Yellowhammer Press

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 [...]

James Lee Burke does not necessarily write “literature.”  His books do not challenge the intellect, nor do they express the ineffable.  They do not probe and prod.  They do not lay bare areas of inquiry that have been heretofore ignored.
Who cares?
His novels are engaging, readable, and present us with a version of the South that [...]

When, I wonder, did it become commonplace with Southern writers to center a body of work in one specific small town?  Wendell Berry has his Port William. Ron Rash had his Cliffside.  I suspect it all started with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.  George Singleton has recently given us Forty-Five, South Carolina.
In The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Singleton unpacks [...]

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 [...]