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#3 – All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – Best Reads of 2023
What Cosby brings to the table is a landscape I know and love and people who are too often hidden in plain sight. And the context of his fiction is both as ancient as the Chesapeake and as contemporary as a black sheriff in a rural Southern backwater county. →
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#4 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Best Reads of 2023
Yeah, this Dostoevsky guy has got potential. →
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#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023
Victor Lavelle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror. →
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#8 – The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer – Best Reads of 2023
What did I know about Mailer? Well, he liked to write long books, could be insufferable and borderline lethal as a spouse, and absolutely chewed up the scenery wherever he appeared. What I discovered was that he was also an energetic and ambitious writer who could move a story along. →
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#9 – Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles – Best Reads of 2023
Paulette Jiles, with her poet’s eye, has a knack for writing books that feel small even when they’re about a place as vast as Texas. →
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#2 – Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – 2022 Best Reads
Audacity. That’s the word that came to mind as I gawked my way through Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads. The man has no compunctions about burrowing straight to the heart of characters like a Navajo man wary of visiting do-gooders to the reservation and a mid-life woman trying to put together her previous life and →
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#3 – The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – 2022 Best Reads
Maggie O’Farrell’s breakthrough novel, Hamnet, which was named a New York Times ten best in 2020, didn’t do it for me. I appreciated the gorgeous details of life in Shakespeare’s England, but the connection to Shakespeare himself seemed tenuous at best. However, The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s follow-up novel, hit the sweet spot, even though she →
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#4 – Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby – 2022 Best Reads
This is the first crime thriller I’ve ever put in the Top Ten, but I got hooked on S.A. Cosby this year. His books are crackling page-turners filled with similes and energy. And, o yes, violence. There’s a lot of that, too. Cosby attracted my attention because he’s a Virginia native and aspires to the →
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#7 – Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty – 2022 Best Reads
So much has gone wrong on the Penobscot reservation in rural Maine. Read these fictional short stories by Morgan Talty and it’s hard to get past the poverty and pain along with the sense that the whole place is so marginal as to seem the backside of nowhere. But the place is haunted by things →
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Glorious Excess: S.A. Cosby and the Future of Southern Fiction
S.A. Cosby knows that he’s prone to excess. He told The Guardian as much in an interview last year: “I write long sentences. I like similes (maybe too much, according to some reviewers). I like to write esoterically. I pontificate and wax poetic in the middle of gunfights. That’s my style.” –S.A. Cosby In his →
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