Margaret Seidler’s book, “Payne-Ful” Business: Charleston’s Journey To Truth, is going to be known in the future as a pivotal point in changing history. Margaret has not written “another” book about slavery, it is not a memoir where she feels sorry for her circumstances, it is a wake-up call to embrace the kind of knowledge […]
“‘Payne-Ful’ Business: Charleston’s Journey to Truth” by Margaret Seidler
June 17, 2025 by Leave a Comment
“Going to Maine: All the Ways to Fall on the Appalachian Trail” by Sally Chaffin Brooks
June 17, 2025 by Leave a Comment
The author, Sally Chaffin Brooks, is also a comedian, and this shows in a positive way in her memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail when she is only twenty-five. Going to Maine: All the Ways to Fall on the Appalachian Trail (Running Wild Press 2024) is, thus, to be expected humorous and it is in a […]
“Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” by Grady Hendrix
June 16, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Jess Burtis At a maternity home in rural Florida, a teenage girl finds herself abandoned by her family and far from her life in Alabama. Fern is pregnant. It’s a transgression shared by the other young, unmarried girls at the Home for Unwed Mothers. There, in the sweltering summer of 1970, Neva learns […]
“While Visiting Babette” by Kat Meads
June 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
This novella is ninety pages of sheer delight, a well-told story with a tender twist. While Visiting Babette (Sagging Meniscus Press 2025) uses the technique of the unreliable narrator to spin a charming, endlessly clever, and at least slightly bizarre tale of two cousins, Ina and Babette. These two are more like close sisters, each […]
Jess Burtis
June 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Jess Burtis is an avid reader and Southern Gothic enthusiast. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with an M.Phil in Literature, and she received her B.A. from Appalachian State University. Born and raised in the Carolinas, Jess is a fan of Southern writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. When Jess isn’t […]
June Read of the Month: “NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy” by Brooke Champagne
June 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Part of the story behind Brooke Champagne’s astonishingly good essay collection, NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy (UGa Press 2024) is a dog. Well, not just Nola herself, the “brindled, emaciated pit-boxer” that Champagne and her husband adopted after Hurricane Katrina, but moreso her particular expression, born of jealousy and/or inadequacy, when […]