2022 Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters' Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction. Old Country Fiddle orbits around the lives of an eccentric cast of characters from the Texas Hill Country. A roadside flag salesman profits from a neighborhood culture war. A professional congratulator…
Buena Suerte in Red Glitter resonates with the spiritual and secular hunger of a Johnny Cash album. Craven's poetry roams the raw edge of suburban Los Angeles, raising a full glass in the transcendent haze of the bars of Manhattan. Inflamed with intoxication, loss, longing, visceral anger and…
The Alexandria You Are Losing and Other Stories explores universal themes of dislocation and uprooting; American and Arab characters yearning for a home they have forsaken, or for a more palpable sense of identity and belonging. The stories also illuminate the common threads that connect us as human…
As a lawyer, Allen Mendenhall asks questions. As a writer, he's interested in the craft. Combine these two and you get this, a collection of writers discussing writing. Writers on Writing: Conversations with Allen Mendenhall is an anthology of penetrating interviews with prominent and diverse…
This collection begins with clear-eyed reportage on the heartbreak and devastation in the lives of women, historical and contemporary. The universal implications of their fate serve as "frame" for the rest of the book as the poet, in strikingly spare language, takes impassioned aim at the…
Southern Literary Review editor and literary lawyer Allen Mendenhall examines in this collection of essays ideas about place, literature, reading, family, and custom from the vanishing perspective of a traditional Southerner. Whether he is lamenting the lack of learning among lawyers, recalling…
Newly adoptive parents celebrate their child as they welcome the new millennium. A traveling circus performer past his prime stirs the heart of a local woman. A daughter regrets lost opportunities with her late father during his final year in a nursing home. A nineteenth century portrait of…
This colorful, regional family tale unfolds across the Texoma, Oklahoma-Texas border. Family patriarch Abraham Dyson, a hardscrabble mechanic and tow-truck driver, finds himself in the midst of learning that his property is under seige. He does what he must to hang on to his rural Southern property…
The Landfill Poems investigate the human and environmental hazards of late capitalism in the American South. Told from the perspectives of two poverty-stricken siblings in Tennessee, these sonnets carry the reader through the anxieties of these experiences with slant phrases and synesthetic musings.…
William Bernhardt's second poetry collection explores the complex tapestry of family and the subtle interconnections that bind us to our past and forms the ballast to identity. Popular culture merges with classical allusions, weaving the colorful threads of a fabric composed of moments lived and…
Knuckle Bear is both enlivened and burdened by a fractured language, inherited from the settlers who first came to the North Carolina mountains from the hills and valleys of Scotland and Ulster to claim this wild land. It is a language that is broken and crippled, violent and near violent, innocent…
It is a hot, sultry summer in Little Dixie, Oklahoma in the 1970's. A young man commits a robbery that forever changes the course of his life and those around him. Rural poverty and injustices assert themselves as the norm not the exception; by the end of the novel the reader will feel that he or…
Following in the tradition of Alabama memoirist Rick Bragg, Barr explores Bessemer, Alabama, circa 1960's-70's from the eyes of a boy who grew up there, struggling to understand the divide of race, class, religion, and neighborhood anxiety. Barr captures what it means to come of age as the New…
This inaugural issue includes music lyrics by StumbleEast bandmates Kevin Hall and Jay Tracy, poetry and prose by William Bernhardt, Vaibhav Saini, Julia Nunnally Duncan, and others.
This issue includes music lyrics and an interview with Shawna Russell, an author interview with Lara Bernhardt, poetry and prose by Nancy Dillingham, Carl Sennhenn, Suzanne Hudson, John Dorroh, Patricia Taylor, Joe Formichella, William Bernhardt, and others.
