In Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press 2023), Christopher Lowe unleashes the dark side of “Friday Night Lights,” alongside its cutthroat recruitment tactics, the commercialization of players, and the dynamics of football family legacies. Set in the Deep South where high school football is the heartbeat of small Southern […]
Dawn Major in Discussion with Christopher Lowe, author of “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay”
“What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart”: Denise S. Robbins interviews author Max Hipp
Introduction The author, teacher, and musician Max Hipp is a creature of the South, which becomes immediately clear in the first sentence of new debut short story collection—and every sentence after that. What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart (Cool Dog Sound 2024) is an honest, brutal, and necessary dive into the heart of the […]
Fairy Tales, Monsters, and More with Bradley Sides, Author of “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood,” and Dawn Major
From a pond monster called King George to docile dragons and half-shark boys to monsters of the human variety, Bradley Sides’s Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (Montag Press 2024) puts a new spin on how we view monsters and modern-day mythmaking. Clearly, monsters hold a special place in Sides’s writerly heart because we met […]
“The Final Days of Great American Shopping,” by Gilbert Allen
Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall With so many journals and genres available today, the dependable reviewer has a duty to warn off the noble optimists and advise the faint-hearted when a book is not for them. Obligation thus requires that I caution readers: Gilbert Allen’s The Final Days of Great American Shopping, a collection of short […]
“Soon,” by Pam Durban
Reviewed by Dan Sundahl Came a time I drove into old man Engebretson’s farm yard, late 1950s, southern Minnesota. It was a good bright day with a light sugary coating of snow on the ground. The old man had a 40-acre duck pond on his farm and corn rows to walk, ducks and pheasants in […]
Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories
Click to Order Pinckney Benedict’s third collection of stories, Miracle Boy and other Stories, fearlessly merges Benedict’s well-established literary style with a darker, more “popular” approach to storytelling. Born to a family of West Virginia dairy farmers, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Benedict burst onto the literary fiction scene in 1987 with […]