“Cormac McCarthy: The Great Optimist of American Literature” by James Wade

Associate Editor Dawn Major has not had the pleasure of meeting author, James Wade, who wrote the following piece, “Cormac McCarthy: The Great Optimist of American Literature.” She met him through another fellow Southern author. If anything, the Southern writing world is a small one. Everyone knows everyone in the end, well…maybe not Cormac McCarthy […]

“Heads On Fire: Essays on Southern Fiction,” edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund

  Reviewed by William Walsh There is a reason I do not own a Kindle, a Fire HDX, an iPad Air, an HP Omni, or any of the many e-book readers, and it’s not because I’m against modern technology or I’m some hermit-like curmudgeon living in a 1950s cave who thinks the old way of […]

“The Son,” by Philipp Meyer

Reviewed by Miles Smith IV Texans, and Americans at large, sense that there was, at some time, a dark, bloody land that destroyed and created cultures, people, places, and even ideas. Texans know this land as their Lone Star State. But to many Texans and many southerners this brutal place depicted so viscerally in Philip […]

Bill Lavender Interviews Moira Crone about her Book “The Not Yet”

BILL LAVENDER:  What does the book have and have not to do with New Orleans? MOIRA CRONE: When I first started writing the book in the 1990’s, I set it in New Orleans because I live here, and because it began with a dream that was set here—a strange dream of a young man sitting in […]