Tag: Flannery O’Connor
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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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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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Another Southern Writer Finds Love in the Ruins: A Review of Kevin Powers’ Latest
The opening paragraph of Kevin Powers’ new novel, A Shout in the Ruins, is perhaps the finest beginning to a book I’ve read since Flannery O’Conner blew open the universe in the first paragraph of The Violent Bear It Away. Like that gem, Powers’ opener is all mood and tantalizing hooks that spark a thousand…
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Looking In on Lookout Mountain: A Review of I Want to Show You More
There’s a lot going on up on Lookout Mountain. The battle of Chickamauga is not really over. 89-year-old Eva Bock braves traffic to walk up Lula Lake Road to deliver snail mail to President Bush protesting the war. A mainline church takes Corbett Earnshaw’s abrupt confession of disbelief as a sign and demolishes their building…
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Crossing into Mythical Mexico with Cormac McCarthy: A Review of The Crossing
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t need any more accolades from the likes of me. His reputation as a great American writer seems pretty secure. But as a recent convert to the ranks of his fans, I have to say of The Crossing – wow. That’s probably sufficient. I’m not going to be an equal to his prose…
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#4 Wolf Whistle
If I told you there was a laugh-out-loud book about the murder of Emmett Till, the black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, you’d call such a thing, at the least, in poor taste. Yet the late Lewis Nordan, who lived through that episode as a teenager…
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#5 The Crucifixion
Fleming Rutledge is having a long-overdue moment in the wake of her 2015 book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. I finally finished it in 2017, qualifying it for this list, and gushed about it in my review, (which you can access through the title link in the previous sentence). Rutledge sees her book as…
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Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3
Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense…
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Crossing the Great Divide: An Interview with Arlie Russell Hochschild – part 1 of 3
Can a Berkley sociologist and a Louisiana oil patch Tea Party member find common ground? That was the experiment Arlie Russell Hochschild (the sociologist) undertook when she found she was having a hard time understanding the forces that were shaping Red States. When I wrote a review of her book about the project, Strangers…
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Back to the Cross: The Inclusive Vision of Fleming Rutledge
If the theology podcast Crackers & Grape Juice has any redeeming value*, (and Lord knows they have interviewed some questionable characters in their brief existence—primary evidence: their January interview with me!), it is the recurring “Fridays with Fleming” segments that have introduced the Episcopal priest and theologian, Fleming Rutledge, to a wider audience. With…
Heartlands 