“What else is there to do but follow history? Men go to war to be men worth a damn. Their statues and movies are everywhere, forever.” Bars and booze and lacquer and glass and smoke and tv and tourists and shots, and pit-stop at Randall’s to chop up a Xanax, to snort then smoke then »
This story first appeared in the 21c Fiction Issue (vol. 23, no. 3: Fall 2016). I left Render early and hitched all morning. Five rides. Proselytizers and moralizers every one, each with a warning about the evils of hitchhiking, the evils of teenage girls out in the world alone, the evils of cigarette smoking and »
“There is one thing I haven’t told.” After I came home from going away and the Russians decided not bomb us into smithereens, Dad said it was time for me to go back to school. I didn’t need urging. My old life, BC, Before Child, my humdrum, what-are-we-going-to-have-for-supper life, had begun to seem like a »
This story first appeared in our 21c Fiction Issue (vol. 22, no. 3: Fall 2016). Black shank nearly took the tobacco crops that summer, and then a plague of grasshoppers swooped down to take the garden. I was spraying vinegar on the tomato plants to stave off the bugs while Gloria was out by the »
“Standard descriptions of what makes southern literature and culture distinctive (if not ‘exceptional’) are by now familiar to most bibliophiles . . . But such symbols of southernness are fraught with stereotypes, and they rarely tell the whole story.” When we asked some of our favorite writers, scholars, and literary critics for their thoughts on »
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. “Writing is a delightful invention,” Margaret Manigault wrote to her sister Georgina in 1811. “Is it not admirable that at this distance of thousands of miles we should be able to disclose with safety secrets of the utmost importance?” Joan E. Cashin opens these “secrets of utmost importance” to »
Essay
“In this Newest South, novels about tragic mulattoes or doomed aristocrats seem hopelessly out of place, and some writers and critics now speak boldly of “post-southern” literature. At the very least, it’s time to take a look at twenty-first-century southern fiction.” In his notorious 1917 roast of southern backwardness, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” H. »
In the summer of 2015, we filmed a short interview with Dorothy Allison, discussing the idea of southern mothers in conjunction with Keira V. Williams’s essay, “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Today, in collaboration with our 21c Fiction Issue, we bring you excerpts of our conversation. “Life constructs or mitigates »
For our 21c Fiction Issue, we consulted crackerjack writer, illustrator, and sleuth Daniel Wallace. The Big Fish traipsed around the Smoky Mountains and a hole somewhere in Alabama, and consulted with a cat named Eudora Welty and a writerly dog named Jake to create for us these “Lesser-Known 21st-Century Southern Writers.” Jimmy Pringle The Hopewell Sisters Mrs. Sedgewick and »
In an essay published in our pages in 2000, our friend Jerry Leath Mills surveyed around 30 prominent twentieth-century southern authors, which led him “to conclude, without fear or refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked »
For some cultured southerners, Southern Cultures has published very little when it comes to Arts & Letters. Sure, we’ve shared a story here and there, and we’ve certainly printed author interviews and scholarly analyses, but our forthcoming 21st-century Fiction Issue (available October) marks our first full plunge into the wellspring of creative writing that surrounds »
Art
GENE First day of July I was thumbing the Caneville Road. I’d walked off another of Brother’s clean-up jobs, mine sludge up to my pant pockets, throat raw, hands itching and broke out. For eight dollars an hour I told him I couldn’t do it. Told him I’d walk back to Canard. He didn’t like »