Yellowhammer Press

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 [...]

Reading about the South with any measure of objectivity is hard, if not damn near impossible.  No other region in American history has been so heavily politicized or saddled with so much historical and semiotic baggage as the Deep South.  There are few places, even in academia (or perhaps especially in academia) where one can [...]

There is no monolith of Southern literature.  We’re not all Faulkners, or Wolfes, or McCullers or Weltys, though most readers of Southern work  know those names by heart as part of the Greatest Hits of Southern Literature.  The casual reader often regards Southern writing not simply as the product of a region but as a [...]

“Reading the South” will be an ongoing series about beginning an understanding of the South through literature, music, and art.
A reader wrote me this week inquiring about a number of things, and where to find good Southern writing was at the top of his list.  My answer was long and, I admit, a bit [...]