Dr Tony Shaw

The Bitterweed Path (1950) by Thomas Hal Phillips (1922–2007) is an interesting book in the history of homosexual literature. It featur...

In recent years John Williams's  Stoner has attracted a great deal of attention as one of the great 'forgotten' novels and h...

This is the English edition of Sweetgrass , retitled The Secrets We Keep . I'm not too sure why though: did the publishers think the ...

Ron Rash's Serena comes with many snippets from reviews, the Guardian's mentioning the author in the same breath as Cormac McCar...

This is Anne Tyler's latest novel, and it will probably be several years before she publishes another. It's her nineteenth, and...

Charles Portis is a Southern writer whose work has developed something of a cult status. He's reasonably well known for one of his f...

  The Clock Winder is Anne Tyler's fourth novel, and the year it was published the New York Times had very little to say about it...

Mildred D. Taylor is sometimes mentioned as a writer of young adult fiction, but this novel certainly doesn't read that way. The Road...

A major theme of Anne Tyler's Morgan's Passing is the gulf between appearance and reality, which runs everywhere in the book, bu...

Being   unfamiliar with any of Connie May Fowler's work, I looked at her Wikipedia entry, and was intrigued by this paragraph:   ...

  Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941)   Last May I mentioned the competition run by Hesperus Press for nominations for the re-publ...

Mudbound is the first novel by Hillary Jordan, who grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahama. The book is almost entirely set on and ...

Some reviews have described this as a coming-of-age book, which it certainly is, although William J. Scheick's twelve-page Afterword in ...

A unshaven man dressed in a crumpled shirt and overalls stares from the front cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . The photo was take...

Karen White's The Memory of Water is an example of the Lowcountry sub-genre of Southern Literature, is set in South Carolina, and is to...

Daniel Wallace comes from Alabama, where Big Fish is set. This is story tied together by a string of tall stories and jokes told by the nar...

It's slightly odd how this looks like a YA cover, but then this is a 1980s edition, and I suppose many covers at that time were inte...

Orville Prescott was the chief book reviewer for the New York Times for many years. In 1964 he concluded his review of Anne Tyler's...

Hopelessly late as usual, I only learned a few hours ago of the death of the amazing Southern writer Harry Crews, who was a hellraiser of...

Reviewing Anne Tyler's Digging to America in The New York Times here , Michiko Kakutani finds the coincidence of the two separate ...