“The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery” by Di Rushing

Di Rushing’s The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery (UMiss Press 2024) is described as both memoir and true crime. If one reads the book for memoir alone, the description of the author’s Mississippi upbringing, her travels abroad as a young military wife in Germany, and the return […]

Books of Note: “Can’t Shake the Dust”; “Faulkner, Welty, Wright”; and “Before We Left the Land”

Can’t Shake the Dust Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing 2024) by C.H. Hooks employs three points of view to paint a full picture of a dysfunctional family in South Georgia. The alcoholic father and son are obsessed with racing—even though the father lost a leg in a racetrack accident. The recovering addict mother […]

“Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession” by Lawrence Wells

Lawrence Wells knows how to tell an entertaining story, and his latest, Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession (University of Mississippi Press 2024), is a humdinger. The manuscript was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for narrative nonfiction at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. Even readers who are not […]

SLR Interviews Susan Cushman

 

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Judge William Alsup, Author of “Won Over”

AM:  Judge Alsup, I’m grateful that you’ve shared your time to do this interview for Southern Literary Review.  The occasion for the interview is, of course, the publication of your memoir, Won Over, which has this subtitle: “Reflections of a Federal Judge on His Journey from Jim Crow Mississippi.”  What made you decide to write […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Russell Scott, Author of The Hard Times

AM: Thank you for the interview and congratulations on the publication of The Hard Times. This novel opens in Mississippi with an alarming scene involving a doctor—or doctors—and then brings us to Africa. You’re a doctor in Mississippi who’s traveled to Africa. What’s going on here? RS: I guess you write what you know; it […]