Reviewed by Ryan Guth I was watching an episode of The West Wing a few nights ago on Netflix. As a group of President Bartlet’s staffers walked into a blues club in DC, I suddenly found myself thinking that would have amused an acquaintance of mine … only I couldn’t quite recall his name. Then […]
“Undead Souths,” edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner
September 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Joshua S. Fullman This volume follows countless others in their earnest curiosity about Southern identification and expression. For many Southerners, their region represents all that is/was great about the American heritage. For many others, it is something un-American, anti-American, or sub-human. Efforts to understand the South by both her defenders and detractors have […]
“The Pink House,” by Trish MacEnulty
September 20, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Trish MacEnulty’s smooth delivery of four very different female viewpoints in The Pink House creates a rich reading experience to savor like a tasty casserole. Each narrator has a compelling story and unique problems that meld into a riveting whole. The action centers around a women’s prison in North Florida, a […]
“Don’t Date Baptists—and other things my mother told me,” by Terry Barr
September 15, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Walter Bennett Terry Barr’s Don’t Date Baptists is foremost a book of stories—an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative—about a boy’s coming to manhood and moral awareness in the deep South of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a propitious time and place indeed to be the son of a Jewish father and Methodist mother. And that […]
September Read of the Month: “Book of the Beloved,” by Carolyn Haines
September 6, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro The amazing Carolyn Haines is at it again. The compelling, complex and darkly fascinating Book of the Beloved illustrates all over again just how talented and versatile the award-winning Haines is as a writer. Beloved is a book you won’t be able to put down, Southern to the core, and […]
“Miss Julia Inherits a Mess,” by Ann B. Ross
August 31, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl About a decade ago a television series began its run: Gossip Girl. It was a teen drama based on a novel series by Cecily von Ziegesar. Fictional lives, then, of a batch of adolescents, queen bees in their gossipy chess games. It takes little imagination to add, say, fifty gossipy […]