“[Do] you really believe that the US government has deliberately covered up the cure for cancer?” This question, asked by Eli James, the protagonist in Robert Bailey’s newest political thriller, The Boomerang (Thomas and Mercer May 2025), reflects the central conflict in a riveting, suspenseful, and gloriously bold novel. The author has faced cancer within […]
SLR editors converse with Robert Bailey, author of “The Boomerang”
April 29, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Introduction: Southern Literary Review is pleased to present this three-way exchange about Robert Bailey’s newest book, The Boomerang, which is his eleventh novel. Robert joins Editor Donna Meredith and Associate Editor Claire Hamner Matturro in discussing The Boomerang, a political thriller that had Donna and Claire both going “Wow” when they read it. Robert is […]
“Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl” by Hyeseung Song
April 29, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Hyeseung Song lays bare the difficulties she encountered trying to fit into American culture as a girl of Korean descent in Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon & Schuster 2024). Throughout her young life, Hyeseung longs to be seen for who she really is. She feels she is either invisible to White Americans […]
“Everything Is Ghosts” by Tyler Robert Sheldon
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Perhaps it was no accident that I finally had a chance to read Tyler Robert Sheldon’s latest poetry collection, Everything Is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2024), at Christmastime. Just like the Christmas Eve of Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ immortal Christmas tale, this book is populated by ghosts of past, present, and future. The poems […]
“Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder” by Brandi Bradley
April 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder (Rumor Mill Press 2025) is not your mama’s police procedural, folks. In this sequel to Local Monsters, author Brandi Bradley has crafted a particularly riveting mystery by going heavy on character development instead of hitting the reader—boom, boom, boom—with chronological facts and forensics. Told from alternating points of […]
“The Welcome” by Hubert Creekmore edited by Philip “Pip” Gordon
April 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Pip Gordon calls The Welcome (UMiss Press 2023), Hubert Creekmore’s “most radically significant work,” and both terms seem important to understanding what makes this novel noteworthy. Gordon discovered that, perhaps because the novel went so completely out of print, there was surprisingly little academic work on it, despite its recognition as an important example of […]