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 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, […]
“The Charmed Library” by Jennifer Moorman
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
The Charmed Library (Harper Muse 2026) by Jennifer Moorman, is Jennifer’s seventeenth book. I met Jennifer Moorman at The Pat Conroy Literary Center and was immediately charmed by her. So charmed that I offered to read and review her book. I was surprised, delighted, annoyed, and wondering; from the foreshadowing, I spent most of the book anticipating a very […]
“The Weird Girl” by Carla Damron
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
The Weird Girl (Stillwater River 2025) by Carla Damron continues the story of social worker Georgia Thayer that readers met in The Orchid Tattoo. (See our review here.) In this installment, Georgia is fostering Tessa, a vulnerable teenager she previously rescued from sex traffickers. Given Tessa’s traumatic past, her struggle to fit in at school […]
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has appeared recently in Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Crab Orchard Review. Her first book, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is currently available from Kelsay Books. Her latest collection, Little Stone, Little Stone, is centered on her experiences with ovarian cancer and is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She serves as […]
“All That Teethes Within” by Kari Gunter-Seymour
October 20, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s fourth full-length poetry collection, All That Teethes Within (University Press of Kentucky, 2026), grapples with death in many forms and is a journey to be savored and held as you meander along with the speakers of these poems who meet each moment with compassion and honesty. For a book about death, there is […]