Reviewed by Matthew Simmons 150 years after the end of the Civil War, I sit in Columbia, South Carolina. The banner that the local university’s football coach once called “That Damn Flag” has come down, to the joy of some and the consternation of others. In the spring of this year, I worked on a […]
March Read of the Month: “Kids These Days,” by Drew Perry
March 4, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Matt Simmons Perhaps no trope is as evocative of southern writing as the “sense of place,” a concept that can be both incredibly limiting and powerfully productive in how we read about and respond to the American South. On the one hand, this trope may force us to read in search of southern […]
“Fielder’s Choice,” by J. Mark Hart
March 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Review by Matthew Simmons Years ago, after reading Richard Russo’s Mohawk, I decided I needed more flexibility in labeling fiction. Obviously, there was pulp, there was genre fiction, and there was the rarified air of “lit-tra-ture.” But what I’d found in Mohawk seemed to somehow occupy parts of all of those labels simultaneously and effortlessly. […]