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 […]
Melissa Jean
September 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Melissa Jean is an environmental studies professor, independent researcher and writer/editor, forest therapy guide, and community educator teaching about nature-based mindfulness and creative writing. She holds a PhD in Human Dimensions of Ecosystem Science and Management and an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in The Colorado Review and a variety of online journals, including […]
“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 […]
Fascinating Faulkner: Personal essay from Mollie Smith Waters
September 25, 2025 by 1 Comment
Storytelling. It is what makes Southerners, well, Southern. While the South has always been able to boast of great yarn spinners, one of the most famous of those writers is William Faulkner. After all, he won a Nobel Prize for Literature, so his genius is not in question. Faulkner was truly brilliant at capturing the […]
“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. […]