Literary Friday, Edition 112

Literary News

Wales Arts Review‘s Southern Lit Issue is out now! We collaborated  on a few of the stories, and the issue is guest edited by our friend Cerith Mathias, whose passion for the South and its authors began as a child with a dog-eared, faded navy blue copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

A Florida barbershop is promoting literacy in the town of Sunrise by adding a library so young patrons can read books while waiting for their appointment.

Travel writer Paul Theroux has an exposé in Smithsonian Magazine on The Soul of the South 50 years after the civil rights summer of 1964.

Esquire Magazine has an interview with James Lee Burke about what you should be reading. Hint: It’s Hemingway.

Intern Maura Maher reviews “True Blood” author Charlaine Harris’s latest book Midnight Crossroad.

Tamara Welch of Traveling With T made the trip to Patti Callahan Henry’s booksigning at TurnRow Books on Wednesday (pictured at right). Save the date for our Twitter chat with Patti next Friday, July 25!

Speaking of TurnRow, owner Jamie Kornegay has announced the coming of his debut novel Soil, a modern tragedy that pays homage to Mississippi’s great literary tradition and adds a manic dose of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for good measure, due out in March 2015. 

Literary Events

Hemingway Days wraps up this weekend in Key West, Florida, with a rum tasting, Running of the Bulls, Hemingway’s birthday party, the Papa lookalike contest and a wrestling tournament.

The annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, with the theme “Faulkner and History,” will take place July 20-24 in Oxford.

Sundress Academy for the Arts will have a poetry reading with Sandra Marchetti and Sarah Einstein as part of its July Reading Series at The Birdhouse in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 20.

The Decatur Book Festival is scheduede for August 29-31 in Decatur, Georgia, with keynote speaker Joyce Carol Oates.

Save the date for the 26th Annual Southern Festival of Books October 10-12 in Nashville, Tennessee. This year’s theme is “A Celebration of the Written Word,” and the extensive list of authors confirmed is out now.

New in Southern Voice

Florida Triptiks, a humorous description of Florida locations, by native writer Cameron Hunt McNabb.

To find out more about Southern authors’ haunts and hangouts, download the Deep South Literary Trail App, available direct from iTunes and for Android. The app has recently been updated with several new sites and lots of new photos just in time for those summer road trips!