Summary: Sam and Jeff Freeman become best friends on the day they meet in 1968, the year they turn eight. I Remember Everything traces their lives for more than five decades, from growing up to growing old, and follows them on grand adventures, including two magnificent road trips, the first to New England the year they […]
“The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery” by Di Rushing
February 23, 2025 by 1 Comment
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”
February 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
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
September 10, 2024 by Leave a Comment
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 […]
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 […]