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 […]
“Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession” by Lawrence Wells
September 10, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Judge William Alsup, Author of “Won Over”
September 11, 2019 by 2 Comments
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
November 27, 2015 by 1 Comment
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 […]
“From Midnight to Guntown,” by John Hailman
August 21, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel Sundahl If I remember right there’s a commemorative statue of William Faulkner on the Oxford, Mississippi, City Hall front lawn. He’s seated on a park bench; there’s a patrician elegance to the statue, legs crossed, pipe in hand, a battered (what was likely brown) hat. What’s missing is a glass of “branch […]
“Retarded Girl Raised in Dog Pen,” by Lauren Leigh
May 12, 2015 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Amy Susan Wilson Disabilities, a family murder, Mississippi, a mental institution, and the spirit of redemption all appear in Lauren Leigh’s debut novel, Retarded Girl Raised in Dog Pen. Every chapter, while often bearing brutal abuse in the household of a rural Mississippi family, rings like a bell, clear and resonant with no […]