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 […]
“Pat Conroy’s Lowcountry” by Lynn Seldon
October 7, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Pat Conroy’s Lowcountry (History Press 2026) by Lynn Seldon offers a literary travel guide to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and a glimpse into the Lowcountry heart of the incomparable author of The Prince of Tides. As a longtime friend and sometime neighbor of Pat Conroy and his wife, fellow novelist Cassandra King, Seldon is perfectly […]
October Read of the Month: “The Nurse at Baker Hospital” by Jocelyn Cullity
October 7, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Horrifying. Haunting. Gut-wrenching. All of these describe The Nurse at Baker Hospital (Regal, October 2026) by Jocelyn Cullity. Drawing on primary sources, the novel meets the highest standards of historical fiction while reading with the urgency of a thriller. Though the events are rooted in the past, the lessons they offer are not merely relevant—they […]
CHRONOS TIME OF POLITICS, KAIROS TIME OF LIFE LIVED: Gail Godwin on Life, Politics, and Citizenship by Kerstin W. Shands
October 5, 2026 by Leave a Comment
When the 2024 presidential election was approaching Gail Godwin decided to write a chronicle to record the political development, a chronicle that would also look back at important periods in her own life. Her new book, The Art of Becoming a Citizen: A Memoir (Bloomsbury 2026), raises profound questions about meaning and morality on personal and […]
“A Time of Witches” by Madeline Martin
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
A Time of Witches (Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins, 2026) by USA Today bestselling author Madeline Martin is an intense, spellbinding dual-timeline novel about magic, love, and the power of sisterhood. The contemporary story is set in Savannah, while the older story is set in 16th-century England during the time of the Hopkins witch trials, also known […]
“Keeper of Lost Children” by Sadeqa Johnson
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Keeper of Lost Children (Simon & Schuster, 2026) by Sadeqa Johnson is an excellent historical novel of warmth and transcendence about three Black people who overcome great odds in the decades after WWII. At the heart of the novel, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American military officer, is living in Occupied Germany in […]
“Happy Happy,” a novel by Corey Mesler
October 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment
When I first began reading Happy Happy (Livingston Press 2026), I wondered why my friend Corey Mesler didn’t write this book as a memoir, instead of a novel. He explains why it would have been more difficult to write the painful aspects of his struggles as memoir, but his fiction version is so powerful, so […]