Essay by John Nelson I came to literature long before I came to birds. I remember cardinals and robins from my childhood in suburban Chicago, and I probably saw kingfishers and herons as a friend and I searched for snakes along the Des Plaines River, but I don’t recall meeting anyone whose imagination had been […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Richelle Putnam, Author of The Inspiring Life of Eudora Welty
January 29, 2015 by 1 Comment
AM: Thank you for talking to us about your latest book, The Inspiring Life of Eudora Welty. If my memory is correct, this is the first interview that Southern Literary Review has done about a work in the young-adult (or, as they say, YA) category. I’d like to start by asking about your decision to […]
“Heads On Fire: Essays on Southern Fiction,” edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund
January 15, 2015 by Leave a Comment
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 […]
“South, America,” by Rod Davis
October 30, 2013 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Gerald Duff Acclaimed writer Rod Davis in his new novel provides a mystery, the first in what promises to be a series featuring a part-time writer, TV announcer, private investigator, Vietnam veteran, and world-weary survivor named Jack Prine. He lives in New Orleans, but not in the French Quarter. Instead he prefers a […]
“Remembering Medgar Evers,” by Minrose Gwin
August 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Chris Timmons Medgar Evers should be of interest to anyone who has examined the racial history of the United States, and of the South. It’s too bad he is now near-forgotten. Undoubtedly, general American forgetfulness has much to do with it; as far as history goes, Americans do not have much memory. Nor […]
March Read of the Month: “The Books that Mattered,” by Frye Gaillard
March 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall “My first encounters with books were disappointing.” That’s a curious opening line for a memoir about reading inspirational books, but an apt one, too, because Frye Gaillard anticipates right away how he will treat reading: not as an activity undertaken in isolation or as an exercise liberating readers from the quotidian […]