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 […]
“The Mango Tree” by Annabelle Towmetich
April 15, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Annabelle Tometich’s delightful sense of humor sweetens even the toughest, most humiliating moments of her life in her outstanding memoir, The Mango Tree (Little, Brown and Company, 2024). Beginning with an epigraph from her mother’s Facebook feed, the book announces its tone immediately: laugh-out-loud funny. “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts […]
Dawn Major interviews Emma Ensley, author of “The Computer Room”
April 14, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Emma Ensley’s collection of short stories, The Computer Room, proves that there are still a few out there with a sense of humor. This book is a must read for Millennials and Gen-Z although readers from any generation (yes, Boomers you will relate as well) would appreciate Ensley’s stories. Prepare to be transported back in […]
“The Slip” by Lucas Schaefer
April 14, 2026 by Leave a Comment
To write a novel that both expands generations and centers on one person is always a hard thing to do. To do it so successfully with your debut novel is another thing altogether. The Slip (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Lucas Schaefer is a huge novel, not so much physically as mentally. You start the […]
Jennifer Lewis Interviews Cynthia Leal Massey, Author of “Well of Deception”
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
A finalist for the 2026 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, Well of Deception (Stoney Creek Publishing 2025), by Cynthia Leal Massey, is a historical fiction novel taking place in south central Texas in the late 1950s. Inspired by true events, this story is about the murder of Maggie Schneider at her turkey farm […]
“Ava: A Novel” by Victoria Dillon
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Just as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World invited us to imagine test-tube babies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale invites us to imagine fertile women enslaved as breeders, Ava: A Novel by Victoria Dillon opens us to the possibility that in a post-Roe world, human birth might evolve into something entirely different. I mean, entirely […]
Read of the Month: “Art Work: On the Creative Life “by Sally Mann
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Almost without exception, seeing a book with the subtitle “On the Creative Life” I’d take a pass. But who can resist a book like Sally Mann’s Art Work Art Work: On the Creative Life (New York: Abrams Press, 2025), that begins with “This is a book about how to get shit done” ? Sally Mann, […]