Reviewed by Matthew Simmons One of the great frustrations of being a young person in a small town is how incredibly boring it seems. Everything that happens seems to happen somewhere else, and wanderlust is an oppressive feeling, something inescapable, omnipresent, and, importantly, your greatest desire in the world. This is true everywhere, it seems, […]
May Read of the Month: “The Kings and Queens of Roam,” by Daniel Wallace
May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
May Read of the Month: “The Kings and Queens of Roam,” by Daniel Wallace
May 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Lizzie Gheorghita Daniel Wallace fans, count yourselves lucky. The Birmingham native’s forthcoming novel, The Kings and Queens of Roam, echoes the passion for mythology and adventure first evidenced in Big Fish. Wallace illuminates the rich history of a fictional land rife with burly lumberjacks, Chinese immigrants, feral dogs, and ghosts, and seamlessly melds fanciful and imaginative elements […]
May Read of the Month: “The Kings and Queens of Roam,” by Daniel Wallace
May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Southern Literary Review is happy to announce that Daniel Wallace’s novel The Kings and Queens of Roam will be our May Read of the Month. We believe this book is extraordinary, so we have asked two reviewers to write about it. The first review will appear this week, and the second next week. We hope you enjoy.
April Read of the Month: “March with Me,” by Rosalie T. Turner
April 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Philip K. Jason This novel portrays the outer and inner worlds of two young women growing up in Birmingham, Alabama when it became the flashpoint of the Civil Rights Movement. The chapters contain subsections that alternate the consciousnesses of Letitia and Martha Ann, one black, one white, as they process the momentous changes […]
March Read of the Month: “The Books that Mattered,” by Frye Gaillard
March 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall “My first encounters with books were disappointing.” That’s a curious opening line for a memoir about reading inspirational books, but an apt one, too, because Frye Gaillard anticipates right away how he will treat reading: not as an activity undertaken in isolation or as an exercise liberating readers from the quotidian […]
February Read of the Month: “Sheer Indefinite,” by Skip Fox
February 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by William Aarnes Skip Fox’s Sheer Indefinite ranges over many topics. Early in the book a poem describes events in Louisiana in terms of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. There are poems that worry about how well words relate to the world (“This language is broken playground equipment”). There is a sequence of poems […]