Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The “Etowah” in the title to Raymond L. Atkins’s recently published book refers to a 164-mile-long waterway rising in northwest Georgia to begin flowing south and then west through Rome, Georgia. If one had the interest, one might build a raft and, Huckleberry-like, float along through Alabama down to Mobile […]
“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 […]
Walter Bennett
September 13, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Walter Bennett is a former civil rights attorney, judge, and law professor who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is the author of The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and the novel Leaving Tuscaloosa (Fuze Publishing, 2012). He is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
“All the Governor’s Men,” by Katherine Clark
July 27, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl I title this review “The Overly-Stuffed Novel,” a designation that calls attention to Willa Cather’s credo stated with some punchy forcefulness in her essay “The Novel Demeuble.” The point is simple enough: Aesthetically, the novel does not merely catalog the furniture of life, physical things, processes, sensations, thoughts. She analogizes […]
“My Southern Journey,” by Rick Bragg
July 14, 2016 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro Rick Bragg can spin a charming, compelling story about coleslaw—that’s the range of this man’s creativity and talent, which I’ve been appreciating since reading (savoring) his hauntingly beautiful memoir about growing up hard, fast and poor in Alabama, All Over But The Shouting (Pantheon 1997). I wasn’t the only one […]
Joshua S. Fullman
May 31, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Joshua S. Fullman is an Assistant Professor of English at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama. He earned his bachelor’s and Master’s at California State University, another Master’s at the University of Edinburgh, and his PhD at Southern Illinois University. He currently serves as the Director of the Institute of Faith and the Academy at Faulkner, […]