Allen Mendenhall Interviews Lauren Clark

AM:  Lauren, thank you for doing this interview.  I’m glad to have the opportunity to ask you about Dancing Naked in Dixie.  Before I get to the book, though, I’d like to ask you about your transition from television to writing.  How did that transition take place? LC:  I loved working in TV news and […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Julia Nunnally Duncan

AM:  Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, and congratulations on your forthcoming book, Barefoot in the Snow.  This is, I believe, your third collection of poetry.  How does this one differ from your earlier books of poetry? JND:  Barefoot in the Snow reflects a more mature vision and perspective of events […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews John Shelton Reed

Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, John.  I know that readers of the Southern Literary Review are excited to hear from you. Dixie Bohemia began, your Introduction explains, with the substance of the Fleming Lectures you delivered at Louisiana State University in April 2011.  Here we are just a year and a […]

October Read of the Month: Dixie Bohemia, by John Shelton Reed

Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia is difficult to classify. It’s easier to say what it isn’t than to say what it is. It isn’t biography.  It isn’t documentary.  It isn’t quite history, although it does organize and present information about a distinct class of past individuals interacting and sometimes living together […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Coleman Hutchison

Click here for a review of Apples and Ashes. Click image below to purchase this book. Thank you, Dr. Hutchison, for doing this interview, and congratulations on the publication of this fine book, Apples and Ashes. You address this question at length in your book, but I’ll ask the question anyway for the benefit of […]

“Lions of the West,” by Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan.  Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion.  Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. Good histories don’t just tell stories; they make arguments.  Robert Morgan’s arguments in Lions of the West, subtle though they are, run as follows: historians and storytellers cannot help but view dramatic […]