Reviewed by Elizabeth Harris Migratory Animals is an ambitious, contemporary-feeling novel that measures, for me, the difference between Now in Southern writing and a classic Then—even as issues from Then still devil our shared lives. It’s a Then of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Ralph Ellison, William Goyen, and those of their early-to-mid-twentieth-century characters who […]
November Read of the Month: “A Hanging at Cinder Bottom,” by Glenn Taylor
November 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Glenn Taylor’s new over-the-top caper sparkles with cinematic scenes begging to be transformed into film. A Hanging at Cinder Bottom: A Novel (Tin House Books) is primarily set in West Virginia coal country with occasional forays into Baltimore. The white-faced monkey depicted on the cover plays a role in a story […]
November Read of the Month: “The Curse of Crow Hollow,” by Billy Coffey
November 3, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by John Ryan Hrebik “Would you know evil if you looked it in the eyes? Would you truly?” Billy Coffey’s first-person narrator poses this question to an unknown traveler who’s passing through Crow Hollow. The speaker, “a tired old man” eager to introduce us to both his town and its occupants, does not reveal […]
“Silent We Stood,” by Henry Chapell
October 28, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Extensive research led to a compelling depiction of Dallas, Texas, just before the Civil War in Henry Chapell’s novel, Silent We Stood. The story develops from a fire that destroyed much of the city in 1860, when fear of slave rebellion gripped the South following John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. […]
“Slab,” by Selah Saterstrom
October 26, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It’s been about four decades since the now mythologized Merwin incident at Naropa, chronicled by Tom Clark in a Cadmus Edition titled The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. In many respects, the incident is now like an epitaph for very different kinds of writing, the very charged, passionate and declamatory style […]
“Isolation,” by Mary Anna Evans
October 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro Isolation is Mary Anna Evans’s writing at its finest—which is saying a lot for this award-winning author. Evans has long been adept at blending history, archaeology, mystery and domestic drama into riveting tales, smoothly written and well laced with the homegrown humidity and lushness of her native South. She’s conjured […]