Robert Cooper and I met at a vast Midwestern university as graduate students in a doctoral program. I am a Southerner by birth and am now a professor in Virginia. Cooper is a Southerner by choice after having accepting a professorship at McNeese University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he has lived, taught for decades, […]
August Read of the Month: “The Murder Gene” by Karen Spears Zacharias
August 4, 2022 by Leave a Comment
The Murder Gene (Koehler Books, 2022) is written with the precision of an ace journalist and with the page-turning intrigue of an award-winning novelist. No surprise since the author, Karen Spears Zacharias, is both. This combination of talents results in compelling nonfiction which deserves a wide and appreciative audience. Not only impeccably written, the book […]
“Stories from the Attic” by William Gay
August 3, 2022 by Leave a Comment
William Gay was a literary autodidact who was born, lived most of his life, and died in Lewis County, Tennessee. Through extensive reading and almost continuous writing, he perfected his craft to become one of the essential Southern writers of the twenty-first century. His stories are every bit as visceral as early Cormac McCarthy with […]
Change of Leadership at SLR
July 13, 2022 by 1 Comment
After devoting more than a decade of service to Southern Literary Review, including serving as editor-in-chief and publisher, Allen Mendenhall is stepping down from those roles. Allen has written and published over one hundred of his own book reviews and author interviews on SLR, most recently moving from Q/A print interviews to a video format. […]
“James Dickey: A Literary Life” by Gordon Van Ness
July 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment
For James Dickey, who believed in the “transcendence of the imagination,” as evidenced in a letter to Gore Vidal in 1988—“I make no distinction between fact, fiction, history, reminiscence and fantasy, for the imagination inhabits them all,” —Gordon Van Ness takes on a complex, passionate, revelatory—and often thorny—task in James Dickey: A Literary Life (Mercer […]
“A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line” by John Cullen Gruesser
July 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Thorough research underpins John Cullen Gruesser’s A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs (Oxford University Press, 2022)—and every serious student of Black literature will want to read this biography of an important figure in American history. While the book’s main focus is on Griggs’s writings, it also covers his family and his contributions to the […]