Corner of the Moon (Regal House 2025), veteran North Carolina writer Valerie Nieman uses all this rich material—and more—to dramatize the backstory of two of Shakespeare’s most […]
Gale Massey interviews Florida author Lauren Groff about her new bookstore “The Lynx”
April 2, 2025 by 3 Comments
The Lynx Bookstore 601 South Main Street Gainesville, FL 32601 Introduction: Walking into the bookstore, I noticed the open and high ceilings, the quiet hum of shoppers, the bookstore’s staff, and immediately felt at home. To my right, a large window let in an abundance of natural light, and just beyond that was a wall of […]