When Barbara Kingsolver elected Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound, for her Bellwether Prize (2006), the title went straight to my “must read” list. Since it remains one of my favorite books, I’m going to skip back a few years and choose it as our Read of the Month, a new SLR practice that will highlight one […]
In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, by Neil White
May 25, 2010 by Leave a Comment
“Surrounded by men and women who could not hide their disfigurement, I could see my own.” That’s how southern author, Neil White, sums up the eighteen months he spent incarcerated in Carville, Louisiana at the nation’s only functioning leprosarium. In his award-winning memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir, White peels back layers of […]
Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner, by Jay Watson
March 29, 2010 by
Review by Allen Mendenhall Kudos to the University of Georgia Press for this recent reprint of Jay Watson’s Forensic Fictions, which has become something of a classic among law-and-literature scholars. A pioneering project, Forensic Fictions stands as the first critical work to interrogate the lawyer figure in Faulkner’s oeuvre. The tanker truck accident lawyer […]
Oxford American: The Southern Magazine of Good Writing, 11th Annual Southern Music Issue
March 2, 2010 by
Review by Allen Mendenhall Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit because the folks at the Oxford American have done it again! Each year this literary quarterly, proudly published by the University of Central Arkansas, releases a Southern music issue. This year the editors have introduced a new theme—The Southern State […]
Yazoo Blues by John Pritchard
July 15, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Yazoo Blues continues the adventures of Junior Ray Loveblood, the racist, trash-talking, yarn-spinning character from John Pritchard’s first book Junior Ray. Junior Ray is now a semi-retired, self-described lawman and a part-time casino guard who boasts that “I come from the roughest they is.” As storytellers go, he is part historian, part raconteur; he’s also a born philosopher of the small town, […]
Faulkner Studies in Japan, edited by Thomas L. McHaney; compiled by Kenzaburo Ohashi and Kiyoyuki Ono
June 2, 2009 by
Review by Allen Mendenhall It was with great interest—and, perhaps, skepticism, for I myself taught English in Japan—that I read Faulkner Studies in Japan, an assemblage of critical essays written and translated by Japanese academics and edited by American Thomas L. McHaney, professor of literature at Georgia State University. Whisking eagerly through the […]