Reviewed by Matthew Simmons It is difficult to give Terry Roberts’s debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, the full and proper treatment it deserves. This is not because it is a novel marked by “difficulty” of some experimental sense; to the contrary, it is a highly-readable, easily-digestible book. But in that statement lies […]
November Read of the Month: “A Short Time to Stay Here,” by Terry Roberts
November 7, 2012 by 1 Comment
October Read of the Month: Dixie Bohemia, by John Shelton Reed
October 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia is difficult to classify. It’s easier to say what it isn’t than to say what it is. It isn’t biography. It isn’t documentary. It isn’t quite history, although it does organize and present information about a distinct class of past individuals interacting and sometimes living together […]
September Read of the Month: “Keowee Valley,” by Katherine Scott Crawford
September 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Philip K. Jason An independent woman; a lush frontier environment; the approach of war; and a romance of opposites are only some of the ingredients in Ms. Crawford’s ambitious first novel. Combining a style that is frequently lyrical, abundant historical research that has been well-absorbed and woven into the fiction with authority, and […]
August Read of the Month: The Oxford American’s Best of the South 2012 Issue
August 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The Read of the Month for August is the latest issue of The Oxford American. The issue, subtitled Best of the South 2012, features fiction by Wendell Berry, Tyrone Jaeger, and Addie Citchens; introduces new OA columnist Jesmyn Ward; and offers eclectic essays and commentary on such topics as food, Hilton Head, religion, music, kinship, […]
July Read of the Month: “Blueberry Years,” by Jim Minnick
July 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Jim Minnick’s The Blueberry Years, re-released in paperback a few weeks ago, proclaims itself, in the subtitle, as being a “memoir of farm and family.” And so it is. Yet, while Minnick is too humble to proclaim it as such, it is the reader’s prerogative to make of a book what it really and truly […]
June Read of the Month: “Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale,” by Lynda Rutledge
June 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Review by Andy Johnson. Amy Einhorn Books /G.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin). Hardcover. 289 pages. $25.95 In this, Lynda Rutledge’s first novel, God commands ailing Texas widow Faith Bass Darling to sell her Louis XV Elephant Clock, an heirloom wedding ring, a banker’s rolltop desk, a rare Dance Dragoon pistol, 44 signed Tiffany lamps, a portrait […]