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.
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Charles D. Thompson, Author of “Going Over Home”
January 23, 2020 by Leave a Comment
AM: Grateful for this interview, Charles. Your latest book is Going Over Home, published by Chelsea Green Publishing. It comes with the endorsement of none other than Willie Nelson! Until I opened it and started reading, I didn’t realize it was a memoir. I had been expecting—what exactly? Something academic? A polemic? Your tenacity is […]
Devi S. Laskar, Chapel Hill Native, Wins $5,000 Crook’s Corner Book Prize
January 22, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues, published by Counterpoint Press, is the winner of the seventh annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. This year’s judge was National Book Award-winning author Charles Frazier, who says, “I loved the very focused and concise ideas and dramatic […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Douglas Dell, Author of “Deep and Dirty”
January 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment
AM: “The funny thing about The South,” says the narrator in the prologue to your debut novel, Deep and Dirty, “is that it’s pretty, an odd choice of word but highly practical, take away the disasters sitting on almost every other corner and you’ll notice nature has this way of battling human influence by blotting out […]
“Chita: A Memory of Last Island,” by Lafcadio Hearn (edited by Delia LaBarre)
January 8, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Adele Annesi The nineteenth-century novella Chita: A Memory of Last Island, by Lafcadio Hearn, blends fact with fiction in a lavishly haunting tale of a Louisiana isle whose serene beauty is destroyed, leaving a legacy of sorrow, joy, and warning. The real L’Île Dernière (“Last Island”) is gone, but her story remains. Set […]
January Read of the Month: “The Moonshiner’s Daughter,” by Donna Everhart
January 1, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Philip K. Jason It’s 1960 in Wilke’s County, North Carolina and sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser has a problem. In fact, she has several problems. One is an awkward and demeaning relationship with her father. He seems remote and silently critical. Jessie has asked him over and over to explain the death of her mother, […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews George Weinstein, Author of “Watch What You Say”
December 26, 2019 by Leave a Comment
AM: Thanks, George, for this interview. I think we met once, years ago, at an Atlanta Writers Conference. This must have been around 2010 or 2011, when I was still a doctoral student in English and living in Atlanta—Alpharetta to be precise. What strikes me about the release of your new novel, Watch What You […]
“Catacombs,” by Mary Anna Evans
December 24, 2019 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro Below the surface in Oklahoma City, a vast system of catacombs exists where a community of Chinese people once lived underground in the early twentieth century. These catacombs are not fiction, though the book Catacombs (Poisoned Pen, 2019) is. Mary Anna Evans, the author of Catacombs, explains, “The parts of […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Walt Gragg, Author of “The Chosen One”
December 19, 2019 by Leave a Comment
AM: Thank you for doing this interview during the holiday season, Walt. Your second novel, The Chosen One, a military thriller, was recently released to much acclaim. Congratulations. Did you expect any Rushdie-style pushback against your depiction of fundamentalist Islam and the prophetic cleric Muhammad Mourad? WG: I certainly hope not. The book is not […]