Yellowhammer Press

Blizzards be damned.  Nothing warms the soul like Southern food.  Cornbread and peas, greens, fried chicken, and sweet potatoes will cure any ailment and drive the cold from your bones.  The Southern Foodways Alliance, a wonderful organization, has produced numerous short documentaries on Southern foodways and folk culture.  “Buttermilk Can Help” are must-sees, but [...]

Dear Walker,
I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, [...]

Much of Faulkner’s work is, arguably, unfilmable.  Rendering Go Down, Moses or As I Lay Dying on screen would simply show them as narratives, unable to properly convey the depth of characterization and power of his characters’ internal monologues.  1958’s The Long, Hot Summer, however, attempts a more modest feat.  Based on one of Faulkner’s [...]

George Singleton is man, myth, legend, and possibly the greatest all-around son-of-a-bitch the South has ever produced.  I’ve written briefly about his recent collection The Half Mammals of Dixie and recently finished his delirious novel Work Shirts for Mad Men. The Southeast Review has a collection of anecdotes about Singleton in their collection The Cult [...]

At best, Erskine Caldwell is a poor man’s William Faulkner.  His early novels, which somehow maintain a toehold in the canon of Southern Literature, are extensively populated with caricatures of rural Southerners so over the top in their grotesqueness that they are barely readable.
In Tobacco Road, his most well-known work, the Lesters, headed by the [...]

We have few rules about what can and cannot go on the site, but one rule is hard and fast: no Confederate flags anywhere, ever.  While we broke that rule slightly with the last post, it’s a choice we made when starting this blog.  Too often, discussions of Southern life and culture veer wildly off [...]

Unless you live under a rock, you’re at least dimly aware that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released recently.  Brown kicked off the esoteric conspiracy craze in 2003 with The Da Vinci Code, a book so unbearably, ploddingly awful that AO Scott of the NY Times called it “Dan Brown’s best-selling primer on how [...]

Grady McWhiney ruffled feathers.  McWhiney (late, 2006) produced controversial scholarship about the development of the Southern psyche and its roots in a much-vaunted Celtic ancestry.  With fellow historian Forrest McDonald, McWhiney authored what would come to be known as the Celtic Thesis — simply put, that unlike the rest of America’s inhabitants, Southerners are (or [...]