Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s debut novel Loving the Dead and Gone (Regal House, September 2022) is a 2020 Petrichor Prize finalist. There’s more than one aching heart in this excellent story exploring the generational effects of love, loss, betrayal, and redemption. The story opens with middle-aged Clayton finding a young man’s body after someone smashed into the […]
September Read of the Month: “Loving the Dead and Gone,” by Judith Turner-Yamamoto
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
If You Want to Understand Code-Switching, You Need to Read Jean Toomer’s “Cane”
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Toomer’s groundbreaking 1923 work reflects the complexity of racial performance By Lee Williams As the Harlem Renaissance skipped to a run, the South Georgian characters of Jean Toomer’s Cane demonstrated what present day Black Americans know all too well: to survive the collisions of racial trauma or violence, one has to switch identities. Constantly. Published in 1923, […]
Claire Hamner Matturro reviews “No Names to Be Given” and interviews the author Julia Brewer Daily
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
THE BOOK Julia Brewer Daily’s, novel, No Names to Be Given (Admission Press, 2021) is an evocative and sensitive novel about three young women from vastly different backgrounds who face unwed pregnancies in the 1960’s Deep South. Sandy, Faith, and Becca become roommates in a New Orleans maternity home hospital for unwed mothers and gradually […]
“Hannah and Ariela” by Johnnie Bernhard
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Providing a blueprint for a rich, fulfilling life after the loss of a loved one was not likely Johnnie Bernhard’s main intent in writing her latest novel, Hannah and Ariela, (TCU Press, 2022). Yet this compassionate novel set near the Texas border does exactly that. Seventy-three-year-old Hannah Duran stars in this story, although the chapters […]
“Dead Letters from Paradise” by Ann McMan
August 24, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Dead Letters from Paradise (Bywater Books, 2022) by Ann McMann blends literary mystery, historical fiction, and romance with entirely delightful results. There are no dead bodies in this mystery, and there’s no overt sex in the romance. Yet here are two reasons—among many—to love this novel. First, the crisp, yet lyrical prose style, coupled with […]
“Just That” by Robert Cooper
August 23, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Robert Cooper and I met at a vast Midwestern university as graduate students in a doctoral program. I am a Southerner by birth and am now a professor in Virginia. Cooper is a Southerner by choice after having accepting a professorship at McNeese University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he has lived, taught for decades, […]