The Bright Years (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Sarah Damoff shimmers as an exquisite, poignant portrait of a family crumbling as their painful pasts push their way into the present. It is a story of addiction and recovery. Of love and loss. Of forgiveness and redemption. Set in Texas, The Bright Years takes readers on […]
“Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South” by Thomas Helling, MD.
April 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South (UMiss Press 2024) by Thomas Helling, MD., is a carefully researched academic book examining illness, medicine, and medical training in the South from the 1600s to the late 1800s. Helling’s book includes a preface and thirteen chapters. Distinctive to Helling’s book, is his 1) careful attention […]
“Boomerang” by Robert Bailey
April 29, 2025 by 3 Comments
“[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 […]