Judging from her exceptional poems in Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press 2025), award-winning poet Lola Haskins has both a scientific and a literary bent to her world view. In this new and glorious collection, she showcases both. Like the cicadas in her poem “The Spirituality of Cicadas,” creatures believed by ancient Chinese to […]
“Terra Incognita” by Steph Post
September 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Steph Post’s exceptional world-building is on full display in Terra Incognita, a novel that first appeared in 2024 in a limited run of 100 hand-crafted copies. The book quickly earned acclaim, winning the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction, and was re-released as an ebook in May 2025. The story opens in 1800s New […]
“Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories” by Les Brown
September 30, 2025 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Jeanne Malmgren If anything is synonymous with Appalachian heritage, it’s the art of storytelling. For generations, highlanders have sat on front porches and under trees, spinning yarns that are sometimes true, sometimes a little “stretched.” When Les Brown was a boy, he listened keenly to the oral history of his forebears—and now, in […]
“Fulfillment” by Lee Cole
September 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In Fulfillment (Knopf 2025), Lee Cole’s second novel, half-brothers Joel and Emmett find themselves together again in their family home in Paducah, Kentucky. You don’t have to have read Cole’s first novel, Groundskeeping, to easily jump into the western Kentucky world of Fulfillment. The two half-brothers are living such different lives. Emmett is broke and […]
“William Faulkner in Holly Springs” by Sally Wolff
September 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Presented in William Faulkner in Holly Springs (University Press of Mississippi 2025), Sally Wolff’s extensive research on the influence of the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, on the fiction of one of this country’s finest authors will be of interest to a number of reading audiences. Most obviously, scholars and fans of William Faulkner’s fiction […]
“Faulkner On and Off the Page” by Carl Rollyson
September 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Everyone remembers the first William Faulkner short story or novel they read. The rich tapestry of the characters is as memorable as the particularities of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County or that famously short chapter in As I Lay Dying. So it is no surprise that biographies of Faulkner’s life and career would be equally complex. […]