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 […]
October Books of Note: “Choose What You Want to Regret,” “The Swan House,” “Divided Loyalty,” and “The Leaving Gene”
October 28, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Effective Leadership Choose What You Want to Regret by Jim Murdaugh. (Sept. 2026) This book by Tallahassee State College president Jim Murdaugh gives both aspiring and veteran leaders a blueprint on how to elevate their leadership impact. His experience includes previous leadership roles in local law enforcement, state government and the military. Murdaugh’s 134-page book […]
“Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea” by Jim Gulledge
October 28, 2026 by Leave a Comment
An heirloom pocket watch loosely links three novellas together in Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea by Jim Gulledge. Each story captures the distinctive beauty of a different North Carolina community—Saluda, Peachland, and Beaufort. The prologue presents a striking image: a hawk, a rabbit, and a rattlesnake, each “oblivious to all hungers but its own,” […]
Donna Meredith interviews Walker Abel, author of “Heart & Bone”
October 28, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Heart & Bone Summary: Deep in the Appalachian winter, a brutal ambush at a remote mountain shelter leaves two young hikers dead. For Emma Fisher and her friend Summer, surviving the attack is only the beginning. Somewhere in the whiteout, a man named Jedediah follows them—a man bound to Emma’s past by something she believed […]
Winners of the 2026 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award
October 24, 2026 by Leave a Comment
WINGS STRONGER THAN ANY FEAR by Sheema Kalbasi 2026 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award Winner GARGOYLE VIGIL by Jamie L. Smith 2026 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award Winner, Editors’ Choice Visit the Anhinga Press website to order.
“The Marriage Bed” by Tommy Hays
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
There is young, falling-in-love love, and there is old, comfortable love. There is love that makes life easier, and there is love that breaks your heart. And finally, there is love you thought you knew, until you find out you actually may not have known it at all. Tommy Hays, in his gentle novel The […]
“Gwendolyn & Eddie” by Michael O. L. Seabaugh
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Gwendolyn & Eddie (Koehler Books 2025) is Michael O. L. Seabaugh’s third novel. I could not put this book down. I read it in twenty-four hours and was mesmerized by how I was drawn into the story. Interestingly enough, this novel is touted as being a “a darkly comedic domestic dramedy about a 1950s housewife, […]