Kayla Hardy’s The Quarter Queen (Ballantine Books, 2026) is a gripping, cinematic tale honoring the complexity and strength of mother-daughter relationships, and the breadth and beauty of the religious practice of Voodoo in antebellum New Orleans. Readers are immersed in the perilous, vibrant quarters of the slave-owning city, where languages and cultures blend, and competing […]
“Yellow” by Amy Pence
July 11, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Yellow (Red Hen Press 2026) is a multi-threaded transformation of the novel into an innovative form. Twelve-year-old Z learns about the world through the televised events of 1973 while the nation is taken by the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space. That summer she discovers an unclassified slime mold in her backyard which she […]
“Shelter Me” by Daren Dean
November 1, 2025 by 1 Comment
In Shelter Me, Daren Dean brings to life the residents of a struggling neighborhood in central Louisiana. Though the town of Satsuma Grove is fictional, the catastrophic flood at the heart of this novel is based on the real and unnamed 2016 disaster, during which twenty to thirty inches of rain fell over just three […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Roger Johns, Author of “River of Secrets”
October 18, 2018 by Leave a Comment
AM: Thanks for doing this interview, Roger. Your new novel, River of Secrets, is a sequel to Dark River Rising. Both novels feature Wallace Hartman, a detective in Baton Rouge. What drew you to the detective genre? RJ: Allen, thank you for interviewing me. It’s a real privilege to be able to do this. The […]
“Letters from Paris,” by Juliet Blackwell
May 30, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Johnnie Bernhard Juliet Blackwell’s Letters from Paris is solid reading entertainment with a lovable protagonist, Claire Broussard, whose small-town Louisiana beginnings lead to tragedy. Blackwell builds suspense without sacrificing seriousness or believability, two common victims of the mystery genre. Perhaps that’s the key to Blackwell’s novel – everything about it is “just right.” […]
Laughlin: Romanticist Extraordinaire, A Memoir
July 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment
By Louis Gallo Laughlin, Ghosts Along the Mississippi: An essay in the poetic interpretation of Louisiana’s plantation archictecture—One hundred photographs by the author (Bonanza Books, NY—1961) —Clarence John Laughlin, Aperture Monograph (1973) I. I’ve never believed that literature is an ideal conduit for surrealism other than in spurts such as the “Nighttown” episode in Joyce’s […]