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. […]
“Love You to Death” by Christina Dotson
September 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Love You to Death (Bantam 2025) by debut author Christina Dotson is an action-packed, smart, genre-blending story of a deep but dysfunctional friendship between two young women. The novel is superb—and superbly disturbing. While female friendships are the heart and soul of women’s fiction, the toxic relationship in Love You to Death is not the […]
“Half-Truths” by Carol Baldwin
September 15, 2025 by 1 Comment
Introduction: Carol Baldwin spent eighteen years researching and writing her latest book, Half-Truths (Monarch Educational Services 2025). I can’t even imagine. I spent about six years on my first novel, and that felt like an eternity. But Baldwin seems to love research, an important quality for someone taking on a historical fiction novel set at […]
“Sunrise on the Reaping” by Suzanne Collins
September 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In a dystopian North America, a boy is pulled into the competition of a lifetime. The winner is guaranteed to never go hungry again, but the losers never make it out alive. The 50th Hunger Games have arrived, and sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy must go into the arena to fight for his life. Suzanne Collins takes […]