Southern literature
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Praise the Bottom: A Conversation with Malcolm Tariq
Malcolm Tariq discusses his debut poetry collection, HEED THE HOLLOW.
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No-Man’s Land: A Conversation with Angela Mitchell
Angela Mitchell discusses her debut collection, UNNATURAL HABITATS & OTHER STORIES.
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Re-Rethinking Harper Lee
At Lit Hub, Kate Jenkins discusses Southern literature’s clumsy history in dealing with race, and theorizes that, in light of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee may have actually been much more ahead of her time than we thought: Did…
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A Classroom of Atticus F., G., and H.
It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. Over at the Paris Review, Sadie Stein takes a look at the unfortunate facts: Atticus was kind of a racist, and Atticus is the most popular male baby…
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The Gods of Southern Gothic
At the Guardian, author M.O. Walsh tries to account for the global popularity of southern gothic literature. While he attributes much of southern gothic literature’s success to a tradition of oral storytelling, he also suggests that it is the southern novelist’s…
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Truly, Zero
To write a book like Mislaid, you have to simultaneously be aggressively assured of your own cultural experience and have, truly, zero fucks to give. VICE talks to Nell Zink about process, practice, and poor old Jonathan Franzen.
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A Southern Northerner
Through the South, I tried to make sense of what seemed similarly wrong with the North. Over at BuzzFeed Books, James Hannaham explains why he decided to be a “Southern writer” despite his New York origins.
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The Rumpus Interview with Skip Horack
Skip Horack talks about his new novel, The Other Joseph, blending research with fiction, and living with the “curse of the fiction writer.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About the American South
The latest issue of Guernica is out, and it’s a doozy. The special issue—the first of 4 such issues funded by a Kickstarter campaign—takes on the American South. Features include novelist Kiese Laymon in conversation with his mother on language and love…
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A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction Of William Gay
The great Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70.
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Heartlands
Four debut authors—Josh Weil, Skip Horack, Holly Goddard Jones, and Amy Greene—paint varied pictures of the South they know.