Valediction: Poems and Prose (Madville Publishing 2023) by Linda Parsons is an achingly lovely collection in which the poet treks through ordinary facets of life weighing marvel against damage. Parsons’ poems and her micro-essays, which she calls visitations, are eminently relatable—the death of a beloved dog, a complicated father-daughter relationship, loving support from older women […]
“Idiot Men” by Scott Gould
March 19, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Scott Gould’s newest collection, Idiot Men, provides the stage for wayward characters who make poor choices in life and love against a backdrop of elegant prose. In “Word of the Day” (winner of the 2020 Larry Brown Short Story Award), a long-haul truck driver’s wife flees to Jamaica with her lover, leaving him to babysit her hairless tomcat, […]
“Louise and Vincent” by Diane Byington
March 19, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Louise and Vincent (Red Adept Publishing LLC 2023) by Diane Byington is a moving, well-written novel which should captivate readers, especially those who like history and stories of strong women. The book blends well-researched history with the author’s rich imagination and her talent to create a story about star-crossed lovers, domestic abuse, and the power […]
March Read of the Month: “A Glooming Peace This Morning” by Allen Mendenhall
March 6, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Allen Mendenhall’s debut novel, A Glooming Peace This Morning (Livingston Press 2023), is an achingly lovely, stirring novel about confused youth, a tragically mismatched relationship, legal ethics, and small-town Deep South in the 1970s. The story is told in the voice of a mature man looking back forty years to events in his youth, and […]
Claire Hamner Matturro interviews Dr. Allen P. Mendenhall, author of “A Glooming Peace This Morning”
March 5, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Introduction: Allen Mendenhall served as editor and publisher of Southern Literary Review for a decade, and when Associate Editor Claire Hamner Matturro discovered he had written his first novel, A Glooming Peace This Morning, she reached out for an interview. Mendenhall has written eight non-fiction books, including Of Bees and Boys: Lines from a Southern Lawyer […]
“Winston’s Book of Souls” by Terresa Cooper Haskew
March 4, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Although Terresa Haskew’s debut novel, Winston’s Book of Souls (Touchpoint Press 2024), begins with a dead body and revelation of other crimes, it is at heart a story of desire for atonement. Her characters make mistakes but yearn to live good lives. With an ever-increasing tone of foreboding, the story pulls readers relentlessly forward to […]